New Objectivity and Expressionism

New Objectivity and Expressionism are linked in the novel through an explicit account of an artistic opposition and through a broader montage of modern Berlin. New Objectivity is identified as a movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s against Expressionism and ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. The book does not establish itself as a direct illustration of that movement; instead, its city scenes make the term’s cultural resonance legible amid the material and media textures of urban life.

The historical opposition

The relation is defined first as a historical contrast: New Objectivity emerged in opposition to Expressionism. The account places the movement within a specific political span, from the early 1920s to 1933, when the Weimar Republic fell and the Nazis rose to power. This endpoint makes the artistic distinction part of a larger history rather than a timeless contrast between two styles.

The novel supplies no detailed account of Expressionist technique, so the opposition should not be reduced to a checklist of stylistic traits. Its importance here is that the book names a contested artistic movement inside a narrative densely attentive to the contemporary city and its forms of public communication.

The song’s double edge

The clearest local articulation comes in the note on the 1928 foxtrot Es liegt in der Luft, with lyrics by Marcellus Schiffer and music by Mischa Spoliansky, from a revue of the same name. Its refrain links objectivity with electricity. The verbal pairing gives the movement’s name a lively, even prickly charge: objectivity is not presented as an absence of sensation, but placed beside a force suggestive of tension and excitation.

The song was first performed in Berlin in 1929 by Paul Godwin und seine Jazz Symphoniker at the Komödie am Kurfürstendamm. Its popular, performative setting matters: the movement’s name circulates not only as an art-historical label but also through a contemporary song and revue culture. The pun offers a compact counterpoint to the documentary textures elsewhere in the novel, where information arrives amid noise, movement, and competing voices.

A city assembled from documents

The Berlin passages repeatedly put unlike kinds of material next to one another. A notice publishes plans for a wall rosette at 10, An der Spandauer Brücke and specifies where objections must be filed; a weather report forecasts falling temperatures; and a tramway notice supplies routes, fares, and passenger rules. On Tramway 68, an adult fare costs 20 pfennigs and a scholar’s ticket 10. Such details make administration and transport part of the city’s visible fabric rather than background information.

At Rosenthaler Platz, this documentary register breaks into a brief street incident: a man jumps from Tram 41 carrying two yellow parcels as an empty taxi skids past, while a police officer watches and a tramway inspector arrives. Nearby, public notices and commercial appeals range from fruit brandies and legal services to rubber sponges. The abrupt adjacency of practical information, advertising, and street action creates a city that is apprehended in fragments rather than arranged around a single explanatory voice.

The same method appears at Alexanderplatz, where the road is torn up for the underground railway and pedestrians cross on planks. Tramcars arrive from Alexanderstrasse and continue via Münzstrasse toward Rosenthaler Tor; shops and businesses fill buildings from basement to attic. Commercial copy, political grievance, and claims about the Tenancy Protection Act crowd into the same urban field. The city is simultaneously infrastructure, marketplace, and arena for public argument.

Documentary form and urban experience

The montage does not make factual surfaces neutral. A report on the Heerstrasse tram disaster says the investigation remains incomplete: questioning continues, expert reports are pending, and responsibility cannot yet be assigned between late braking and a combination of unfortunate coincidences. Official language records what is known while marking what is not. Elsewhere, the account of a Renaissance Theatre performance turns an advertisement into an extended meditation on who can receive, believe, or act upon publicity, including residents too ill to reach the theatre in a city of four million.

A different kind of public spectacle appears at Alexanderplatz in the pounding pile driver outside Aschinger’s. Its repeated blows drive rails into the ground while a crowd watches the pile shrink under the hammer. Set beside transport notices, commercial claims, and the work of urban construction, the scene makes the city’s material transformation palpable. Together, these passages give the novel’s relation to New Objectivity its strongest form: not a claim of direct membership, but an affinity with a modern city represented through concrete things, public documents, mass communication, and sharply juxtaposed impressions.