Through the Eyes of Dresden

Art, Science, and Bodies on Display in the Early Twentieth Century

Brianne Wesolowski

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• Print ISBN:
  9783111707211
• Subtopic: German History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111708201
• Index: History

Why are some kinds of bodies excluded from social contexts, while others are not? By what means are the politics of inclusion carried out? This book examines visual, material, and movement cultures to trace the multiple ways that historical actors from fields of industry, science, and art created and displayed bodies in early twentieth-century Dresden. In particular, Through the Eyes of Dresden engages the histories of the garden city of Hellerau, the German Hygiene Museum, and Circus Sarrasani to consider how visual and material relations were forged between the interior and the exterior of bodies, between individual and social bodies, and between human and non-human animal bodies. In so doing, this book brings together a history of inclusion with that of exclusion, revealing how historically specific presentations of bodies visualized and materialized hierarchies of belonging. Each of these spaces constituted bodies differently, and yet they were bound together through the intellectual and material  landscapes of Dresden. The histories of these three discrete spaces thus also reveal the dynamic history of early twentieth-century Dresden, a history that has hitherto been eclipsed by the destruction of the city in 1945 and its subsequent veiling by the Iron Curtain.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction Dresden’s Architectures of Presentation
• Chapter 1 The Nature of Production: The Garden City of Hellerau and the Rhythm of the Series
• Chapter 2 Designing Information: Dresden’s Hygiene Project and the View from Somewhere
• Chapter 3 Art at the Margins: Circus Sarrasani and the Making of Exclusion
• Chapter 4 Death Dances: Life Among Dresden’s Ruins
• Index