In the 20th century, countless artists celebrated the vision of a “complete renewal of human sensibility” (Marinetti). With their works, they hoped to make those who could see, hear, touch or participate in any way more sensitive. This book focuses on aspects such as identity, self-awareness, failure, thrownness and failing, blindness, initiation, intimacy and distance, symbioses of human and non-human, empathy and death, and infinity. In the art of the time, the aim was to strengthen the human in people at the same time as using sensitivity as a bearer of hope. This modernist ideal has no common style, only a cultic tradition in which everyone can be reflected. These “mirrors” need to be questioned.

Antje von Graevenitz, retired professor, taught general art history with a focus on the 20th/21st century at the University of Cologne (1989–2005) and lectured at the University of Amsterdam (1977–1988). She completed her doctorate in Munich in 1973 on Baroque ornamentation, but specialized in contemporary, anthropological, ephemeral and interdisciplinary topics.