This study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.

Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Modern Surface and Postmodern Simulation: A Retrospective Retrieval Agendas of Surface and Simulacrum Weimar Surfaces Now Tactility in the City Exhibiting Superficies Philosophies of Counterfeit Resistances to Weimar Surface Surface, Academy, and World
1. Functionalist Facades: The Reformation of Weimar Architecture The Building's New Face Decoration Do's and Don'ts Brave New World Glass Culture The Pains of Tabula Rasa Surface Art at Home Fashioning the Female Body
2. Electric Stimulations: The Shock of the New Objectivity in Weimar Advertising Advertising as Power Electric Modernity The Architecture of Light Shock Treatments "Light Lures People," Rejecting the Modern The Embrace of the Avant-Garde Postmodernity and the Space of Advertising
3. Into the Mouth of the Moloch: Weimar Surface Culture Goes to the Movies From Caligari-Effect to Film-Set Omnipotence Kracauer versus the Weimar Film City Celebratory Film Streets The Weimar Movie Palaces: Facades on Facades "The Total Artwork of Effects," Cinema and the Secularization of Ritual
4. The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism The Phantasmagoria of Selling Through the Looking Glass The Opening in the Wall Window Techniques The Display Window as Mechanical-Age Artwork Transparencies of Truth and Lie Mannequins on Both Sides of the Glass The Murderer at the Window Post-Wall Re-Creations
Appendix: Selected Weimar Periodicals and Newspapers Notes Illustration Sources Index