New Objectivity - 923

Narrator (f):

Technological progress in the infrastructure of large cities, including public transportation, electrification of streetlights, venues for consumption and entertainment, apartment buildings and public squares often found their way into the painting of New Objectivity. Outlying districts, where the urban transitions into the periphery, were also common themes. The presence of technology but also the new possibilities of mobility were frequently illustrated. Popular motifs included railway bridges, underpasses, telephone poles, wires, bridges, often abruptly receding or forming barriers—subjects that testify to a fascination with the constructive and with dynamics and that make suitable forms of depiction possible.

Narrator (m):

Modernity was also manifested in mass transportation such as the railway and the subway: Germany’s first subway went into service in Berlin in 1902 on a line from Potsdamer Platz to Stralauer Tor. The dynamic inherent in the train as a mode of transportation, which also characterizes the beginning of Walter Ruttmann’s famous film Berlin: The Symphony of the Metropolis, fascinated contemporaries.

Narrator (f):

Max Radler’s painting Station SD/2 of 1933 also recalls Ruttmann’s film but reinterprets it in an unusual way. A locomotive is standing at a platform that is empty except for a single figure. As so often in the paintings of New Objectivity, the dynamic of the strict composition that results from the diagonals vanishing into the distance strikingly clashes with the overall melancholic impression.

Narrator (m):

In our New Objectivity ListeningBar, you can hear the play “Weekend” of 1929 by Walter Ruttmann. It was the very first radio play narrated entirely by noises and found sounds. Ruttmann called his witty homage to daily life in Berlin “photographic radio art.” You can also hear one of the key texts of New Objectivity: “Das Gleisdreieck” by Joseph Roth.