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Using the examples of Eisenstein's theories of montage and the visual ideas of New Objectivity, the chapter describes how the “utopia of film” was formulated in poetic concepts by twentieth-century avant-garde movements, and how this was aimed at a new form of subjectivity in mass society. Eisenstein's concept of the film image, with its fourth dimension, is exemplary for the art of the twentieth century, as it shows the movement of a utopian gesture or commitment into a concrete form of perception, a movement that then found its way into discussions of “film as an emotion machine.” Based on Balázs's writings, the ideal of the New Objectivity is then examined in detail as a visual theory emanating from the Weimar avant-garde's encounter with the cinema—an attempt to represent the reality of everyday life in a flowing cross-section image that grasps its object in the modulations of its perceptibility.

Opening with a survey of the challenges to understanding the term modernism and the particular complications of German culture’s negotiation with modernization, this chapter goes on to identify how modernism and antimodernism came to define a Cold War conflict between Socialist Realism and Western tolerance for experimentation. In histories of the visual and performing arts, expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and the Bauhaus came to represent the primary casualties of National Socialism that needed to be rescued from oblivion. This made it difficult to acknowledge the evidence pointing to modern aspects of Nazi society, encouraging scholars instead to go to great lengths to portray an aesthetic nazification focused almost exclusively on stamping out modernism, especially in art history and musicology. Film, theater, and dance studies concentrated less on antimodernism and more on the Nazis’ overall devaluation of arts and media, relegating Nazi-era products to categories of mere propaganda and kitsch. For much of the Cold War period, presumptions about Nazi antimodernism were only slowly and cautiously challenged, with many questions remaining unanswered about the striking similarities one could observe between “Nazi arts” and parallels in other societies, including Western democracies.

The New Objectivity of the 1920s heralded a return to the concept of expression as a construct, and objectivity would became a cornerstone of the high-modernist aesthetic that dominated throughout the middle decades of the century. The idea of music as a revelation of the compositional self was nevertheless too deeply ingrained in musical culture to disappear altogether, and a belief in the aesthetics of subjectivity has continued to manifest itself in a variety of ways down to the present. Concert-hall audiences have nevertheless continued to listen within a hermeneutic framework, that is, from the perspective of the composer, and they accept responsibility for understanding the work at hand. In the realm of popular music, by contrast, the framework of rhetoric persists. We thus find ourselves today in an era of dual expressive paradigms and dual frameworks of production and reception.

This chapter examines the interrelation of cognitive linguistic principles, specific textual and narrative strategies, and—as a third domain—contemporary poetological positions by means of an analysis of two novels of the German movement “Neue Sachlichkeit.” It sheds light on the strategies of perspectival embedding and points out its relevance for the characterization of modern literary aesthetics. After a first historical outline regarding the key status of perception and perspective in modernist aesthetics, the chapter discusses the cognitive linguistic principle of perspectivization and the inherent potential of multiperspectivity in narrative that results from the constitutive double-layered structure of narrative discourse. This provides the basis to analyze the specific strategies of foregrounding multiperspectivity by means of viewpoint splitting and deictic shift, polyphony and multimodality in two modernist novels by Alfred Döblin and Irmgard Keun that can be understood as strategies of perspectival embedding and addressed as “aesthetics of observation.”