Academic literature on the topic 'Franz Pfemfert'

Revistas de literatura, artes plásticas y de música no sólo acompañaban los movimientos de vanguardia de la primera mitad del siglo veinte, hoy llamados históricos, sino los plasmaban y expresaban. Su número es abrumador, tanto en Europa como en América. En su imprescindible panorama de las vanguardias, Serge Fauchereau, colocando al expresionismo alemán (o, mejor dicho, de lengua y cultura alemanas) a la cabeza del surgimiento y evolución de las avant-gardes históricas, señala algunas revistas al respecto como Der Sturm (1910-1932), de Herwart Walden, o Die Aktion (1911-1932), de Franz Pfemfert, además de Nord-Sud (1917-1918), de Pierre Reverdy, y Dada (1917-1921), de Tristan Tzara...

Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection Gloria! (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.

Abstract This article collects four texts written by German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970): “Artistic Aspects of Labor in Old and New Times” Published in 1903 in the social-democratic journal Die Zeit at a time when Märten dedicated the majority of her writings on form to feminist perspectives on housing and reproduction. It is her first systematic essay on what will become a central concern of her own “life-work,” namely, the question of how to break open the capitalized division between “productive labor” and what Märten calls “social-personal” work. Märten thus sketches an understanding of labor outside of its capitalist determinations and notions of progressive temporality. Essence and Transformation of Forms (Arts) This text appeared in 1924 in the journal Arbeiterliteratur. Its immediate objective was to explain the aim of her similarly titled book to a proletarian audience. In this short summary, Märten emphasizes the importance of ethnography for her project. Rather than isolating forms from their social surroundings, as was traditional in art history, the practice of viewing forms ethnographically allows their origins to be seen in a broader framework of social-collective materialities and vital needs. Märten argues that this shift in perspective could be an aid de-fetishizing workerss relationships with the object world. “Art and Proletariat” This was first published in 1925 in Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion and later that year reprinted in Czech translation in Pásmo, a magazine run by the revolutionary artist collective Devětsil. The article argues that the notion of “proletarian art” is politically and systematically pointless given that “art” is merely the historically specific, impoverished manifestation of form under the conditions of industrial capitalism. In place of art, Märten draws on the notion of “classless form” in order to imagine a monist state of form beyond the divisions of class, gender, and species. “Workers and Film” Written in 1928, this text was not printed during Märten's lifetime, instead serving as a script for a radio broadcast, as was the case for most of her published and unpublished texts on film. Almost a decade before Walter Benjamin's Artwork essay (1936), Märten's “Workers and Film,” along with numerous other articles and radio broadcasts, addressed strikingly similar questions, yet under profoundly different premises. In Märten's synthetic understanding of a monist material culture of people and things, film promised to actualize a technologically mediated monism for the industrial age.

Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion (1911-1932) was one of the most influential journals of the German expressionist movement. Between 1911 and 1919 it served as a sanctuary and career stepping stone for a number of young, still undiscovered modern writers, artists and critical thinkers. Under the strong influence and strict, often dogmatic, guidance of its sole owner, publisher and editor Franz Pfemfert (1879-1954) Aktion articulated a unique blend of modern art and oppositional left-wing revolutionary politics. Unlike other expressionist journalists of its time Aktion was entirely preoccupied with a comprehensive, in-depth and above all critical examination of Wilhelmine society within the socio-political and historical context of its time. Consequently the overall content of this journal alongside its editorial criteria reflected the inseparable link between major historical events and the changing socio-political and artistic stance of the journal itself. The aim of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive literary-historical analysis and to examine the focal point of the journal’s continual critique of society, namely the intransigent denunciation of Wilhelmine authoritarianism and its numerous institutional and ideological manifestations as primary causes of oppression, social injustice and conflict. While the antiauthoritarian critique of society is illustrated as the main objective of the action, this study also identifies the ever-present symbiosis of intense ambivalence and inveterate idealism within the theoretical understanding and practical modus operandi of the journal as the main trigger in its seemingly unstoppable process of politicization, ideological radicalisation and subsequent isolation. This thesis draws upon a wide range of selected editorials, political-theoretical articles as well as literary-artistic contributions from within the Aktion, while historically initiated changes in Pfemfert’s editorial policy serve to divide the overall development of the journal into three distinctive timeframes (a) pre-war phase February 1911-August 1914; b) war phase August 1914-November 1918 and c) revolutionary phase November 1918-end of 1919).