Verena Kick, Georgetown University
Photobook Politics: The Functional Montage of Design and Ideology in Germany 1915-1945.
https://www.newberry.org/calendar/verena-kick-georgetown-university
German Studies Seminar
Feb 27, 2026
3:00pm–5:00pm
Online
This paper is the introduction to my book entitled Photobook Politics: Design and Ideology in Germany 1915–1945, which examines how German photobooks from 1915 to 1945 utilized material and design elements to convey political ideologies. The introduction develops the concept of the “functional montage” to describe how photobooks combine images, typography, captions, covers, and formats into a coherent whole that produces political meaning. Unlike avant-garde montage, which relied on jarring juxtapositions, the photobook’s functional montage organizes disparate components into an ordered composition where each element—whether typographical, visual, or material—serves both aesthetic and ideological purposes. Drawing on Soviet film montage, notions of montage as cultural practice, photobook scholarship, and media history, the introduction situates the functional montage within broader debates on book design and mass media in the early twentieth century. By foregrounding the book form itself, it argues that photobooks do not merely illustrate political ideas but enact them through their material and compositional strategies, shaping collective perception and national identity.
About the Speaker
Verena Kick is an Assistant Professor of German at Georgetown University. Her research explores twentieth-century German modernism, visual culture, materiality, photobooks, film, and Digital Humanities. Her book project, Photobook Politics, investigates how German photobooks from 1915 to 1945 employed material and design elements—such as covers, formats, typefaces, and captions—to convey political ideologies. She has published on topics ranging from photomontage in Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (1929), to Franz Kafka’s drawings, Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s photography, and Werner Herzog’s cinematic concept of history. Most recently, she published an article on the use of the “archive effect” in Thomas Heise’s essay film Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019). In the digital realm, she co-directs with Prof. Carsten Strathausen Adapting Kafka, a multimodal project that compiles and analyzes editions and adaptations of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925).