@article{FilminGermanPublicHealth1918-1946:Corporeality:2693,
      recid = {2693},
      author = {Schroeder, Tyler},
      title = {Film in German Public Health 1918-1946: Corporeality,  Crisis, Utopia. Film in der öffentlichen Gesundheitspflege,  Deutschland 1918-1946. Körperlichkeit — Krise — Utopie.},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-08},
      pages = {199},
      abstract = {This dissertation argues that media practices and  communicative technologies in modern hygienic education—and  the media objects they are used to create—are assessed for  their “hygienic value:” whether and how they function as  useful practices for bringing about circumstances conducive  to the corporeal thriving of human beings. How such  thriving is defined, and how it is connected to information  practices, varies based upon the political and  institutional discourses in which the media object has been  made, the dispositions of those individuals with deciding  power over the form and fate of the object, and the  particular public health issues that the object is made to  address. This dissertation works primarily with the medium  of film in the national context of Germany, roughly from  the end of the First until the end of the Second World War.  The first chapter offers a prehistory of modern hygienic  media discourses in the German-speaking context, surveying  parallels between information and other essential  resources, like clean air and sunlight, in encyclopedic and  instructional texts associated with the social hygiene  movement and with paraprofessional folk medicine in the  late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second chapter  studies the written archives left by three lost films from  the 1920s, each of which differently illuminates the  relationship between centralized public health  administration, the regional and economic heterogeneity of  interwar Germany, a rapidly developing set of film  practices, and the illnesses and forms of personal health  associated with modernization. The third chapter studies  how a 1936 film on dental hygiene—an oddity in a period  when the public health discourse was being forcibly  redirected to serve the eugenic goals of so-called “racial  hygiene”—both fused personal hygiene with fascist  aesthetics and antagonized the Reich Office for Educational  Film by circumventing its distribution and exhibition  structures, eventually earning a de facto exhibition ban.  The fourth chapter works with two of the first films to be  made on German soil after the war—both made by Soviet  occupying authorities in the ruins of Berlin in order to  spread public health messages about combating diseases  associated with primitive postwar living  conditions—examining in particular how these films and  their associated archival traces document the ways in which  postwar imperatives of infrastructural rebuilding and  salvage also applied to human bodies. Across these studies,  successive governmental and professional bodies—of hygiene  educators and policymakers in the Weimar Republic, Nazi  Germany, and one post-World-War-II occupational  administration—negotiated whether and how the relatively  new and costly medium was to be implemented to serve the  political and administrative goals those governments  understood as addressing public health.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2693},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2693},
}