Biological Modernism identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption common to scholarship on the period that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, Carl Gelderloos shows that biology and other discourses of living nature offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it.

Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred Doeblin, Ernst Junger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human, and thus also radically reconsidered the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being. Biological Modernism will be of interest to scholars of German literature and culture, literary modernism, photography, philosophical anthropology, twentieth-century intellectual history, the politics of culture, and the history of science.

About the Author
Carl Gelderloos is an assistant professor of German Studies at Binghamton University.

Reviews
"Biological Modernism: The New Human in Weimar Culture is a thought-provoking reexamination of some of the most entrenched narratives we have about modernity in the Weimar Republic." -June J. Hwang, author of Lost in Time: Locating the Stranger in German Modernity



Book Information
ISBN 9780810141322
Author Carl Gelderloos
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 333g