Sam Dolbear’s research while affiliated with ICI Kulturlabor Berlin and other places

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.

In an article published after his death, Christopher Chitty declared the public pissoir a ‘nodal point’ in the formation of a modern gay metropolitan life. In The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic, Javier Samper Vendrell adds another such point to this queer topography: the newspaper kiosk. Often phallic in shape, the kiosk was where one might have glimpsed elicit publications in Berlin’s interwar years, and Samper Vendrell focuses on those magazines published by Friedrich Radszuweit (1876–1932), a prominent leader of the homosexual rights organization the Bund für Menschenrecht (BfM). Throughout The Seduction of Youth, the kiosk is treated as a ‘nodal point’ (in Chitty’s conception) of the dissemination and circulation of an emergent mass print culture that unleashed the possibility of divergent identities and desires in the Weimar public sphere. Samper Vendrell skilfully traces the conditions that made this emergence possible, from sexological and psychological research to urban and technological transformation, but also charts the conditions of its demise: from the censorship of the so-called Trash and Smut Law of 1926, to total annihilation from the public sphere in 1933.