Students Reflect on German Art Through Stories of Entrapment
Students in Kata Gellen's course, German 443S “Stories of Entrapment," have lunch at Café Sabarsky, the authentic Viennese café at the Neue Galerie.
In Spring 2025, Associate Professor of German Studies Kata Gellen took the students in German 443S, “Stories of Entrapment,” to New York City for a first-hand, immersive experience of German theater, literature and visual art. They attended a German-language production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Three-Penny Opera (Dreigroschenoper), saw an exhibit of manuscripts, photographs, and art related to the writer Franz Kafka, and saw an exhibit about the modern German art movement New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). This trip was generously supported by the Department of German Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Provost’s Office, and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.
Read the students’ own account of their academic enrichment travel below – in English and German!
New York Trip, German 443
Carmen Becker Pombo, Vivien Buchmann, Younghyun Hwang & Katie Laitusis
We went to New York on April 4-6, 2025 as part of our German class. The class is on Stories of Entrapment in the 20th and 21st Centuries, so we naturally covered Franz Kafka. A bit of background information: he was a Jewish Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague and is considered one of the most important German writers of the 20th century. His work is interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity, fitting right into the class's theme. We visited an exhibition of this author in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Seeing original manuscripts and secondary interpretations put his work in the wider context of the 20th-century German-speaking world. The example seen here is a take on his novella "The Metamorphosis" (German: "Die Verwandlung") that tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and struggles to adjust to this condition. The painting is also accompanied by an interpretive dance performance. It was very interesting to see the different art forms, novella, painting, and dancing, intertwined and representing the same theme in such different ways.
On Saturday evening, we traveled to Brooklyn to see a performance of the “Dreigroschenoper” or “Threepenny Opera” by Bertolt Brecht at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The play was performed in German with music played by the Berliner Ensemble. We read the playbook for this performance as a class prior to the trip, so it was an amazing opportunity to be able to see the story being performed as it was intended on a stage. The music, costumes, set, and acting all added to the story and gave us all a new perspective on the play. One of the most significant parts was being able to see the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) in action which is a technique developed by Brecht and that is a hallmark of epic theater. The performance in New York however took a modern twist on the script in this regard, occasionally having the characters switch to English or address the audience members. The Verfremdungseffekt is an aspect of the “Dreigroschenoper” that is essential to its meaning, however, it cannot be fully understood when just reading the playbook, so it was an invaluable opportunity to be able to experience the performance live in New York.
We visited the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in the Neue Galerie. The art movement called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) emerged in the 1920s as a reaction against Expressionism. We noticed that much of these paintings were characterized by sharp lines and geometrical shapes, probably influenced by the industrialist culture of that era. Indeed, many of these paintings contained critical references to industrialism, namely the way it manipulated nature and based human beings. “Lords of the World” by Georg Scholz would be a good example: industrialists are standing on top of a steel bridge, which is drawn like a frame around the river and mountains in the distance. Such positioning gives us the impression that nature is being suffocated by artificial constructions. Paintings such as Gottfried Brockman’s “A Cripple’s Existence,” Karl Hubbuch’s “On the Street,” and Georg Kinzer’s “Blind Beggar,” although not adhering to sharp lines or shapes, portrayed the debasement of human life by war and poverty.
Although some of the paintings seemed to be making a critical commentary on the “will to manipulation” in industrial society, most of these paintings also seemed to exhibit a fascination with clear-cut geometric shapes. “High Pressure Steam” by Volker Bohringer or “Construction” by Carl Grossberg would be good examples of this.
All in all, this exhibition gave us a more informed glimpse into German culture in the early 1900s, and helped us understand the milieu in which other artists and thinkers emerged.
New York Reise, Deutsch 443
Als Teil unserer Deutschklasse hatten wir das Privileg, eine Reise nach New York zu machen, um die Werke, die wir im Unterricht besprochen haben, im wahren Leben zu sehen. In dieser Zusammenfassung werden wir unsere Erlebnisse von der Kafka Ausstellung, der Neuen Sachlichkeit Ausstellung und der Dreigroschenoper erzählen.
Unser erster Stopp war die Franz Kafka Ausstellung in der Morgan Library. Kafka ist ein österreichischer Autor und Schriftsteller, bekannt für seine einzigartigen Sichtweisen über Isolation, Schuldgefühle und die generelle Angst, die mit dem Leben verbunden ist. Im Museum konnten wir die Original Manuscripten und Postkarten von ihm anschauen und lesen. Zusätzlich konnten wir mehr über sein Leben außerhalb seiner Arbeit erfahren, da das Museum nicht nur seine Werke, sondern auch Ausstellungen von seinen Wohnorten und Beziehungen bereitgestellt hat.
Unser zweiter Stopp war die Dreigroschenoper in Brooklyn. Das Theaterstück oder die Oper wurde vom Berliner Ensemble vorgetragen. Es war eine unbeschreibliche Erfahrung, ein Stück, das man gelesen und analysiert hat im Unterricht, in echt anschauen zu können. Musik ist ein großer Teil dieser Oper und ohne die Live Aufführung kann man sich die Geschichte komplett vorstellen oder die Bedeutung des Stückes verstehen.
Unser letzter Stopp, bevor wir leider wieder zurückfliegen mussten, war die Neue Galerie mit einem Fokus auf die Neue Sachlichkeit Ausstellung. Die Neue Sachlichkeit ist in den 20er Jahren entstanden und ist ein Aufruf gegen Expressionismus. Die Gemälde kann man an seinen scharfen Kanten, strukturierten Aufbau und geometrischen Formen erkennen. Die ganze Ausstellung hat uns einen tieferen Einblick in die Deutsche Kultur in den 1900 Jahren gegeben, und hat uns geholfen, das Milieu der Künstler und Denker der Zeit zu verstehen.