Taking it’s name from Alfred Döblin’s Der deutsche Maskenball, this exhibition proposal traces the influence and adaptation of phrenological thought by artists and designers in Weimar Germany. By centering on Cologne, it offers an alternative approach to the typological and phrenological fascination that offered many in Weimar Germany the means to organise and restructure the fractured state that emerged from the war. Whereas this fascination is often discussed in scholarship in relation to the pseudoscientific theories of the Nazis, A Republic Without an Instruction Manual highlights it’s role in the political left and their adaptation of it as a tool to develop class-consciousness amid social, political, and economic unrest.

Designed for the ground floor exhibition space of the Wellcome Collection, the show opens with period literature, displaying page spreads from Herman Krukkenberg’s der Gesichtausdruck des Menschen and Ernst Kretschmer’s Koperhau und Charakter. In conversation with these books are the examples from George Grosz’s Das Gesicht der Herrschenden Klasse and Franz Wilhelm Seiwert’s 7 Anlitze der Zeit, demonstrating how phrenological imagery was deployed in satirical attacks on the German bourgeois. The three rooms of the exhibition navigate the continuation and development of these themes through the work of the Cologne Dada – with works from Anton Raderscheidt, Gottfried Brockman, and Marta Hegemann – and the Cologne Progressives, before culminating in the work of Gerd Arntz and Augustine Tschinkel for Otto Neurath at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna. By ending with Neurath and ISOTYPE, An Exhibition Without an Instruction Manual shows how tools of exclusion were turned into systems that opened knowledge and statistics to those shut out of formal education.