Directors Letter

Thank you for your interest in the NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, “Shanghai and Berlin: Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany.” The seminar will take place at Stanford University between June 27 and August 4, 2011. We are very excited about this seminar and the topic, urban modernism, which we will approach with comparative and cross-cultural frameworks. The experience of Shanghai and Berlin between the world wars highlights many of the features of modernity that still inform the study of culture today. We look forward to assembling a richly interdisciplinary group of scholars to share in the exploration of this complex and promising field.

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.

Background readings for the seminar include selections from Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern and Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, as well as some other critical literature. However our main focus will be on narrative fiction and cinema, often pairing comparable texts from the two settings. For example, we will juxtapose Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930 with Brecht’s Three Penny Opera: Ding Ling’s narrative of political transformation resembles Brecht’s bohemian radicalism, in which avant-garde aesthetic and vanguardist politics converge. Both authors express a mixture of excitement and cynicism about modern love and life. Similarly we will read Eileen Chang's “Sealed Off” (as well as others of her stories) next to Imgard Keun’s Artificial Silk Girl, two narratives of women facing the reorganization of intimacy associated with the modern metropolis. We’ll also read Brecht’s Measures Taken, an exploration of radicalism and discipline, in conjunction with Chang’s ‘Lust Caution,’ as well as Ang Lee’s filming, as variants on the tension between subjectivism and obligation in modernity.

Those are just examples—the full reading list is included here—but we are looking forward to this opportunity to compare and contrast highpoints of the urban cultures of Shanghai and Berlin, including excerpts from Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s filming of that seminal novel, fiction by Mao Dun, Ding Ling, Shi Zhicun, Wu Tsu-hsiang, and films including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Wu Yonggang’s, The Goddess, and Xie Jin, Two Stage Sisters. The seminar will conclude with a contrastive examination of three films of cities emerging from the Second World War: Fei Mu, Springtime in a Small Town, Billy Wilder, A Foreign Affair, and Roberto Rossellini, Rome, Open City. These are striking texts in their own right, and we are certain that they will take on added complexity in the cross-cultural setting in which we will study them.

If you have logistical questions, please contact the coordinator of our Research Unit, Diane Jakubowski, at dianejak@stanford.edu or 650-725-8620. For inquiries regarding the substance of the seminar, please explore this website. You may also contact the co-directors at berman@stanford.edu or banwang@stanford.edu

We hope that we have covered all the important points. We believe that “Shanghai and Berlin: Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany” promises to be an innovative and exciting approach to core questions about modern culture, with historical as well as contemporary ramifications. We are looking forward to your application and to the summer.

Russell A. Berman                              Ban Wang

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.