Seminar: Shanghai and Berlin

Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany
A Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

(from the Director's Letter)

The very notions of modernity and modernism are inseparable from urban experience, and this seminar offers an opportunity to study two defining metropoles of the twentieth-century and their respective variants of modern city culture. Urban modernism entailed a new sensibility involving post-traditional life-styles as well as innovative and adversarial forms of art. As a concept it linked broad cultural questions of modernity to the specific aesthetic features of modern art forms, both defined in relation to the pursuit of the new and a rejection of the past as old-fashioned and constrictive. Such programmatic innovation could thrive especially well in urban settings, and modernism frequently took the metropolis as its topic. More than a period style, urban modernism became a core component of twentieth-century experience.

This seminar takes the urban modernism of Shanghai and Berlin as symptomatic sites of innovation but also as indicators of differences and similarities between China and Germany and between “East” and “West.” While these terms are fraught with potentials for overgeneralization, they were current in the period and still pertain today in discussions of cross-cultural engagement in the context of globalization. The seminar “Shanghai and Berlin” is therefore about two cities, their representations in literature and film and alternative paths through modernization. Conventional approaches to modernism have addressed it primarily within the framework of national literary histories or, at best, as a pan-European or western phenomenon. A goal of the seminar is to foster a comparative and global approach in scholarly investigations of modernism.