How does the visual nature of spectacle inform the citizenry, destabilize the political, challenge aesthetic convention and celebrate cultural creativity? What are the limits - aesthetic, political, social, cultural, economic - of spectacle? How do we explain the inherently exclusionary, revolutionary, dehumanizing and utopian elements of spectacle? In this book, authors from the fields of cultural studies, cinema studies, history and art history examine the concept of spectacle in the German context across various media forms, historical periods and institutional divides. Drawing on theoretical models of spectacle by Guy Debord, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Jonathan Crary and Michel Foucault, the contributors to this volume suggest that a decidedly German concept of spectacle can be gleaned from critical interventions into exhibitions, architectural milestones, audiovisual materials and cinematic and photographic images emerging out of German culture from the Baroque to the contemporary.

Contents: Thomas O. Haakenson: What is «German Spectacle»? - Jacob M. Baum: Opening a Window to the Devil: Religious Ritual as Baroque Spectacle in Early Modern Germany - Elizabeth Otto: Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters - Brían Hanrahan: Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: The «Chamberlin Flight» as Spectacular Event, June 1927 - Paul Monty Paret: Berlin in Light: Wilhelmine Monuments and Weimar Mass Culture - Sara Ann Sewell: Spectacles in Everyday Life: The Disciplinary Function of Communist Culture in Weimar Germany - Nadine Rossol: Spectacular Settings for Nazi Spectacles: Mass Theater in the Third Reich - Jennifer L. Creech: Gudrun is Not a Fighting Fuck Toy: Spectacle, Femininity and Terrorism in The Baader-Meinhof Complex and The Raspberry Reich - Deborah Ascher Barnstone: Spectacular Architecture: Transparency in Postwar West German Parliaments - Heather Mathews: Beyond the Global Spectacle: Documenta 13 and Multicultural Germany - Brechtje Beuker: The Spectacle of Terrorism and the Threat of Theatricality.