Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich. Von Viola Rühse. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 320 Seiten + 70 s/w + 17 farbige Abbildungen. €69,95/$80.99 gebunden oder eBook.

Abstract

raising of issues around working-class disability and the perceptual delusions brought on by alcoholic intoxication. The last chapter addresses the political ambivalence that is inherent to the discourse of hygiene by considering how it is deployed on the Left. Biopower and eugenics have typically been associated with the political Right; however, Dobryden works through the contradictions that arise when a politics that critiques the ideology of capitalist productivity simultaneously, perhaps unwittingly, reifies notions of collective health and hygiene. Films like Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (1930) and the canonical Kuhle Wampe (1930), while depicting the ravages of capitalist modernity on the body and mind, reinscribe the hygienic call for the well-being of a collective in the name of revolutionary material environments. This chapter traces the genealogy of this political ambivalence to writings by urban planners and social hygienists, but also the filmmakers themselves, drawing out the need for historians to nuance our understanding of left-wing politics in the late Weimar period. Like other erudite studies of media archaeology that operate against the backdrop of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus, Dobryden’s monograph is a pleasurable, enlightening, and in many ways inspiring read. In its display of rigorous archival research, interesting choice of film texts, and exploration of new interpretative possibilities, the reader will see there is still much to be learned from Weimar cinema. This is true of the ostensibly familiar theme of hygiene and its politicization within the context of German modernity. The Hygienic Apparatus thus is highly recommended for scholars and graduate students, but its readability also allows undergraduate students at all levels to engage productively with its important ideas.