Hannah Höch’s Photomontage as a Tool of Weimar and Anti-Imperial Critique
Lauren Woolf
The end of World War I left a question mark at the end of the 20th century’s second decade for the combatants involved. The conflict had left insurmountable losses. The map of Europe changed rapidly, political alliances shifted, and new social norms emerged, but Germany was left in an especially tough spot financially. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany, the loser, to pay the entirety of restitution owed: 132 billion gold marks. The resultant hardships associated with paying off the debt led to an era remembered for debilitating hyperinflation, and the political turmoil helped usher in the Weimar Republic. [1]
Existing from 1918 to 1933, Weimar Germany is a complicated case study of simultaneous economic disaster and intellectual and artistic liberation. This era is widely remembered as a haven for progressive and communist causes, queer communities, and a number of artistic movements. [2] Two of the most widely known were the Bauhaus and Dada; the artist Hannah Höch was a part of the latter. Existing social norms for gender, class, and race did not fall suddenly away. The stage was nonetheless set for movements grounded in institutional or social critique. In short, the Weimar Republic was progressive, but complicated.
Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was raised by her well-to-do family in Gotha, Germany. Taken out of school at fifteen to care for her sister, Höch did not make the move to Berlin until she was twenty two years old. In Berlin, she studied graphic arts and worked at the Ullstein Verlag, a large leading press, until she joined the Dada movement in 1917. [3] Höch is best remembered for her work in the medium of photomontage, which collaged together parts of different photographs to create a new image entirely. Viewed as provocative and often confrontational, this medium employed contemporary technologies to draw directly from representations of real life.
Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum (Masken: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (1929-1935) (Fig. 1) at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is one such example of Höch’s mastery of photomontage. The artist’s portfolio is built on political themes and criticism, evoking imagery of corruption in Europe and Weimar Germany, but this artwork and the rest of the From an Ethnographic Museum series asks us to address colonialism contextualized through non-Western artifacts and the nude female or androgynous body. Höch’s photomontage draws upon themes of bodily autonomy and anti-colonialism, as directed through the gaze of the female artist, allowing for examination of layered power dynamics. By focusing on motifs of widely disenfranchised bodies and cultures, Höch weaponizes her practice to reclaim self-determination for herself and her compatriots, highlighting an ethos of visual care and subverting expectations of dependency. Beyond her personal lens, Höch’s work crystallizes to show the dependency enforced by ruling systems and the lack of care given to the subjugated by hegemonic powers.
Höch’s sepia-toned Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum, measuring four inches by three inches, features limited elements. Two figures made up of ethnographic masks of unidentified origins adjoining androgynous human figures are the focal point of the collage, while the background is relatively stark. The figure on the left is still. Its mask, which replaces the head and looks to the right, sits atop a forward-facing torso cut off just above the legs and lacking both arms. The mask has human features with bulging, half-lidded eyes, distinctly carved nose and lips, and a slanted jaw. Atop the face sits a headdress or hat with repetitively carved, block-like, linear patterning. As it is turned to the side, only half of the mask’s attributes are visible.
The figure on the right is caught in contrapposto, with the body turned to a three-quarter angle. The left leg is raised to waist height and bent at the knee, while the right leg is only anchored by the toes of the foot. The entire torso is replaced by a mask, which faces left, and the arms are cut off just below the shoulder. The mask has bird-like qualities in the uppermost part. The face is composed of widely carved eyes with diagonally slanted lids and a large, darkly tinted beak. The rest of this mask is less clearly pictured than the uppermost portion, but a set of hands and geometric patterning can be made out. The featured ethnographic masks have stylistic distinctions, but the ambiguity of the title leaves their origin unknown. This rightmost mask is turned to a three-quarter angle in the opposite direction of the attached body, so some of its features are not visible. Adjoined to the body, the figure in its entirety seems to twist, looking backward while moving forward. Unlike its counterpart, this figure seems to be in the midst of a dance. Though their positionalities differ, the figures’ gazes seem to intersect as they look toward each other.
The two figures are set against a minimal background. Made up of two rectangular shapes and a wash of black, the figures appear bright against the otherwise dark nature of Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum. The left figure sits atop a vertical, relatively narrow, dark charcoal-colored rectangle, which mimics a pedestal. This compositional decision could be a deliberate reference to the museum and traditional presentations of classical sculpture, an aesthetic lauded by Western art history. The pedestal literally raises the figure, just as Höch raises these ethnographic masks to the spotlight. As the left figure is presented from the thighs up, it is firmly anchored to the rectangular element as a base. By comparison, the figure on the right is barely tied to its closest background element. A wider rectangle, horizontally oriented and slightly lighter gray, cuts across the bottom of the artwork from the right side. It meets with the vertical rectangle and fails to continue across the rest of the composition, breaking a certain element of verisimilitude in its setting. The right figure is only attached to this horizontal element by the toes of the right foot, while the heel of that foot is lifted, as if in midstep, and the left leg has entirely departed from the ground. The rather plain nature of Höch’s chosen background establishes the most basic of environments, while remaining abstract enough to exclude any sort of place-based specificity. Furthermore, the sepia palette keeps focus on qualitative aspects, as opposed to tonal variety. Ambiguity of space works to Höch’s advantage, removing these ethnographic masks from the Western museum, without sacrificing some form of atmospheric contextualization. Combined, the two figures alongside the background elements deploy collaged representation and environmental abstraction simultaneously. [4]
As part of an ongoing series, the Smart Museum’s artwork is only one among many that draw on a broad set of shared qualities. In the From an Ethnographic Museum series, Höch consistently merges what appear to be living or sculptural human figures with masks, lending each the same sense of personification found in this collage. Additionally, most backgrounds are minimal, giving a limited sense of any environment to keep the collaged figures in focus. The main stylistic difference between this specific artwork and the rest of the series is the incorporation of more varied color palettes. Like many of this set, the Smart Museum’s collage has a short title with the briefest of information outside the group’s name, offering only the description of an element. [5] For titular and visual reference, another work from the series called Monument II: Vanity (1926) (Fig. 2) shares a number of elements with the previously described collage. A background of umber and sienna brown stripes give the vaguest sense of space, while the center of the composition features a pedestal block upon which a body in contrapposto pose stands, turned to a three quarter angle. The human figure stops mid-torso to be replaced by what appears to be an indistinct sculpture in a dark gray, while a mask of unidentified origin acts as the head. Unlike the flatter, sepia-toned palette of the other artwork, Monument II: Vanity, is awash with varied browns, black, gray, gold, and bronze. [6] This elemental consistency establishes the overarching oeuvre of the entire From an Ethnographic Museum series.
The simultaneously abstract and representational aspects and political messaging of these collages, as well as the majority of Höch’s work, is a reflection of the era, geography, and social norms in which they were created. Of Höch’s ability to distill chaos through photomontage, German studies scholar Patrizia McBride writes:
Its stroke of genius lies in rendering, at a basic structural level, the semblance of a world in shambles while avoiding depicting it in an illusionistic or naturalistic fashion. Montage thus turns the splintering and degradation of contemporary experience into an inexorable aesthetic principle, one that refuses to sublimate reality through embellishing representation and rather embraces it for what it is. [7]
As we have seen, the Weimar Republic broadly represents the result of a post-war German state, clamoring to deal with economic limits and a new iteration of national identity in the wake of being on the losing side of this conflict.
Alongside the struggles and corruption came an opportunity for social liberation amongst those who operated outside European, male, Christian, and heterosexual norms. Within these circumstances came what appeared to be a shift in ultra-traditional gender roles and sexuality. On the front of sexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research) in Berlin in 1919, which operated until 1933. Hirschfeld and the Institute pursued research that supported the natural diversity within sexuality, gender, and intercourse. Importantly, Hirschfeld argued against the idea that same-sex love or attraction was perverse. [8]
Beyond sexuality broadly, new conceptions of femininity arose, resulting in the emergence of the Weimar Republic’s “New Woman.” Maud Lavin, a leading scholar on Hannah Höch, describes the phenomenon of the “New Woman”:
The Weimar New Woman differed from her Wilhelmine counterpart in that she now held the vote and probably had fewer children; in addition, she was more likely to be working for a wage, to have had an illegal abortion, to be married, to work in a pink collar position or in a newly rationalized industry, and to live in a city. Sexual and social mores affecting women had also changed, leading, at least in theory, to an increased autonomy for women and a new freedom to seek social, political, and sexual self-definition. [9]
On the surface, this description points towards an idyllic iteration of the contemporary woman in a liberal state who could flourish thanks to artistic and social freedoms. In actuality, real change for Weimar women failed to penetrate any circumstances that may have actually allowed for social mobility. Economically, women saw little improvement in their financial statuses, as the increased presence of women in the workforce was concentrated in the lowest paying jobs with little or no union infrastructure. Almost half of women employed worked in the agricultural sector, filling the void that men who had joined industrialized fields had left. This is especially true of women in non-urban parts of the Republic. [10] Additionally, married women who worked were not able to drop the domestic duties that they had before pursuing outside employment. Instead, the role of homemaker was piled on top of regular employment, expanding the workload, as opposed to eliminating the burden of domesticity. [11] Thus the actualization of the “New Woman” became a balancing act of modern progress and traditional expectations without comprehensive benefits. Gaining the vote and an ill-paying job did not mitigate the hardships of limited social mobility and restricted rights elsewhere.
Höch would have had to navigate these expectations just like her peers. Furthermore, her lived circumstances added to the complexities of artistic practice in a male-dominated movement and as a person of non-heterosexual bearing. Within the context of Hirschfeld’s work, the less hidden nature of queer identity in certain circles during the Weimar Republic makes sense. Höch never labeled her own sexuality specifically, but she spent years of her life in long-term relationships with both men and women, leading to the modern assumption that she was queer in some way. Scholarship about Höch varies in its address of her romantic life and identity. Existing literature aligns her use of the body with notions of masculinity in her deconstruction of gender, [12] while other authors go so far as to label her as bisexual. [13] Regardless, Höch’s identity is a significant aspect of understanding her work, especially that which merges the personal and political.
Through her own eyes, the complications of trying to conceive of one’s own identity under this pressure is clear in the artwork that Höch produced. One way in which questions of autonomy are communicated is through the bodies present in her art. Höch drew upon modern symbols of the period, especially that of the more androgynous and female body. The presence of such figures asks us to reflect upon the possibility that these figures might incorporate aspects of the artist’s personality, bringing in an aspect of herself as well as visualizing the rapidly changing norms that a female and queer audience would have been experiencing. Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum, produced a little over ten years after Höch joined Dadaism, very prominently features more androgynous and female bodies. These bodies give both movement and life to the figure on the pedestal and the one in motion in the Smart Museum’s collage, where the left figure is anchored to the plinth, unable to move due to its composition, while the right figure is continuously reaching towards a form of freedom, frozen in a moment of movement. The bodies have power or are subjected to other authorities, just like the ethnographic masks outside and within European imperial contexts.
Beyond composition as a whole, the masks operate in a dual narrative. They have the visual qualities and meaning from their place of origin. They too have the imposed colonial meaning that reinterprets their background to glorify Western conquest. The feminine body functions similarly. A woman in the Weimar Republic was expected to balance modern expectations and a traditional role in the domestic sphere. The colonial powers [14] at large had made conquered territories dependent on imposed systems, just as the Weimar’s “New Woman” had been made dependent on hierarchical norms for perceived success. Höch works to draw out the parallels between her local context and broader geopolitics via photomontage. In this way, the masks and bodies work well together to communicate a message of discordance and visualized disempowerment, with the potential for reclamation of that agency.
As an artist of female sex, Höch would have been in the minority of the Dada movement. Thus, the confrontational nature of her preferred medium is only one way in which the potency of her messaging and care is presented. Photomontage allowed for the normal to become absurd. The piecing together of imagery from everyday life to create a new scene opened an opportunity to communicate narrative without the assistance of traditional composition. In merging elements that would have been perceived as disparate, Höch forces the viewer to see how the realities of Weimar Germany and colonialism were directly related, especially in terms of subjugated bodies. By constructing tableaus that highlight the museum as an institution, this series clarifies the influence of enforced dependency. Thus, care and dependency play equally important roles in understanding Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum.
In analyzing this artwork, considerations of narrative also become relevant. Dadaism championed irrationality, but that does not mean every practitioner of the movement avoided clear critique or relevancy. Höch was particularly good at using her medium to construct narrative. Picture Book, originally published in 1945, is an unusual example of this skillset. Höch organized her own poetic text alongside photomontages that worked as illustrations. The majority of these collages favor animal imagery combined with mundane objects and plant life. A 2010 reproduction of Picture Book made by The Greenbox, a German publishing company, translates Höch’s text into English. These little poems draw upon themes of modern womanhood, the burden of motherhood, and power imbalance, all of which would have been very relevant to women in the Weimar Republic and during World War II. The third poem (Fig. 3) reads:
The Runfast
The whole day long she bustles to and fro’ and no one knows quite why.
But it’s not because of boredom though-
There’s something on her mind.
A nifty nest so woolly [sic]on the meadow’s edge she’s set
That’s filled, so filled with worries,
-one thousand baby fastrunlets. [15]
Though the imaginary Runfast could very well evoke the frivolous fun of a children’s book, the levity is negated by the ever present weight of expectation. The assumption of given care associated with maternity, potentially to the extent of self-neglect, weighs heavily in Höch’s tale, so she centers those who suffer under imposed roles, and not the children, in order to invert where authorial care is enacted.
Though Höch remained childless for the duration of her life, she was not unaffected by the expectations that the Runfast encountered. An undated quote from her personal accounts reads, “Snow and blooms—abortions in January and May. I want to blur the boundaries. Keep the look soft, touchable—not lacquered.” [16] Höch remains known as a skilled Dada practitioner unaffected by the responsibility of raising children, but, even in the event of an abortion, she sought softness in the recollection. In seeking softness, Höch looked to take care of herself. In the story of the Runfast and the collage at the Smart Museum, Höch works to care for others amidst forced dependency via her professional medium. The Runfast represents what Höch’s life could have been and what the lives were like for many other “New Women.” Thus, a Dada narrative becomes framed by the circumstances of Höch’s own life and work.
The power of storytelling, or the lack thereof, is a consistent element across the multiple factions of the Dada movement. Höch worked with the group based out of Berlin, but the movement as a whole lacked site-specificity, pointing towards the evolving relationship between national identity and aesthetic. World War I had radically shifted the expectations of conflict, while also destroying long established norms on the European continent. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, a relic of Habsburg glory, fell. The Ottoman Empire did, too. Importantly, reactions to ages of European expansion were also evolving. [17] The most global conflict in history thus far had created new networks, while tearing down the dominant predecessors. Thus, the continent was left collectively unsettled. Out of discomfort and rapid change came the pull away from traditional conceptions of art. Though Dadaism was short lived, it offered an opportunity for alternate expression, even including those who had traditionally been excluded from formalized artistic practice, like women. [18]
From the outside, schools like the Bauhaus seemed to deconstruct notions of gender-segregated art education in the Weimar Republic, but this impression is more false than true, as women were relegated to ‘feminine’ arts, such as textiles. The same outcome can be seen in Dadaism, with artists like Hugo Ball and Marcel Duchamp becoming the movement’s public face. Compared to the Bauhaus, this gender segregation actualizes more clearly in historiography than artistic practice. Like the Weimar Republic broadly, an exterior impression of progress flattens complexities mired in patriarchal norms. In the case of Dada, a shared sense of trauma and confusion negated the limitations borders might impose, allowing for the interpretation of irrationality in a transnational context.
This transnational lens further exacerbated changing perceptions of imperialism around the same time and how those ideas manifested in art, including Höch’s Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum. On the surface, Höch merges Western and non-Western symbols, incorporating contrapposto poses and traditional elements of the colonial museum alongside ethnographic items, likely wrongfully acquired from their places of origin. The meeting of elements in this composition adds layers of visualized power dynamics. Höch invokes the pedestal, upon which glorified trophies of conquest sit, while returning a sense of embodied humanity to the masks through the collaged figures. Though the Smart Museum’s photomontage does not feature poetic text like in Picture Book, Höch still effectively creates a scene precariously balanced to communicate political critique in reoriented photography and the vaguely defined picture plane. By bringing non-Western imagery into Western art, the border between regional artistic production is broken, allowing visual critique of European colonialism to commence, via the hand of a German female artist. The divide of creative identity blurs in the medium of photomontage.
Outside of Höch’s individual portfolio, practitioners of Dada and Surrealism drew upon anti-colonial messaging and created related literature and manifestos, such as a 1925 Surrealist-authored pamphlet supporting the rebels in the Rif region of Morocco in their fight for independence from France. [19] Among a variety of related artistic endeavors, Höch’s Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum stands out:
She deserves our full attention in the debate of colonialism versus Dada and Surrealism, because of the explicit critique of colonialism that she stages… Höch engages the viewer with a systematic and ongoing critique ‘of an appropriative Western gaze that reduces bodies, foreign and domestic, to commodities.’ [20]
Despite the innovative anti-colonial nature of her work in this series, Höch’s own life raises questions as to how her actions as an artist against imperialism are influenced by the relative privilege of her standing as a citizen of the Weimar Republic, which was just a new iteration of the imperially-motivated German nation-state. The intellectual leeway available for artists in Weimar Germany was instrumental for Höch to create such confrontational art, further opening modes of critique and interpretation. The Dada movement, more broadly, functioned well in the Weimar state for the same reasons. Without regulated expectations of what defined art, disorder became equally as relevant an aesthetic as any academic style. In this sense, Höch is not complicit in perpetuating the colonial history of her homeland, rather using the mechanisms in its post-war state to bring awareness to the past.
But though the entire From an Ethnographic Museum series successfully joins global elements in photomontage, the title of the series does raise questions of complicity through lack of specificity. Is Hӧch complicit in colonial norms by failing to give each mask its own cultural identity or is the title a result of unavoidable practices that Hӧch had to deconstruct? Is Hӧch’s methodology of care and recognition of dependency diluted by the resources to which she lacked access? Outside of the photocollage at the Smart Museum, the majority of individual works in this series possess titles based on emotions, actions, or description, but rarely incorporate the actual elements of each work into the name. In this way, Hӧch fails to break out of the colonial decontextualization rampant in museums. The compositions return agency to each mask, but they fail to reclaim their agency of origin in title.
On the other hand, Hӧch would have had to work within existing imperial infrastructure to source such imagery, meaning that there might have been limitations in given information, leading to ongoing ethnic ambiguity. There is not a clear yes or no answer to define Hӧch’s role as a resistor or cog within the imperialist landscape, but the intention of her work is not free from the context in which it exists. The Weimar Republic did not spring up from uninhabited Earth, it was a descendant of the monarchical expansionist systems which lay the groundwork for the reshaping of German national identity. Regardless of available intellectual freedom and independently enacted care amidst the corruption and financial distress, Hӧch and her fellow anti-colonialists had to reckon with their national history, while attempting to deconstruct the systems that built that heritage and continued to enforce dependency through artistic activation.
The Smart Museum’s artwork from the series From an Ethnographic Museum layers the complexities of gender roles and colonial norms to create a cohesive scene evoking messages of anti-imperialism and autonomy of many sorts, resulting in a multi-faceted reflection of care and dependency through the artist’s lens and a broader historical purview. In her own life, Hӧch reckoned with the competing identities of her unlabeled queerness, womanhood, and artistic life in the evolving Weimar Germany. A front of progressivism constructed the facade of a liberated “New Woman,” but limitations dictated by traditional domestic expectations and restricted access to full financial and bodily independence weakened the impression of forward movement. In the midst of this, Hӧch utilized photomontage within Dada to revolt against aesthetic tethers, embracing fragmented irrationality to center care and a disdain for forced dependency. Furthermore, Hӧch’s work now exists as distilled reinterpretations of contemporaneity in the Weimar Republic. The use of photography incorporates an aspect of reality, only made possible by the growing accessibility of technology.
Beyond Höch, borders and diplomatic relations across the European continent shifted and softened drastically in the artist’s lifetime. Thus, the combined artistic freedom of the Weimar Republic, along with an influx of widespread imperial critique, served as a potent moment in which to reembody the ethnographic masks, though it is relevant to recognize that the infrastructure of anthropological collections at the time may have limited Hӧch from taking more drastic naming liberties. The From an Ethnographic Museum series only ever saw public display once in a 1934 one-woman exhibition in Brno, Czech Republic. Otherwise, the concepts within the series really only operated as a work in progress, as opposed to an anti-colonial opus. [21]
Their lofty intentions were overshadowed by socio-political circumstances.
Hannah Hӧch represents the female gaze in the Weimar Republic, acting upon the social and political pressures of the time to respond in a confrontational way, while encouraging care for the subjugated amidst a culture of expected dependency. The blended softness of painting and traditional mediums is left behind for the cutting nature of contemporarily-situated photomontage. Evocative messaging and narrative through a newly rendered realism is a continually successful trademark of Hӧch’s work, especially in the context of her lifetime. Instead of resisting change, Hӧch lived amid shifting tides and visualized her protests into powerful art, and her style is equally as personal as it is national. Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum is one particularly relevant moment from the artist’s directive to confront, while simultaneously returning bodily agency to those limited by colonialism and the patriarchy. Hӧch unmasks the social causes that drove this series through the permanent recording of a scene of her own making. Hӧch enacts autonomy throughout, softly cutting the maternal cord to fully evolve as a “New Woman” of her own making. Hӧch revolts, but who does her care benefit?
1. Eric D. Weitz, “A Troubled Beginning” in Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 7-39. Accessed October 31, 2022, ProQuest Ebook Central.
2. Ibid.
3. Around 1916, Hugo Ball, a German writer who had fled to Switzerland, created some of the first artworks attributed to the movement in Zurich, specifically in the Cabaret Voltaire. From Zurich, the tenets of Dada spread, finding footing in Berlin, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. Hannah Höch and Maud Lavin, “From an Ethnographic Museum,” Grand Street, no. 58 (1996): 128. https://doi.org/10.2307/25008096. (This essay is attributed to both Höch and Lavin as the majority of the document is photographs of Höch’s work from the series, while the brief concluding essay is authored by Lavin.)
4. Hannah Höch, Masks: from an Ethnographic Museum (Masken: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum), 1929-1935, gelatin silver print, image: 4 x 3 inches, sheet: 4 7/16 x 3 1/4 inches, and mounting: 6 7/16 x 5 inches. New York: Artists Rights Society, Chicago, Smart Museum of Art.
5. The digitized object file contains only the most basic object information and provenance, with no additional notes or description. The object file is linked here.
6. Höch and Lavin, “From an Ethnographic Museum,” 127.
7. Patrizia C. McBride, “Weimar-Era Montage: Perception, Expression, Storytelling,” in The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2016), 18. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1gk08k8.6.
8. United States Holocaust Museum, “Magnus Hirschfeld,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed October 30, 2022. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hirschfeld-2.
9. Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 64.
10. Renate Bridenthal, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women at Work,” Central European History 6, no. 2 (1973): 151. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545664.
11. Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” 65.
12. Julie Nero, “Engaging Masculinity: Weimar Women Artists and the Boxer,” Woman’s Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2014): 40–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24395362.
13. Maria Makela, “Rejuvenation and Regen(d)eration: Der Steinachfilm, Sex Glands, and Weimar-Era Visual and Literary Culture,” German Studies Review 38, no. 1 (2015): 43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43555951.
14. Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa,” The American Economic Review 106, no. 7 (2016): 1802–03. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43861113.
15. Hannah Höch, Picture Book (Berlin: The Green Box, 2010), 3. ©️ 2023 The Green Box, Berlin.
16. Suzette Marie Bishop and Alicia Ostriker, “HANNAH HÖCH,” in She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes (University Press of Colorado, 2003), 53. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nrsd.35.
17. Nathanael Kuck, “Anti-Colonialism in a Post-Imperial Environment: The Case of Berlin, 1914-33,” Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 1 (2014): 134-136. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43697292.
18. H. Henkels and F. C. Nagels, “The Beginning of Dadaism: Arp and van Rees in Zürich 1915,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 23 (1972): 373–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24705675.
19. Martine Antle and Katharine Conley, “Introduction: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism,” South Central Review 32, no. 1 (2015): 1. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44016874.
20. Ibid., 5.
21. Höch and Lavin, “From an Ethnographic Museum,” 128.
Antle, Martine and Katharine Conley. “Introduction: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism.” South Central Review 32, no. 1 (2015): 1–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44016874.
Bishop, Suzette Marie and Alicia Ostriker. “HANNAH HÖCH.” In She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes, 53–54. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2003. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nrsd.35.
Bridenthal, Renate. “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women at Work.” Central European History 6, no. 2 (1973): 148–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545664.
Henkels, H. and F. C. Nagels. “The Beginning of Dadaism: Arp and van Rees in Zürich 1915.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 23 (1972): 373–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24705675.
Höch, Hannah. Masks: From an Ethnographic Museum (Masken: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum), 1929-1935. Gelatin silver print. 4 x 3 inches (10.2 x 7.6 cm), sheet: 4 7/16 x 3 1/4 inches (11.3 x 8.3 cm), and mounting: 6 7/16 x 5 inches (16.4 x 12.7 cm). ©️ 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Chicago, Smart Museum of Art.
Hannah Höch, Monument II: Vanity, 1926, collage made with wrapping paper on colored paper, sheet: 25.8 x 16.7 cm. ©️ 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Nuremberg, German National Museum.
Höch, Hannah. Picture Book. Berlin: The Green Box, 2010: 3. ©️ The Green Box, Berlin.
Höch, Hannah and Maud Lavin. “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Grand Street, no. 58 (1996): 120–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/25008096.
Kuck, Nathanael. “Anti-Colonialism in a Post-Imperial Environment: The Case of Berlin, 1914-33.” Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 1 (2014): 134–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43697292.
Lavin, Maud. “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch.” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 63–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/488172.
Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
Makela, Maria. “Rejuvenation and Regen(d)eration: Der Steinachfilm, Sex Glands, and Weimar-Era Visual and Literary Culture.” German Studies Review 38, no. 1 (2015): 35–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43555951.
Marhoefer, Laurie. “Degeneration, Sexual Freedom, and the Politics of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933.” German Studies Review 34, no. 3 (2011): 529–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41303797.
McBride, Patrizia C. “Weimar-Era Montage: Perception, Expression, Storytelling.” In The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany. University of Michigan Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1gk08k8.6.
Michalopoulos, Stelios and Elias Papaioannou. “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa.” The American Economic Review 106, no. 7 (2016): 1802–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43861113.
Nero, Julie. “Engaging Masculinity: Weimar Women Artists and the Boxer.” Woman’s Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2014): 40–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24395362.
United States Holocaust Museum. “Magnus Hirschfeld.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed October 30, 2022, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hirschfeld-2.
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