Germany's Roaring Twenties

Monday, January 26, 2015 - 6:00am to 8:00am
Helen S. Schaefer Building Dorothy Rubel Room  1508 E. Helen Street Tucson, AZ 85721

THIS COURSE IS FULL!

This is the first meeting of a multi-session course. 
MONDAYS 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Jan. 26, Feb. 2, 9, and 16, 2015

Berlin, capital of the Weimar Republic between the two World Wars, was one of the most exciting cities in Europe--the place of the most radical experimentation in the visual and performing arts, in mass entertainment and theater, in literature and architecture. Berlin was a laboratory of modernity. While the cultural stage was vibrant and intoxicating, the celebrated roaring twenties also was haunted by the shell shock of World War I and by economic instability, social upheaval, and political turmoil. This class explores avant-garde movements like Expressionism and Dada, as well as major works like Bertolt Brecht’s innovative play Three Penny Opera and Fritz Lang’s monumental film Metropolis. In this seminar we will consider the period’s challenges to notions of art, vast social changes, and the impact of mass culture and technological developments on twentieth-century sensibilities. And we will come to see why this period still fascinates us today.

BARBARA KOSTA received her PhD in German from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Recasting Autobiography: Women's Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film and coeditor of Writing Against Boundaries: Gender, Ethnicity and Nationality in the German-speaking Context. Her most recent book is Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, Mass Culture. Her research and teaching interests are Weimar cinema and visual culture, transnational cinema, contemporary literature and film, feminist theory, and cultural studies.

More information including course fees and how to register can be found online at http://hsp.arizona.edu