Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Germanic Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
North, Paul
Abstract
This dissertation explores the historical transformation of the concept of form in Germany between 1850 and 1930 into a dynamic term that intellectually enabled the project of liberal cultural critique. It describes how form was reconceived from a static shaping force with Platonic overtones into a mobile, dynamic means of structuration that allowed for internal difference and change. The dynamization of form allowed it to become a central term in the renewal of epistemology, and in turn, allowed philosophy to move into the study of culture and its material products. The project is based around three key figures – the psychologist and philosopher Moritz Lazarus; his student, the philosopher Georg Simmel; and Simmel’s student, the journalist and cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer – who form a continuous lineage that engages with and develops the idea of the ‘cultural form’ first postulated by Lazarus in the 1860s through the feuilleton of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. The project puts their development of form into dialogue with contemporaries who were pursuing similar projects—from the publicist Aron Bernstein, to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the young critics Georg Lukács and Leo Popper, and the Weimar Republic journalist Gabriele Tergit. These authors’ theoretical transformation of form is linked to their shared positionality as liberal German Jews. The transformation of form into something constructive, process-oriented, and open to change was thus intertwined with the attempt to forge liberal praxes in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, to posit models of social relationality and belonging that relied not on essentialized identities, but on shared sets of cultural forms and practices. The reflections of these thinkers on their outsider status, coupled with their liberal political commitments, meant that they privileged constructive over essentialist notions of German identity, and developed theories of culture that foregrounded constructive and pluralist forms of belonging.
Recommended Citation
Duvernoy, Sophie, "The Shape of Things: Reading Culture through Form in the Wilhelmine and Weimar Republic" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 960.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/960
