From Photobook to Digital Book: Curating Weimar Germany’s New Visual Literacy Online

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the digital curation of Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy, using Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles as a case study to examine in which ways a photobook and accompanying research can be showcased online. Tucholsky and Heartfield’s work is an example of the photobook genre that rose to prominence in the 1920s, also for its potential to serve as an “Übungsatlas” (Walter Benjamin) for the new visual literacy. In curating the photobook online, using the publishing platform Scalar and the media repository Critical Commons, the photobook and the accompanying research not only become easily accessible to fellow researchers, students, and the public, but it also becomes possible to emulate and thus explore Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy online. Curating Tucholsky and Heartfield’s photobook and the related analysis online allows for a reflection on digital curation as scholarship, its use in the classroom, and its implications for the trajectory of photobook research.