Shanghai and Berlin: Syllabus

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Week One: Reading the City and Modernity

June 27: Introduction: Looking for Urban Modernism.

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in llluminations

Carl E. Schorske, “The Ringstrasse,” in Fin de Siecle Vienna

Meng Yue, "The Rise of an Entertainment Cosmopolitanism," in Shanghai And the Edges of Empire

June 28: Kristine Harris, “The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai,” in

Chris Berry, ed. Chinese Films in Focus II

            Film: Wu Yonggang, The Goddess (1934)

June 30: Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine” in After the

Great Divide   

            Film: Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)

The first week begins with a foundational discussion of modern urban culture before proceeding directly into the material of Shanghai and Berlin. Benjamin’s essay addresses the transformation in sensibility in nineteenth-century Paris, the epitome of the modern metropolis, and its traces in the poetry of Baudelaire. Schorske’s volume on Vienna around 1900 is the paradigmatic treatment of modernism in the city, and the Ringstrasse chapter describes the remapping of modern urban space. In the two films, gender is the site of urban cultural conflict. The Goddess, a classic of the Chinese silent film, shows the quandaries of a Shanghai prostitute, while Lang’s Metropolis displays the convergence of utopian aspirations with anxieties about technology, both projected onto female figures.

Week Two: From Sentiment to Cynicism: the Cold Gaze and the New Woman
 

July 5 (TUESDAY!): Brecht, Three Penny Opera (1928)

            Film: Ruttman, Berlin, Symphony of a City
July 6: Ding Ling, Shanghai, Spring 1930 (1930)
July 7: Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl (1932)

                        Ailing Zhang, “Sealed Off” (1943)

Brecht’s Three Penny Opera is a clear expression of Berlin cynicism and a view of urban human nature in which criminality and critical sensibility intertwine. Although placed in early modern London, it is a thinly veiled allegory of modernist Berlin, and it became the signature piece of Brechtian theater’s comment on the culture of the German capital. As a modern dismantling of romantic illusions, Brecht’s play resembles Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930, which depicts how petty bourgeois individuals engage in romantic love and modern literature but quickly run into a dead end: in contrast, an enlightened housewife becomes aware of socio-economic problems and joins a workers association. Ding Ling’s celebration of political transformation echoes the bohemian radicalism of Brecht, in which avant-garde aesthetic and vanguardist politics converge. Both authors express a mixture of excitement and cynicism about modern love and life.

Urban modernism described a sensibility in which nothing changed more than representations of gender roles. The anonymity of the cities combined with new economic forces and a reorganization of work to allow for a critical distance from traditional role structures, as the literature and the films of the era record. Zhang’s short story “Sealed Off” recounts how a man and a woman are thrown into a close encounter during an air raid in Shanghai. and their conversation explores their frustration with conventions as their intimacy grows. In Keun’s novel, The Artifical Silk Girl, the heroine leaves the German provinces to arrive in Berlin, where she navigates between the opportunities of new found freedom and structures of patriarchy resistant to change. The heroine is the emancipated new woman, facing the enduring power of the city.

Week Three: The Urban Novel and the Filmed City

July 11: Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) (excerpts)

July 12: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (excerpts)

            Xie Jin Two Stage Sisters (1964).

Gina Marchetti, ‘Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary

Aesthetic,” in Sheldon Lu, ed. 
Transnational Chinese Cinema

July 14: Project Presentations

Döblin, whose earlier novel, the Three Leaps of Wang-Lun (1915) had treated political unrest in premodern China, presents a classically modernist treatment of metropolitan life in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Combining montage structures, stream-of-consciousness, multiple discourses, and colloquial language, it has been compared to aspects of the novels of Joyce, Céline and Dos Passos. The city and the masses are as much central figures as is the ex-convict, Franz Biberkopf, who tries but cannot overcome the forces that beat him down: Döblin deploys the modernist novel to provide an anatomy of subjectivity in the modern city. Some fifty years later, the premier director of the New German Cinema, directed a sixteen-hour filming of the novel for West German television. Fassbinder’s retrospective account of Döblin’s Weimar Berlin cites the novel’s modernism from a later vantage point, marking a historic distance to urban modernism, but also taming it. Two Stage Sisters provides a similarly retrospective treatment of interwar modernism.. A comparison of the cities of Fassbinder and Xie is as much about different national cinemas as it is about the changing memory of the interwar period: Fassbinder invoked Weimar Germany in 1980 in the midst of the Cold War and a still divided country, while Xie explored the interplay of theater and crime on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. With the third session of this week, the seminar commences regular presentations of participant projects.

Week Four: The Haunted City: Urban Alienation and Depradation  

July 18:         Shi Zhicun, “One Evening in the Rainy Season” (1929)

Wu Tsu-hsiang “Young Master Gets His Tonic” (1932)

July 19: Mao Dun, Rainbow (1929)

July 21: Project Presentations

Urban modernism is not only about excitement, velocity and freedom: it also involves loneliness, alienation and constraint. The seminar examines literature and film that record this darker side of modernism. Thus,in Shi Zhicun’s “One Evening in the Rainy Season,” a flash romance in Shanghai streets vanishes when the time comes to return to reality. In addition in Wu Tsu-hsiang’s “Young Master Gets His Tonic,” the grown-up son of the gentry landlord enjoys both traditional and modern privileges in Shanghai and literarily sucks milk and blood from the downtrodden. Cao Yu's drama Sunrise depicts the interplay of economic corruption and personal degradation, in ways comparable to Three Penny Opera.

Week Five: Subjectivity, Politics, Betrayal and the End of Interwar Modernism

July 25: Brecht, Measures Taken (1930)

            Film: Brecht, Kuhle Wampe

July 26: Zhang, Lust Caution (1950)

            Ang Lee, Lust Caution (1995)

July 28: Project Presentations

Urtban modernism emancipates subjective desire, but it also involves the decline of subjectivity through political engagement and revolutionary parties that emphasize duty. Yet acts of betrayal often accompany revolutionary parties, a conflict of duty and desire. Brecht’s play and Zhang’s s novella both signal the end of the moment of urban modernism: Measures Taken explores the demise of individual sentiment within the Communist revolution—it involves Russian agents carrying out propaganda in China-- while Lust Caution treats the conflict between love and politics in the resistance against the Japanese invasion. In both, individuality disappears beneath the force of political power and obligation. Lee’s filming of Zhang’s narrative adds an additional historical layer to the reflection on the culture of Shanghai in the 1930s, and its lush sensuousness and deceptive playfulness stand in stark contrast to ascetic discipline of Brecht's cadre.

Week Six: The Ends of Urban Modernism in Shanghai and Berlin

August 1: Project Presentations

August 2: Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Failure of Technology (1939), excerpt

            Film: Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (excerpt)

Mao Tun, “Spring Silkworms”; Ding Ling, “When I was in Hsia Village”

August 4: Urban Modernism in Cinematic Retrospect:

Fei Mu, Springtime in a Small Town (1948)

Billy Wilder, A Foreign Affair (1948)

This week begins with the final project presentations and then proceeds to material evidence of the end of the era or urban modernism. As much as urban modernism celebrated itself, it also elicited opposition: anxieties about metropolitan disorder, appeals for a return to nature, and fear of technology. In Germany, in addition to celebrations of rural life, a philosophical critique of technology, as in Jünger's 1939 treatise. The stories by Mao Tun and Ding Ling articulate the emergent ruralist sensibility as a critique of urban modernism. The seminar then concludes with discussions of two films that mark the end of urban modernism. Springtime in a Small Village stages the conflict between city and country in the context of post-war, pre-revolutionary China. In A Foreign Affair, Austrian exile director Wilder looks at post-war Berlin, the devastation of the bombing (an allusion to Riefentstahl’s Triumph of the Will) and an evaluation of the modernism embodied in a classic performance by Marlene Dietrich. Both films tilt toward a valorization of national and rural identity, laying the groundwork for a new post-urban sensibility.