ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the cultural constructions of public modes of communication in the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, decades of expansion and transformation of the public sphere in those countries. It explores a cultural narrative that accompanies the introduction of photography and radio broadcasting during a time of change. The book presents and describes a historically relevant media discourse–albeit in the margins of cultural practices–by treating art and intellectual productions as constitutive material signs of conversations about the media. It shows that what Siegfried Kracauer once called the "surface-level expressions" of an era, which "by virtue of their unconscious nature provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things" and whose knowledge depends on their interpretation.
