Biological Modernism: The New Human in Weimar Culture

Honorable Mention for the DAAD/GSA Book Prize for the Best Book in Germanistik or Cultural Studies

Biological Modernism identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, Carl Gelderloos shows that biology and other discourses of living nature offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it. Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred D blin, Ernst J nger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human and radically reconsidered the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being. Biological Modernism will be of interest to scholars of German literature and culture, literary modernism, photography, philosophical anthropology, twentieth-century intellectual history, the politics of culture, and the history of science.

Author: Carl Gelderloos
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 12/15/2019
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780810141322

About the Author
CARL GELDERLOOS is an associate professor of German studies at Binghamton University.