EMPIRE OF ECSTASY

ISBN-13: 978-0-520-20663-2
Writer: Karl Toepfer
Title: Empire of Ecstasy
Subtitle: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935
Series: Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 13
Language: English
Place of Publication: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London
Publisher: University of California Press
Year of Publication: 1997
Format: 159x240mm
Pages: xvii+422 printed on alkaline paper
Illustrations: 86 black and white plates and pictures
Jacket Design: Nola Burger
Jacket Illustration: Dancer at the Elisabeth Estas School, Cologne, 1927. Photographer unknown.
Binding: Red cloth spine and boards in colour dust jacket
Original Price: N/A
Weight: 1,037gr.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars: nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of “modern identity,” which stimulated often contradictory impulses, desires, and ambitions in participants and enthusiasts.

  

Radiating modernity, freedom, and power, the body appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy that resisted containment within particular fields of study of cultural doctrines. Most provocative about the body culture of the Weimar Republic was its insistent belief in the human body as a sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious “inner” conditions. Indeed, modernity of being depended less upon the rationalization of life than upon the appearance of the “modern” body.

Toefper suggests that this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. Through the presentation and analysis of unpublished archival material (including many little-known photographs) and the reclamation of forgotten discourses of fashion, gymnastics, nudism, and the visual arts, he investigates the process of constructing an “empire” of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy. Toepfer presents the work of well-known figures such as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, as well as many obscure but equally fascinating practitioners of German body culture. His book is to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism.

MANAGING THE BODY

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-928052-0

Writer: Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska

Title: Managing the Body

Subtitle: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880-1939

Language: English

Place of Publication: New York

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Year of Publication: 2011 (reprint)

Format: 162x239mm

Pages: xi+394

Illustrations:15 black and white pictures

Front Cover Photograph: Bathers at the Serpentine Lido, Hyde Park, London, May 1932 © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Binding: Hardcover in duotone printed covers

Weight: 737gr

Entry No.: 2012003

Entry Date:19th January 2012

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Managing the Body explores the emergence of modern male and female bodies within the context of debates about racial fitness and active citizenship in Britain from the 1880s until 1939. It analyses the growing popularity of hygienic regimen or body management such as dietary restrictions, exercise, sunbathing, dress reform, and birth control to cultivate beauty, health, and fitness. These bodily disciplines were advocated by a loosely connected group of life reform and physical culture promoters, doctors, and public health campaigners against the background of rapid urbanization, the rise of modern lifestyles, a proliferation of visual images of beautiful bodies, and eugenicist fears about racial degeneration.

Zweiniger-Bargielowska shows that body management was an essential aspect of the campaign for national efficiency before 1914. The modern nation state needed physically efficient, disciplined citizens and the promotion of hygienic practices was an integral component of the Edwardian welfare reforms. Anxieties about physical deterioration persisted after the First World War, as demonstrated by the launch of new pressure groups that aimed to transform Britain from a C3 to an A1 nation. These military categories became a recurrent metaphor throughout the interwar years and the virtuous habits of the healthy and fit A1 citizen were juxtaposed with those of the C3 anti-citizen, whose undisciplined lifestyle was attributed to ignorance and lack of self-control. Practices such as vegetarianism, nudism, and men's dress reform were utopian and appealed only to a small minority, but sunbathing, hiking, and keep-fit classes became mainstream activities and they were promoted in the National Government's 'National Fitness Campaign' of the late 1930s.