Title: “Unreal, Purely Formal Relations”: Realism in Christian Schad’s Drawings of Queer Nightspots for Ein Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin (1931)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Art historian Benjamin Buchloh influentially framed the career of German artist Christian Schad (1894–1982) as exemplifying the “return to realism” undertaken by many formerly avant-garde European artists post-World War I. In 1917, as an adherent of Zürich Dada, Schad created the first intentionally abstract photograms. However, by the 1920s, the newly Berlin-based Schad turned to copiously realistic paintings of urban modernity’s paradigmatic figures – including, uniquely among his fellow Neue Sachlichkeit painters, denizens of the German capital’s then-burgeoning queer social spaces. By analysing in-depth Schad’s pen-and-ink illustrations of Berlin’s queer nightspots for Curt Moreck’s sensationalistic 1931 tour-guide Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, this paper will, for the first time, connect Schad’s return to illusionistic pictorial representation to his representation of queer communities. Positioning Schad’s figuration not as regressive or reactionary but as defined by the hollowing out of realist mimetic conventions and their humanist ideological underpinnings, I propose Schad’s ink lines both denied and asserted their capacity for spatial illusion. Historicising this self-negating realism through Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel’s writings on urban spatial alienation, I argue Schad pictured these nightspots as paragons of the general impossibility of intimate connection under Weimar modernity, popularly attributed to sexual desire’s perceived rampant commodification and dramatised in his drawings through the insistently non-reciprocal play of gazes between their figures. Ultimately, I contend Schad’s portrayal of queer nightspots as privileged sites of a generalised sexual alienation neither indicted nor celebrated Weimar Berlin’s sexual and gender minorities. Rather, their alienated atmosphere reflected Schad’s incapacity, in a fundamentally incoherent society, to forge a self-contained aesthetic whole from the dizzying array of social and sexual experience in Weimar Berlin, that “city of many possibilities and impossibilities.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".