The Divided heritage - Irit Rogoff

Within a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussion, The divided heritage considers twentieth-century German art in its social and political context. It focuses on the problems of German cultural production, rather than on a narrative of styles and movements, and it applies both social history and critical theory to an investigation of the visual arts. The collected essays are arranged in four heavily illustrated groups, each drawing attention to the cultural continuities and disjunctures of the period. The first set looks at the issue of cultural disruption, on both a social and political and a conceptual level; the second discusses the effect of representation of gender on the continuity of cultural history; the third highlights the variants within historical patterns of patronage; the city in German social and cultural theory and its place in the world of visual representation. The volume editor brings together the views expressed in an introductory chapter.