Grotesque Visions

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in Critical Studies and Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, USA. He is coeditor of the book series Visual Cultures and German Contexts and has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism, Spectacle, Representations of German Identity, as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. He has received awards and fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.

• AcknowledgementsNote on Style and SourcesList of Figures1. The Return of the Grotesque2. The Science of Berlin Dada: Salomo Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and the Grotesque3. The Architectonics of Public Science: “Learning to See” in Rudolf Virchow’s Museum of Pathology4. Sexuality ad oculos: Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld Meet Til Brugman’s “Celluloid Children”5. The Optics of Evidence: Photography and Vision in Berlin Anthropology6. Visual Objectivity Meets Impossible Object: Hannah Höch “From an Ethnographic Museum” Photomontages7. Learning to See GrotesquelyCoda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of VisualityBibliographyIndex

Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada is a much-needed contribution to the history and theory of the grotesque. Calling attention to historically specific ideas about the human body in early twentieth-century Germany, Thomas O. Haakenson not only describes the genesis of the grotesque at this particular time and place, he demonstrates its critical potential to intervene in the era’s often misguided scientific activities. As science and anthropology increasingly implemented visual images to validate research and serve as legitimate evidence, the Dada grotesque—as Haakenson convincingly argues—pointedly questioned the importance of vision as constitutive of knowledge.