Project Summary

This project offers the first extended investigation of the relations between law, justice and popular visual culture during the era of the Weimar Republic. Its leading premise is that the interwar period in Germany witnessed a remarkable confluence of law, politics and cultural representations that radically altered the shape and texture of the legal imagination. Historical scholarship has not been blind to this, and there is a substantial body of work that considers how traditional journalistic and literary forms contributed to the development of a new popular legal culture. What has been almost entirely overlooked, however, is the impact of the ‘new’ visual media of the era – cinema, photography and mass image-reproduction techniques – that literally changed how legal subjects and the legal system were seen, and which engendered new spaces of conversation, contestation, dissent and critique.

The project seeks to excavate this neglected archive of visual material as a way of opening new lines of enquiry on how perceptions and understanding of law and justice were experienced, constructed, conditioned or challenged through the new image regimes of the Weimar period. The overarching aim is to develop a set of new and innovative critical perspectives on the following three key points of focus:

• the forms of legal image-making generated by the visual media of the Weimar era;
• the meanings these images acquire in the context(s) of their production, circulation and reception;
• the cultural work these images perform in fostering and shaping a popular legal imagination outside the formal spaces of law and politics.

The project comprises three sub-projects that each address these points in relation to a distinct media form. Sub-project 1 attends to cinema, sub-project 2 (postdoc project) to visual art, and sub-project 3 (PhD project) to photography.

The project proposes a novel analytical approach that is both historically-sensitive and conceptually-refined. It takes its initial cue from the ‘visual turn’ in the study of historical cultures, and combines this with impulses from the fields of cultural studies and cultural-legal studies. Within this new framework, the project aims to progress the state of the art in two significant and substantial ways. First, it seeks to enhance historical understanding of the juncture of legal, political and popular visual culture in Weimar Germany, which remains a remarkably under-researched and under-theorised subject in the scholarship. Second, it looks to advance new theoretical concepts and methods for exploring the connections between law and (popular) visual culture at specific sites and conjunctures, and to disseminate these to cross-disciplinary audiences both nationally and internationally.

While the leading research questions are rigorously historical and emanate from the archive, the project also promises to elicit a set of timely reflections relevant to present-day conditions, which continue to prompt comparisons with Weimar Germany. These concern (i) the interplay between law, politics and popular culture in times of crisis, and (ii) how the emergence of new mass media forms might work not only to alter the conditions for public legal-political discourse, but to also (re-)shape popular attitudes towards questions of rights, justice, democracy and the rule of law.

Advisory Board

• Dr. Sabine T. Kriebel (University College Cork, Ireland)
• Prof. Michele Luminati (University of Lucerne)
• Prof. Desmond Manderson (The Australian National University)
• Dr. Ian Roberts (University of Warwick)