With a pop-theoretical background, this sub-project examines the intermedial and transgeneric aesthetics of popular German-language illustrated entertainment magazines of the 1920s and 1930s such as Scherl's Magazin, Uhu and Die Dame in their style-forming, orientation-founding and group-constituting function. Text and image analytical methods are used to investigate how advertisements, guidebooks, pictures and literary texts in illustrated magazines not only meet in a confined space, but also relate to each other formally and functionally, thus prefiguring later pop-aesthetic me-dia procedures. Many of the magazines on which the project is based can be viewed as digital copies at arthistoricum.net.

The Weimar Republic was a visual culture. From today's perspective, it seems natural to be permanently surrounded by moving and still images. In the 1920s, this was new. The whole world came into visual proximity; images of people were shaped visually in the literal sense. In the context, it is generally remembered that cinema experienced its first great flowering. In addition, a new kind of distribution network for photographs had emerged in the course of the First World War, and in the Weimar Republic these were available on a scale that had previously been unimaginable. Accordingly, illustrated magazines boomed, establishing new art forms in the interweaving of texts and images, putting stars in the limelight, staging fashion, presenting holiday destinations and 'foreign peoples'. From today's perspective, these magazines can be identified as incubators or amplifiers for various discourses and currents of the (early) 20th century, e.g. exoticism, sports enthusiasm or the pop culture that was emerging in the 1920s and was to become the guiding paradigm of at least the Western capitalist world from the 1950s onwards.

The digitisation project of entertainment magazines from the 1920s to the 1930s led by Patrick Rössler in cooperation with the SLUB Dresden "Deutschsprachige illustrierte Magazine der Klassischen Moderne. Digitalisierung und Inhaltserschließung', which can be accessed at arthistoricum.net, has made these magazines accessible to both scholars and the interested public. The project 'Prefigurations of Pop in Entertainment Magazines of the 1920s' of the Collaborative Research Centre 'Transformations of the Popular' is one project among many that can now examine these magazines in aesthetic and cultural-historical terms under considerably easier conditions.

Hannah Steinkasserer (student assistant)