Following World War I and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Constitution was ratified, establishing Germany’s first democracy. It ushered in a thriving cultural climate: Expressionism came to an end, the Dadaists engaged in anti-art activities, the Bauhaus school was established, and in particular, Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Objectivity,” emerged. The movement was an alternative realism, endemic to post–WWI Germany, and is the subject in LACMA’s latest exhibition, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–33. The exhibition contains five haunting sections that explore democratic life in the aftermath of war through the tensions between urban and rural environments, industrial modernization, commodities and everyday objects, portraiture, and identity.

Rabble-rousing comparisons between present-day America and post–World War I Germany have recently shown up in many prominent news outlets, perhaps because the comparisons feel so easy. We have our own gaudy, racist buffoon who has recently entered politics by describing an enemy from within. Economic crises and inflation left the German economy in shambles; our own financial calamity nearly left ours in disrepair.

Just as in Germany at the time, new understandings of sexual difference and gender ambiguity currently reverberate in popular culture, like in the TV series Transparent, which even includes a prominent subplot that takes place in Germany’s Weimar Republic. A renewed awareness and aversion to the human cost of war characterizes both Otto Dix’s The War prints from 1924 as well as the controversial scenes of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, 24, and Homeland. The movie Her is analogous to Fritz Lang’s masterwork Metropolis, in which fascination with the future of technological progress is tinged with skepticism and fear. The depiction by painters such as Rudolph Schlichter of lustmord (or “sex murder”) and other violence toward women permeated German art in the 1910s and early 1920s, just as it does now in Jessica Jones, Game of Thrones, The Fall, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. We even have our own version of August Sander à la Humans of New York.

However, these facile comparisons belie the crackling difference between these two cultures. Empathy was absent in the New Objectivity of Weimar Germany, as the name of the movement suggests. These artists drove a grounded, painfully sober view of everyday life into their works. They depicted grave subjects and an unpredictable outside world, either bereft of humans or occupied by distorted bodies with exaggerated features, as if viewed through the used gauze of WWI casualties.

The sentimentality and happy endings we expect from our popular culture could never have existed in Weimar-era Germany. Otto Dix and other German painters do not give their viewers a chance to identify with the subject’s struggle through the blurred boundaries of gender identity, for instance. Rather, these artists typify homosexuality or androgyny, as Dix did in Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). Senselessness distinguishes the violence in Germany’s “sex murders” with no intimations of justice. August Sander categorized his subjects in a chilly, scientific view from above, instead of sentimentalizing them in the way that Humans of New York does. The disenchantment that these artists hold with the experiential world testifies to the suffering that occurred from the decade prior.

In walking through the show, I often returned to Sander’s 1926 photograph Painter’s Wife (Helene Abelen). Abelen stands in androgyny with a loose-fitting, buttoned-down shirt, a slim tie, harem pants, a sleek Eton crop slicked back behind the ears, and predacious eyes focused on the viewer. The outfit obscures the bodily form underneath, denying the viewer any neat categorization of gender or sexuality. Abelen’s eyes lean forward and down at the viewer, with teeth clenching a hand-rolled cigarette, giving her face the ferocity of a panther. The pigeonhole title identifies her not as a person, but as the charge of someone else: a “painter’s wife.” Nonetheless, the viewer witnesses the diversity of elements that defy easy categorization to instead present a figure who radiates dynamism and dominance.

New Objectivity provides a haunting portrait of Germany, depicting a tense unease in the lull between world wars. Millions of German men were dead, millions more injured, and even more suffered horrible physical and psychic pain. As a result, the gender identity of German men was in shreds, and the firm boundaries that culture self-assuredly erected around identity were slouching toward complexity. Abelen’s posture encourages this anxiety as her hands hold a match head against the box’s striker, moments before the flame ignites.

New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–33, is on view at LACMA in Los Angeles until January 18, 2016.