Malika Maskarinec: The Forces of Form in German Modernism, Evansville/IL: Northwestern UP 2018.

The argument of Malika Maskarinec’s “Forces of Form in German Modernism” traces an elliptical trajectory. Its first focus lies on the modernist affirmation of “uprightness as a corporeal and aesthetic ideal”, which the author discerns across a range of artistic mediums: most tangibly in Auguste Rodin’s vertiginous sculpture, but also in the tightrope walkers populating Paul Klee’s paintings, in Franz Kafka’s struggle to fall asleep (and get out of bed), and in Franz Biberkopf’s tragic yet mundane effort to stay upright. Each of these close readings is insightful on its own, but together they display a connection that is more than thematic, and which sets this book above the standard collection of occasional essays. In each case, Maskarinec demonstrates how the theme of corporeal uprightness reflects a particularly modernist aesthetic ideal, which she distinguishes from both the “preexisting idea” of classical aesthetics and the “aesthetics of formlessness” celebrated by late twentieth century critics. For Maskarinec, the modernist concept of form is neither the triumph of spirit nor that of matter, but something that emerges in the antagonistic conflict between the will to verticality and the weight of the horizontal.