Forthcoming From NGC

Issue #151 (Feb 2024)

Special Issue: Visual Culture Issue

This issue of NGC is dedicated to new contributions to visual culture debates, including research on architecture, fine arts, film studies and museum studies. Lynnette Widder’s study of Adorno’s 1949 lecture “Urbanism and Societal Order” contextualizes Adorno’s seldom discussed comments on architecture, including his remarks on urban beauty and on the kind of housing that would be appropriate for Germany’s postwar citizenry. Noam M. Elcott offers a media genealogy of the “screen,” centered on avant-garde artists in the orbit of Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. Taking an original look at Gruppe 47 author Alfred Andersch as a figure in the history of German cinema, Norman Ächtler explores Andersch’s screenplay adaptations of his own novels, analyzing them in light of the author’s aesthetic and film-political standpoints. Shira Miron examines photographs taken in Jewish homes in Germany under the Nazi regime; the photos’ vacant interiors attest to absence and loss under increasing Nazi persecution and invoke the latent presence of their inhabitants through the photos’ commemorative and mnemonic functions. With an eye to the “perpetrator turn” in Holocaust Studies, Daniel H. Magilow explores Piotr Uklański’s Nazi-centric photographic assemblages, asserting that they critically re-narrate Nazism as an ongoing threat amid a resurgence of right-wing populism. Concluding the Visual Culture Issue is Jakub Gortat’s exploration of the Permanent Exhibition of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, which situates the exhibition in Austrian memory culture of the twenty-first century and examines how it relativizes Austria’s own co-responsibility for the Holocaust.

Table of Contents

Lynnette Widder • Adorno’s "Urbanism and Societal Order" and the State of Rebuilding West Germany, 1949
Noam M. Elcott • Art in the First Screen Age: László Moholy-Nagy and the Affordances of Surfaces, Canvases, and Scrims
Norman Ächtler • Alfred Andersch, the Cinéma des Auteurs and the Poetics of Screenwriting
Shira Miron • Presence as Absence: The Homely and the Unhomely in Jewish Photography under Nazism
Daniel H. Magilow • Reconsidering Photographic Temporality through Piotr Uklański’s Nazis
Jakub Gortat • The Permanent Exhibition in the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance and its Role in Austria’s Dealing with the Nazi Past and the Holocaust