Hannah Ryggen

<p>1928: Monetary tightening in U.S. produces deflationary shock in European markets. 1929: Collapse of FAVAG, Germany’s second-largest insurance company, followed by a stock-market crash. 1931: Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest deposit bank, fails. Austria, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and all of Scandinavia leave the gold standard. 1933: Vast European unemployment. Europe divides into currency and trade blocs. Hitler installed as chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. First concentration camp installed and opened in Dachau. 1935: The share of military spending in German national income increases from 1 to 10 percent. 1936: The European economy shows signs of full recovery.</p> <p>“Modernity—it is hell,” wrote Walter Benjamin—a hell within which he, with critical acumen, wrote about the brokenness and ruthlessness of commodity society through the appearance of a looming “little hunchback,” a figure of misfortune and clumsiness cast against the destabilization of Europe that took hold throughout the 1930s. Sourced from a German fairy tale, this hunchback acts as a consistent threat of danger, an individual involved in mischievous tricks with the aim to cause others misfortune. As an omnipresent phantom, the hunchback is as much part of ourselves as part of the other—a phenomenon that forces one to confront the fact that one is incapable of changing life’s conditions despite being aware of how crushing those conditions might be. Attentiveness and passive tolerance are assumed in the face of the hunchback’s existence, whereby “oblivion is to be assumed as a given and any form of emerging future, a form of judgment.” This would define the tragic double bind that befell those who, on anticipating their eventual precarious positions in the cognitive recognition of fascism’s rise, nevertheless opted to preserve identity honorably as a self-determining and self-governing subject with critical yet passive, redemptive and fateless self-reflexivity…</p>