Colloquium: On ‘Arbeitsfreude’: The German Worker in Nazi Industrial Photography and Film

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially presents its winter semester 2020/2021 colloquium:

SABINE HAKE, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

On ‘Arbeitsfreude’: The German Worker in Nazi Industrial Photography and Film Arbeitsfreude (joy in work) was a key term in the reorganization of labor and industry after 1933. It played a central role in the discourse of Arbeitertum and informed many initiatives by the Office “Beauty of Labor.” But how could joy in work be made visible? How could the image of the German worker be enlisted in the establishment of the work community as an extension of the folk community? And how could an emotion such as joy be enlisted in the celebration of German industry and the Nazi racial state? Two photobooks will be used to address these larger questions: Paul Wolff’s Arbeit! (1934), an homage to the beauty of the machine typical of Nazi Sachlichkeit, and Erna Lendvai-Dirksen’s Arbeit formt das Gesicht (1938), a physiognomy of work in line with Weimar-era approaches to social photography. Join the talk here Meeting number: 181 451 2583
Password: EPhpPqTp477 Sabine Hake is Professor and Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture in the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. A cultural historian working on nineteenth and twentieth century Germany, with a special emphasis on film, she is the author of seven monographs, including Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (2008) and Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (2012). Her most recent book, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany 1863-1933, won the 2016-17 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is currently working on the second volume with the title The German Worker: Reimagining Class in the Third Reich.