New Release Books by Andreas Huyssen

Andreas Huyssen explores the history and theory of metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about urban life written for European newspapers. His fine-grained readings open vistas into German critical theory and the visual arts, revealing the miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism.

In this new collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past. The great paradox of our fin-de-siecle culture is that novelty is even more associated with memory than with future expectation. Drawing heavily on the dilemmas of contemporary Germany, Huyssen's discussion of cultural memory illustrates the nature of contemporary nationalism, the work of such artists and thinkers as Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Kluge, and Jean Baudrillard, and many others. The book includes illustrations from contemporary Germany.

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas--Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

This comparative study of contemporary artists William Kentridge (born 1955) and Nalini Malani (born 1946) focuses on their use of the shadow play as a medium of memory. Independently of each other, both artists have deployed this centuries-old performative art form in works that are widely considered to be highpoints of their respective careers--works such as Kentridge's installation The Refusal of Timeand Malani's video/shadow play In Search of Vanished Blood. Both artists belong to a generation whose experience is shaped by colonialism and decolonization; their works reflect on the long-term traces of historical trauma, partition and apartheid, always in aesthetically complex forms (rather than in documentary or agit-prop style). In creative dialogue with modernism and the historical avant-garde, they provide persuasive examples of a new negotiation between aesthetics, ethics and politics.

This special issue of New German Critique explores the art of Dada and photomontage in transnational contexts. Dadaism, an art movement cultivated during World War I, questioned traditional aesthetics and eventually led to the formation of surrealism. Focusing on Dada's achievements in building a network of artists in Europe and America, this issue examines photomontage as an integral part of the movement, as well as its relationship to mass media, photography, propaganda, constructivism, and left-wing politics in the Soviet Union and western Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. The central figure of the issue is John Heartfield, a Dadaist who influenced much of the art world in Europe after World War I. The collection investigates Heartfield's lesser-known early work with cinema in the service of the German High Command. Believing that photographic cinema was akin to war propaganda, Heartfield rejected live-action war footage in favor of American cinematic animation to promote an honest discussion about the horror and realities of war. One essay explores Heartfield's photomontages while turning to film theory as a way of interpreting the politics of his work, demonstrating how his photomontages retain the organic and traditional nature of photography even as they produce cognitive dissonance and satire. Another essay on Heartfield's role in Soviet discussions of the 1930s offers fascinating insights based on new archival research. The issue also looks at the relationship between Heartfield and the illustrated German magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung and how that magazine influenced photomontage across Europe.