The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination since 1500

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Programme

Tuesday, 1 October, St John's College

Wednesday, 2 October, Sidney Sussex College

Thursday, 3 October, St John's College

Abstracts (in alphabetical order)

Achilles, Manuela (University of Michigan), Reforming the Reich: Political Violence and Republican Identifications in Weimar Germany
It is a historiographical commonplace that the Weimar Republic lacked the symbolic appeal to bind collective sentiment and win widespread popular support. While it is true that the republican state broke with the imperial practice of deploying regal splendour and military glory, it still needed to project a public image. This paper explores the public commemorations of Walther Rathenau’s death as one such moment of democratic invention. The democratic foreign minister of the republican government was shot by nationalist fanatics, whose motives were clearly anti-republican. Yet despite the subversive purpose, or rather, because of it, the murder held great symbolic potential for the republican movement. I show that in effect, the violent act became a symbolic coup against socially respected and respectable anti-republicans, for it marked a historic moment at which a democratic discourse was able to congeal and emerge as a force against certain nationalist truisms about the German nation (such as the ‘Dolchstoss’ and ‘Versailles-Staat’).

Arnold-de Siminé, Silke (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge), Themepark GDR? The Aestheticisation of Memory in post-Wende Museums and Literature
German Unification has put the post war period into a historical perspective. A rupture like this provokes questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and explanation of the past. In the context of the ‘deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit’ during 1990 the discussion was not only about the adequate aesthetical representation of the past, but even more so about the role of literature itself in that process. Literature was confronted with the demand to participate in establishing cultural memory. The media of the day were on the lookout for a literary work which would give voice to the impact of the historical events and transform it into an acknowledged aesthetic form, the so-called ‘Wenderoman’. On the basis of a set of literary texts of the nineties, which took on the challenge, the paper shall examine the competition they found themselves in with visual media like film, but also with an institution like the museum, which combines object, image and text. The aim is to look at the dynamics of memory organisation with regard to the history of the GDR and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourses.

Assmann, Aleida (University of Konstanz), Four Forms of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past
Memories are acquired not only via personal experience and interaction with other individuals, but also through media and learning, as well as through identification with groups and participation in their rites. The paper will present different forms of memory that are individually, socially, politically and culturally constructed. Its purpose is to attempt a more integrated perspective on these different forms of memory that have become separated academically as objects of different disciplines. The borderlines between the various forms of memory are often fuzzy, overlapping and interacting within the individual. My criteria for distinguishing them will be: extension in space, temporal range, social scope, and volatility or stability. The more theoretical observations of the paper will be framed by texts of Günter Grass, especially his the last novel that can be read as an allegory on the problems of memory in general and German memory in particular.

Barkhoff, Jürgen (Trinity College, Dublin), Envy of the Gods. The Dream of Creating Artificial Humans around 1800
Today’s increasing blurring of the borders between the natural and the artificial, the real and the virtual, man and machine, is being interpreted as one symptom of the dissolution of the modern unified self. But already at the beginning of modernity 200 years ago, the phantasised and attempted creation of artificial humans revealed the highest hopes and most daring phantasies of the modern epoch, but also exposed its deepest fears and wildest nightmares. I want to approach androids around 1800 from three angles: the first is practical and technological, the second is theoretical and philosophical, the third is literary and phantasmatic. The first part of my paper will briefly look at the mechanical automata of the late eighteenth century (Vaucason, Droz, van Kempelen) and at the philosophical discourse behind them (Descartes, LaMettrie). The analysis of some literary examples in the second part will then discuss envy of God’s omnipotence and the attempt by man as a second maker to copy and surpass his creation as driving forces behind the modern dream of creating androids. My paper will look at four texts which illustrate and reflect this obsession: Goethe’s Prometheus hymn, the laboratory scene in Faust II, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Sandmann and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Benes, Tuska (Indiana State University / University of Pennsylvania), Linguistic History and Memories of National Origin, 1806-15
This paper examines the cultural constitution of memory in the philological discourse on the German language and its history during the political disruption and radical social change of the Napoleonic period. The French occupation and Wars of Liberation (1806-15) are generally considered to mark the birth period of the German national movement. To counter the artificiality of their newly imagined community, early nineteenth-century German nationalists stressed the ‘subjective antiquity’ of the nation and searched for stability in founding myths of origin. As the reputed source of cultural cohesion, the German language was revered as a site of cultural memory. Theories of national origin were likewise based on philological interpretations of the genealogy of modern German. I question in this paper why language emerged as a dominant metaphor for representing cultural memory in early nineteenth-century Germany. The division of Central Europe into multi-ethnic states discouraged a ready political or territorial vision of German unity; the German nation was conceived primarily as a cultural entity existing independently of the state in the collective consciousness of German speakers. The ‘expressive theory of language’ developed by J.G. Herder and adopted by comparative-historical philologists also helped link speech and the written word to the formation of human communities and to the constitution of cultural identity. At the same time, the paper documents how accepted cultural memories of German speakers’ primordial ties to ancient Greece, exemplified in the work of Prussian statesmen and philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, were challenged by new theories of national origin in the Napoleonic period. Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 discovery of the German language’s more proximate ties to Sanskrit convinced nationally-minded scholars such as the poet-philologist Friedrich Rückert that their ancestors had descended directly from ancient Indians. Jacob Grimm saw in Gothic and the Scandinavian tongues evidence of a more immediate Nordic Urheimat. I argue that with the rise of modern nationalism the humanist affinity classicists felt for an idealized Greek aesthetic was increasingly threatened by Orientalists and Germanists who gave greater cultural authority to perceived lines of ethnic descent from ‘barbarian’ antiquity.

Benzi, Laura (University of Pisa), Die Entstehung der Lyrik in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und die spätaufklärerische Affektenlehre
In der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts wurde im deutschsprachigen Raum Emotionen und Gefühlen eine vollkommen neue Bedeutung zugewiesen. Auf literarischer Ebene wurde ‘das Lyrische’, das in Gottscheds Critischer Dichtkunst und in den Poetiken vor 1750 noch fehlt, zum Synonym des emotional Bedeutenden. Die Lyrik schien das Medium für dessen genuinen Ausdruck selbst zu sein. Lyrik wurde zum Inbegriff des Poetischen. Im Mittelpunkt unserer Untersuchung stehen die poetologischen und poetischen Legitimierungsstrategien für die Rangerhöhung des Lyrischen. Wie wurde das Lyrische beglaubigt? Welche Emotionen und Leidenschaften kamen für die neue Darstellung in Frage? Und welche neue Rhetorik diente als Basis, zwischen Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten zur frühaufklärerischen Tradition zu vermitteln? Argumentiert wird hier auf der Grundlage einiger Ansätze der performativen Sprechakttheorie – nach welcher Sprache nicht zunächst Bezeichnung, sondern Bewirkung von Tatsachen ist –, ideengeschichtlicher bzw. kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansätze und einer genaueren Kenntnis der spätaufklärerischen ‘Affektenlehre’, vor allem anhand der musiktheoretischen Reflexion jener Zeit, die sich selbst der Darstellung neuer Emotionen und Gefühle gerade aufschloss.

Boettcher, Susan (University of Texas, Austin), 1521 in 1546: Luther’s Death and the Creation of Lutheran History
Luther’s death unleashed creative possibilities for authors attempting to make historical sense of the still-developing Lutheran movement. Sermons and reports of Luther’s death as well as the first Lutheran historical narratives of the Reformation show that after 1546, Lutheran authors remake 1521 (the year of Luther's appearance at Worms) according to a number of strikingly different traditions and are influenced both by late medieval models of piety, witness and sainthood and by emerging evangelical conceptions of theology and piety under pressure from political battles at court, in universities and in the Reformation public sphere. The emerging Luther figure neither embodies fully the qualities of the late medieval saint nor presents a new model for evangelical saints: the figure occupies a tipping point, and arguably, this position explains its popularity: it occupies the terrain constituted by cultural changes and the mnemonic site it constitutes is fragile but flexible, in development across the sixteenth century. The very rupture this post-1546 narrated Luther tries to address in religious culture is characterized by continuities with the past that both mark the seriousness and relativize the consequences of that rupture in the attempt to make Lutheran history intelligible.

Busch, Stefan (Lincoln College, Oxford), ‘Wenn Sie an Tugend und Vorsicht glauben!’ – Ideals and Life in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon, and Moritz’s Anton Reiser
In his Versuch über den Roman (1774), Friedrich von Blanckenburg famously decreed that authors should depict ‘die möglichen Menschen der wirklichen Welt’. At the same time, however, he combined his demand for realism with the postulate that novels should go beyond superficial events and show the underlying ‘Weisheit des Schöpfers’. Many canonical texts of this period are proof, almost always against the authors’ intentions, of the irreconcilability of an optimistic philosophy and the empirical world. This tension brought many a text to the brink of structural collapse. Minna von Barnhelm was the first such case in point. Here, a deus-ex-machina had to save the day and, more profoundly, the belief in providence. In the introduction to the final edition (1794) of Geschichte des Agathon, Wieland claimed to have at least done his utmost (‘wenigstens sein möglichstes getan’) to combine a hitherto unsurpassed sense of realism with the hero’s virtuousness, and thus openly confessed his failure. Moritz’s autobiographical novel Anton Reiser disintegrates similarly into description on the one hand and normative intentions on the other. The paper will conclude by showing how the failure to combine realism and optimism led to melancholy and/or satire (as in Nachtwachen des Bonaventura).

Cleve, Ingeborg (University of Saarbrücken / Stiftung Weimarer Klassik), Von der Subversivität beherrschten Erbens: ‘Weimarer Klassik’ in der DDR
From the days of approaching defeat and occupation at the end of the Second World War, the leaders and intellectuals of the German Communist Party and later the Socialist Unity Party claimed the established lieu de mémoire of the ‘Weimarer Klassik’ as a heritage for the impending new state and as a foundation of social consensus. They attempted to base a set of values on it that served to justify their politics of national separation and of economic transformation in the Soviet occupied zone and to mobilize a larger public in favour of the party politics subsumed under the Faustian proclamation ‘ein freies Volk auf freiem Grund’. The paper will take into account the historical background of this policy of imposed memory and discuss some of the contradictions arising from the attempts to implement it in various settings and under different circumstances. It is based on archival research on the Goethe- and Schiller-celebrations in the years from 1949 to1959, on the ‘Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten Weimar’ and on the ‘Goethe-Gesellschaft’.

Duttlinger, Carolin (St John’s College, Cambridge), ‘Die Ruhe des Blickes’: Kafka, Media Culture, and the ‘Kaiserpanorama’
The effects of early twentieth-century media culture on the modern subject figure is a recurring theme in Franz Kafka’s writings. The viewer in Kafka’s diaries is confronted with a wide and heterogeneous field of media techniques such as photography, film and advertising. His response to the encountered images ranges from detailed scrutiny to self-oblivious absorption but always results in a feeling of mental and perceptual determination by urban spectacles. In my paper, I contrast Kafka’s account of urban media culture with his reflections on a somewhat different and widely neglected visual medium which he describes in his travel diaries. On a trip to Friedland in 1911, Kafka visited the Kaiserpanorama, a nineteenth-century mechanical viewing apparatus – not to be confused with the painted panorama – devised for the public display of stereoscopic photographs. In his account, Kafka compares the display mechanism of the then already outdated panorama favourably with new media techniques, in particular film, whose fast succession of images contrasts with the display of individual photographs in the panorama – a mode of display which, according to Kafka, enables the viewer to employ a ‘Ruhe des Blickes’ which is made impossible by the cinematic medium. As I intend to argue, the Kaiserpanorama thus figures in Kafka’s autobiographical writings as a counter-model or point of resistance to urban visual culture and the conditioning effect of its steadily increasing flood of images and spectacles on the viewer. At the same time, however, Kafka’s account fails to recognise that the subject’s supposedly contemplative observation of the panorama photographs is in fact determined by a mechanical display mechanism by which the viewer’s perceptual attention is channelled, divided and sustained. Despite its anachronistic and obsolete character, the Kaiserpanorama is thus less a counter-model to, than a predecessor and prototype of, the new technologies and apparatuses which effect the conditioning of the viewer in modern visual culture.

Engel, Manfred (University of Hagen), Deutschland/Hesperien: Kulturelle und nationale Identitätsstiftung in Hölderlins später Dichtung
In dem Vortrag geht es um eine Variante der vor allem aus dem 19. Jahrhundert bekannten Mitwirkung der Literatur am nation-building: Hölderlins Versuch, mythopoetisch eine Identität der abendländisch-christlichen (post-griechischen) Moderne zu stiften, in der wiederum Deutschland eine besonders prominente Stellung zukommt. Im Zentrum werden die Stromgedichte Hölderlins stehen.

Fuchs, Anne (University College, Dublin), ‘Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’: The Landscape of Memory in W.G. Sebald
W. G. Sebald’s work is uniquely concerned with the complex cross-stitching between memory and forgetting, trauma and narrative, trauma and the body. His writing is an example of what Marianne Hirsch has aptly called ‘postmemory’, i.e. the indirect and fragmentary memory of the second and third generation whose main connection to the object is via creative processes and imaginative investment. With its high degree of intertextuality and self-reflexivity, Sebald's writing is, however, also an expression of the fundamental paradigm shift from communicative to the culturally encoded memory of the Holocaust. The death of the generation that shares first-hand experience of the era has led to a process of ‘officialization’, that is the historicization and institutionalization of memory work through archives, museums, memorials or works of art. Undoubtedly, this transition towards a ‘pedagogy of remembering’ poses new challenges for a poetics of remembering which attempts to tap into those alternative modes of cultural transmission that communicate through the unsaid, the ‘sous-entendu’, innuendo and silence. It is against the background of current debates on cultural memory that I wish to explore the problematic of naming and witnessing which underpins Sebald's poetics. Combining a largely phenomenological analysis of the question of alterity with a psychoanalytic perspective on trauma, the paper examines how Sebald attempts to reconfigure an ethical relationship between self and other by focusing on those minutiae of historical experience that are normally at the periphery of our perception. The protagonist of Austerlitz, for example, develops the notion of ‘Schmerzensspuren, die sich […] in unzähligen feinen Linien durch die Geschichte ziehen’. These highly affective, even traumatic traces mark, as I wish to show, both the protagonists’ mental maps as well as the physical environment, in particular buildings and landscapes. Sebald, like Levinas, understands the trace as a ‘summoning of myself by the other’, as a non-utilitarian responsibility towards that other. By tracing these ‘Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’, the narrator and protagonist embark on a labyrinthine journey that maps out a topography of absence and reflects the indexicality of historical experience. Like Benjamin before him, Sebald advocates a poetics of remembering that disrupts the continuity of historical tradition.

Gaier, Ulrich (University of Konstanz), National Myths in Anthropological Perspective: The Example of ‘Suevia‘
The postulate of a New Mythology voiced towards the end of the eighteenth century by Hamann, Herder, Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel is an evident rupture with the tradition of the Enlightenment. It can be shown, however, to have originated with Christian Wolff, the central figure of German Enlightenment, and to fulfill basic anthropological needs which developed along with the emancipation of the individual. The need for communal identity, for instance, can be demonstrated to be one of the main motives for a wave of Swabian patriotism in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Goodbody, Axel (University of Bath), Imaging Nature: Constructions of Nature and Naturalness in Twentieth-Century German Literature
Representations of nature in German literature have attracted growing attention since the environmental movement. However, their role in the process of cultural change has remained largely unexplored. This paper asks what part imaginative writing has played in constructing ‘nature’, i.e. in reflecting and reinforcing hegemonic conceptions of nature and naturalness on the one hand, and on the other in directing popular perceptions of them by envisioning alternatives. The cultural historian Hartmut Böhme distinguishes between four phases in the historical development of conceptions of nature in the western world: nature has been understood as hermeneutic, technological, ecological and cultural project in turn. The usefulness of these paradigms as a broad framework for the classification of a selection of works of twentieth-century literature will be examined. Finally, the appropriateness of the critical responses to contemporary conceptions of nature formulated in the imagery and narratives of recent works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Horst Stern and Günter Seuren will be evaluated in the light of Böhme’s conception of nature as a ’cultural project’.

Horstkotte, Silke (University of Leipzig), Visible Gaps. Photography Inserted into Narrative in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
During the course of the twentieth century, photographic, cinematic, and televisual images have played an increasingly important role in the construction and documentation of historic events. The advent of mass media has led to a proliferation of images in non-imaginative communication. But images also play a central part in how imaginative discourses conceptualize history. W.J.T. Mitchell has coined the term ‘pictorial turn’ for this increasing ‘imageness’ in contemporary communication. I shall explore how literary texts respond to this paradigm shift, and how the increasing presence of images alters the meaning production of literary texts, through a theoretically influenced reading of W.G. Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz.

Huber, Marc Oliver (Free University, Berlin), Memoria in Zeiten des Zeitenbruchs. Zur Strukturkrise des kulturellen Gedächtnisses
Der aktive Bereich eines kollektiven bzw. kulturellen Gedächtnisses zeichnet sich durch begrenzte Aufnahmefähigkeit, damit notwendigerweise einhergehende Selektionskriterien und eine daraus resultierende Strukturiertheit aus (Maurice Halbwachs, Aleida Assmann). Wie einzelne Wörter erst im Strukturzusammenhang eines Satzes bedeutungstragend werden, so wirken auch einzelne ‘Erinnerungsfiguren’ (Jan Assmann) erst innerhalb einer übergreifenden Erinnerungskonfiguration orientierungs- und identitätsstiftend. Zur historischen Konkretisierung eines solchen theoretischen Modells ist es erforderlich, den Wandel der Auswahlkriterien und Gedächtnisstrukturen (die nicht zuletzt Strukturen der Amnesie sind) zu verfolgen. Zwar hat die bisherige Forschung diesen Wandel im Zusammenhang mit Veränderungen auf dem Gebiet der eingesetzten Gedächtnismedien thematisiert, dagegen aber ein zentrales Selektions- und Strukturierungsmoment, das bereits Halbwachs benannt hat, vernachlässigt: Zeitmodelle, die eine Zuordnung einzelner Erinnerungsfiguren aufeinander und auf die Gegenwart ermüglichen, indem sie Verknüpfungsmuster vorgeben. Die im gesellschaftlichen Bewußtsein zentralen Zeitvorstellungen bestimmen, ob eine Erinnerungskonfiguration etwa im Zeichen der Fortdauer, des Verfalls, der Erneuerung, der Wiederholung oder des Fortschritts steht. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden fundamentale Strukturkrisen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses konzeptualisierbar. Je radikaler sich nämlich in einer Gesellschaft ein Sensorium für zeitliche Diskontinuitäten sowie die Innovations-, Überbietungs- und Verschleißdynamiken der Moderne ausprägt, desto fragiler wird ihr Bezug zur Tradition. Definiert sich das in die Erinnerung involvierte Zeitbewu?tsein vor allem als eine permanente Abstoßungsbewegung einer Gegenwart von der Vergangenheit, dann reißen nicht nur die Fäden, die die jeweilige Gegenwart mit der Gesamtheit des Vorangegangenen verbinden, sondern auch die Verbindungsfäden zwischen den einzelnen Erinnerungsfiguren. Ein diskontinuierlicher Zeitrahmen kann somit keine datenfilternden und strukturierenden Funktionen erfüllen. Das Gedächtnis wird zu einem Feld, das modernen Überflutungs- und Verwüstungsphantasien ausgesetzt ist. Dies provoziert gegenläufige Tendenzen zu einer Äternisierung von Erinnerung (Rückgang zum Mythos, Monumentalisierung von Tradition). Die hier angedeuteten Überlegungen sollen entlang von Nietzsches zweiter Unzeitgemäßer Betrachtung unter Berücksichtigung der neueren theoretischen Forschung zum Thema (Nora, Aleida und Jan Assmann, Matsuda, Terdiman) expliziert werden.

Humble, Malcolm (St Andrews University), Monism and Literature in the Later Years of the ‘Kaiserreich’
The association of monism with Social Darwinism as fostered by Ernst Haeckel and the contribution of a vulgarised Social Darwinism to Nazi policies can be said to have distorted our view of a creative writing produced under the influence of a monist world view. Historians now offer a more differentiated view than formerly of the debate on eugenics and Darwinism, especially as it emerged amongst social workers and feminists during the later years of the Second Reich; their conclusions, which link monism and a temperate Darwinism to social reform and Lebensreform, find confirmation and support in the ideas of members of the Friedrichshagen group (Wilhelm Bˆlsche and Bruno Wille), which along with some features of the work of Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal and Rilke have been examined recently in connection with a paradigm defined in terms of monism, psychophysical unity or godless mysticism. Here the competition and selection normally emphasised in interpretations of Darwin are reduced or replaced by a view of man’s place in nature which owes much to Goethe and the Romantics and gives priority to unity and harmony.

Lauster, Martina (University of Exeter), The Continuity of the ‘Gentleman Ideal‘ in German Literature from Lichtenberg to Hofmannsthal
The paper focuses on an aspect of the Western European orientation in German and Austrian intellectual history. It examines a complex ‘subversive’ thought pattern in the cultural imagination from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. While the concept of the English gentleman is, by definition, one denoting codes of a ruling elite, it acquires a distinctly oppositional role when adopted by German/Austrian writers. What they perceive as gentlemanly qualities is, above all, the harmony between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, a combination of the intellectual and the political, the private and the public sphere in one’s personal biography; as well as communicative virtues such as wit and lucidity. By commending and appropriating these qualities, Germans and Austrians act out their opposition to ruling conditions at home – those of a divided, backward nation which has failed to produce modes of behaviour and discourse appropriate to a modern political civilisation. The gentleman ideal as a subversive concept in this sense attacks what Heinrich Mann famously termed the division between Geist and Tat and runs throughout the long nineteenth century, an era when German/Austrian intellectuals were, by and large, excluded from political power. However, the fact that the ideal was first upheld by progressive minds such as Lichtenberg, Jochmann and Gutzkow and then by conservative ones such as Borchardt and Hofmannsthal could be an indication, not of its consistency, but of its ‘fragility’. The liberal gentleman ideal failed to become dominant. During the Weimar Republic at the latest, the oppositional aristocratism of the gentleman (with the notable exception of Harry Graf Kessler) meant an anti-republican or overtly proto-fascist stance.

Leeder, Karen (New College, Oxford), ‘rhytmische historia’: Contemporary Poems of the First World War by Thomas Kling and Raoul Schrott
This paper examines two extraordinary cycles of poems about the First World War published in 1998/9: Der erste Weltkrieg in Fernhandel by Thomas Kling (b.1957), and Gebirgsfront 1916-18 from Tropen by Raoul Schrott (b.1964). It is, in itself, fascinating that two leading contemporary poets should almost simultaneously produce such distinguished works on very closely related subjects. However, both also explore the dialectical relationship between historical fact and cultural memory, and question modes and means of historical representation and transmission. The difference between them is linguistic. While Schrott performs a linguistic archaeology of sorts, Kling’s text is a semantic explosion of slang, rhythmical association and snippets of different discourses. The paper compares these poems, against the backdrop of their cultural reference points, and of the poets’ own historical essays, to examine the ways in which a key moment of history is being re-invented for a new age.

Midgley, David (St John’s College, Cambridge), Technology as a Marker of Cultural Change
Technological development may be expected to impact directly on the economic and social organisation of a community. But the significance of references to technology as expressions of the cultural awareness of a community are less straightforward to interpret. They may imply anticipation of imagined future benefits or anxiety at potential dangers, and they may present themselves in anachronistic forms, using the imagery of old technology to evoke a sense of how society is developing in the present. In Germany in the 1920s, for example, there is an apparently abrupt change of attitude to technology among the intellectual elite, accompanied by an underlying continuity in the popular literature. With a focus on literary representations of technology in the early 20th century, and in particular on the impact of aviation, this paper will explore the distinctions that need to be borne in mind when interpreting such imagery, in relation to its historically changing context.

Niven, William (Nottingham Trent University), Martin Walser’s ‘Tod eines Kritikers’ and its Reception in Germany
The paper will examine the reception in Germany - both prior and subsequent to publication - of Martin Walser’s Tod eines Kritikers (2002). It will argue that Walser’s text represents the most polemical and extreme form of a complex and ambivalent literary preoccupation with German victimhood since 1990, a preoccupation that must be understood within the context of the post-unification renegotiation of national identity and the role of perspectives on National Socialism in determining the parameters of this identity. The debate surrounding the text, while in many ways characterized by something of a ‘family feud’ (Walser - Reich-Ranicki - Unseld - Jens), also reflects a paradigm shift in the self-understanding of one of the main proponents of aesthetically oriented literary criticism; Frank Schirrmacher’s opposition in 1990 to ‘Gesinnungsliteratur’ and his insistence on a depoliticized literature has given way in 2002 to ‘Gesinnungskritik’ (Ulrich Raulff), which even appears to censure works prior to publication. The paper will explore the motives for this shift, which lie partly in the decreasing cultural hegemony of the FAZ. Finally, the paper will explore Habermas’s contention that Walser’s text and Jürgen Möllemann’s recent comments on Michel Friedman, and particularly the remarks of those who defend Walser and Möllemann, reflect a worrying trend in contemporary Germany whereby it is claimed there is a need to be ‘liberated’ from excessive political correctness.

Rau, Susanne (University of Dresden), Reformation and History: The Construction of (Dis)continuities in the Historiography of the Reformation in the Early Modern Period
The reformation has often been read as a radical change in the history of the German territories, especially by the – protestantly dominated – historiography of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Luther as the one who resisted the Pope has often been a figure of integration in certain epochs of German history. Recent studies in the history of the confessionalization proceed on the assumption that different confessional cultures developed from the moment the Reformation started to be institutionalized in the 1550s. The analysis of the process of confessionalization has rarely referred to the historiography of that time, which includes ecclesiastical and imperial chronicles as well as local chronicles of reformational incidents. These chroniclers saw their historiography as a medium of social memory conserving and transmitting the ‘memorable’ events of then and now. Sociologically, the function of historiography can be seen as the stabilization of a society and the legitimation of a social movement through conceptions of time and history presented as change and continuity, or at least as a ‘logical’ historical development. This paper argues from the contemporaries’ point of view and asks how ‘the reformation’ – as it was called only by the second or even third generation of the reformers – was historiographically constructed. It distinguishes between the different confessions, and also between apologetical or polemical styles, showing how the historiographers who wrote the history of their own confession were more concerned with the stabilizing ‘fiction‘ of continuity than with any assertion of change. The further development of the histories of the Reformation until at least the eighteenth century can be interpreted as a further continuation of the social institution of the Reformation often challenged during the epoch of religious conflict.

Ribhegge, Wilhelm (University of Münster), German or European Identity? Luther and Erasmus in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German Cultural History and Historiography
Von Johannes Sleidans De Statu religionis et rei publicae Carolo Quinto Caesare commentariorum libri XXV (1555-1558) bis zu William Robertsons History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) wurden Luther und die Reformation als Teil der europäischen Geschichte beschrieben. Das änderte sich mit dem Erscheinen von Rankes Reformationsgeschichte. Sie begründete einen ‘Sonderweg’ der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung, der über hundert Jahre land die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland maßgeblich beeinflußte. Luther und der deutschen Reformation wurden eine zentrale Rolle bei der historischen Selbstfindung der Nation zu geschrieben. Damit änderte sich auch die Bewertung der jeweiligen historischen Rolle von Luther und Erasmus. Aus den gleichen Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts, die den erfolgreichen Luther des 16. Jahrhunderts heute in einem eher zweifelhaften Licht erscheinen lassen, gewinnt der historisch gescheiterte Erasmus zunehmend an Attraktivität. Es ist vor allem der Europäer Erasmus, der Luther nun wirklich nicht war, der heute so anziehend wirkt. Vor allem in den angelsächsischen akademischen Welt ist Erasmus so etwas wie ein Schutzpatron der westlichen Kultur und Zivilisation geworden, während deutsches Geisteswissenschaftler – darin treue Nachfahren von Ranke und Lortz – Erasmus noch immer sehr distanziert gegenüberstehen.

Riou, Jeanne (University College, Dublin), Joseph Roths Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck: Technik und Erfahrung im Berlin der 20er Jahre
‘Ich bekenne mich zum Gleisdreieck‘, schreibt der Journalist und Schriftsteller Joseph Roth in einem 1924 erschienenen Feuilleton-Artikel über den Berliner Kreuzungsbahnhof, Gleisdreieck. Roth betrachtet diesen Bahnhof als ‘Sinnbild und ein Anfangs-Brennpunkt eines Lebenskreises und phantastisches Produkt einer Zukunft verhei?enden Gewalt.‘ Zu untersuchen wäre diese Symbolik im Hinblick auf ihr Technikverständnis, sowie auch im Zusammenhang der Ästhetik-Diskussionen der 20er Jahre. In meinem Vortrag möchte ich neben Roths Feuilleton-Artikel weitere journalistische und literarische Stellungnahmen zu diesem 1912 umgebauten Berliner Verkehrsknotenpunkt heranziehen und einen Einblick in die damaligen Diskussionen gewähren. Im Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck sind die Reflexionen über Technik und Architektur assoziativ und nicht wirklichkeitstreu im Sinne eines deskriptiven Journalismus: Indem sie jedoch nahelegen, dass das subjektive Wahrnehmungsmoment zwangsläufig in Relation zur materiellen Wirklichkeit entsteht, sind Reflexionen, wie wir sie hier vorfinden, als Teile einer Phänomenologie des Großstadtlebens zu verstehen und sie verdienen als solche unsere Aufmerksamkeit in der Frage nach der Konstitution des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Ein zweiter Schwerpunkt meines Vortrags wäre die Frage nach der Verschränkung des Organischen und des Mechanischen in der Metaphorik des Gleisdreieck-Textes. Indem Roth einerseits das Eiserne, Stählerne, Maschinelle des Bahnhofs als Konstruktion aufgreift, knüpft er andererseits durch die Metapher des Gleisdreiecks als Herz, Knotenpunkt, Ader, an romantische Vorstellungen des Organischen und gleichzeitig Mechanischen an. Auf kongruente und dennoch brüchige Reflexionen des Verhältnisses Mensch-Maschine, Organismus-Mechanismus, die in romantischen Diskursen sowie auch in Diskursen der Moderne zu beobachten sind, soll in diesem Beitrag eingegangen werden.

Robertson, Ritchie (St John’s College, Oxford), Cultural Memory in Austria: The Josephinist Legacy down to Grillparzer’s König Ottokars Glück und Ende
The enlightened despotism of Joseph II (sole reign, 1780-90) tends to be written out of constructions of Austrian cultural history. Roger Bauer (La Royaume de Dieu, 1965) maintains that this enlightened interlude made no significant difference to Austria’s Baroque heritage, and Carl Schorske (Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 1980) argues that a Baroque ‘culture of grace’ remained the model for the Viennese bourgeoisie down to the First World War. As part of a larger research project, I mean to argue that Joseph’s deeply flawed benevolent despotism was not only a transitory attempt at enlightenment from above but also had wide support among the civil service and intelligentsia. As a focus for this argument, I will examine Grillparzer’s sympathy with Josephinism and analyse his play König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825), not as a glorification of the Habsburgs in the person of Rudolf II, but as a critical examination of enlightened despotism in the person of Ottokar.

Ruehl, Martin (Queen’s College, Cambridge), The Making of Modernity: Renaissance Italy and the German Historical Imagination, 1870-1940
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the German Bildungsbürgertum became obsessed with the Renaissance. Renaissance novels, dramas and histories celebrating the individualist, secular ethos of fifteenth-century Italy absorbed the imagination of a steadily growing reading public. At a time of accelerated social and political change - industrialization, the birth of the Second Reich - the Renaissance served as an imagined realm in which German scholars as well as litt?rateurs could debate questions of morality, political power, national identity and religion. My paper locates these debates within their specific historical contexts. In particular, it seeks to explain how and why the Italian Renaissance emerged as a secular ‘counter-ideal’ to the Catholic Middle Ages. My basic argument is that the Bildungsbürger ‘invented’ the Renaissance as a ‘model of modernity’ (J. Burckhardt), one which would provide a genealogy and legitimisation of their own role in a rapidly modernizing Germany. Against the corporate, feudal structures and the Christian spirit of the Middle Ages, they invoked the Italian Quattrocento as an energetically meritocratic world of atomised individuals competing without regard for the traditional restraints of religion and rank: a dress rehearsal, so to speak, for the civil society then emerging in Central Europe. As the corollaries of modernization - most notably, the rise of the Fourth Estate - seemed more threatening, the cultural elite came to think more critically about the emancipatory legacy of the Renaissance. At the turn of the century, decadent playwrights and poets like Stefan George exalted the Dionysian vitality and Machiavellian sceleratezza of the Renaissance princes over the ‘thickly cushioned humanitarianism’ (Nietzsche) of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie. By the 1930s, the Renaissance had been stripped of its progressivist, humanist dimension and functioned largely as a historical reference-point for the critique of liberal ideology. Ironically, thus, what had originally been a significant challenge to the anti-modern, nationalist rhetoric of Romantic and neo-Romantic conservatives ultimately fed into the kulturkritisch discourse of the New Right.

Schmidt, Ricarda (University of Manchester), Raphaels Schüler und Meister Salvator Rosa in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Malererzählungen. Tradierung und Modernisierung eines frühromantischen Kunstdiskurses
Sowohl in Die Jesuiterkirche in G. (1816) als auch in Signor Formica (1819) werden die Protagonisten in ihren malerischen Zielen in die Nachfolge Raphaels gestellt, und zwar so, dass damit die frühromantische Ästhetik von Wackenroders Raphael-Erzählungen tradiert wird. Andererseits jedoch wird Salvator Rosas Werk als überragende Meisterleistung eingeführt. Der an Raphaels Werk mit den Adjektiven ‘göttlich’, ‘himmlisch’ und ‘einfach’ umrissenen frühromantischen Poetologie wird eine an Salvator Rosas Werk ausgebildete Poetologie an die Seite gestellt, die in den Augen der meisten durch Adjektive wie ‘abenteuerlich’, ‘trotzig’, ‘bizarr’, ‘düster’, ‘grauenvoll’, ‘öde’, ‘wild’, ‘fremd’ bezeichnet wird. Dies sind Charakteristika, die gemeinhin auch Hoffmanns literarischem Werk zugesprochen werden, und die Salvator Rosa in seiner Funktion als Projektionsfigur für Hoffmanns Selbstverständnis kenntlich machen. Neben einer Analyse der in Signor Formica evozierten Kunstwerke und Kunstdiskurse zu Raphael und Rosa wird mein Vortrag untersuchen, in welcher Form die Erzählung diese kulturellen Diskurse tradiert und inwieweit der intermedial inspirierte literarische Text sich sowohl in Kontinuität als auch in Diskontinuität zur Frühromantik lesen lässt.

Schneider, Lothar (University of Giessen), Liberalismus, Positivismus, Anglophilie: Über ein Projekt bürgerlicher Kultur in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts
In seinem ersten Brief an den österreichischen Philologen und Philosophen Theodor Gomperz grenzte sich John Stuart Mill 1854 vehement von der kontinentalen idealistischen Philosophie ab: ‘I consider that school of philosophy as the greatest hindrance to the regeneration so urgently required, of man and society.’ Die Polemik Mills wurde in den deutschsprachigen Ländern vielfach gerade dort geteilt, wo man sich materialistischer Philosophie und sozialistischer Politikauffassung verweigerte und am Primat der intellektuellen Existenz des Menschen festhalten wollte. Mein Beitrag skizziert den letztlich politisch gescheiterten, kulturell und kulturwissenschaftlich jedoch durchaus nicht folgenlosen Versuch liberaler bürgerlicher Identitäsfindung, der im Positivismus englischer Provenienz sein Modell und einen Dialogpartner hatte. Obwohl dieses liberale Netzwerk im Zuge der kleindeutschen Reichseinigung politisch sukzessive an Bedeutung verlor und sie schließlich im Wilhelminismus fast gänzlich einbüßte, hatten seine Wissenschaftsfreundlichkeit und Weltoffenheit – so die These – den Anschluß des deutschsprachigen Raumes an die modernen westlichen Kulturen und Industriegeselschaften wesentlich befördert.

Segeberg, Harro (University of Hamburg), Industrielle Kultur, das Kino und die Schriftsteller: Zur Mediengeschichte der Weimarer Republik
In dem Beitrag werde ich einige zeitgenössische Vorstellungen zur Kultur des Fordismus und des Amerikanismus vorstellen und danach das aus ihnen abgeleitete Konzept einer Materielles wie Immaterielles umfassenden universalen Industriellen Kultur entfalten. Darauf soll das Kino als das Leitmedium einer solchen neuen antitraditionalen Kulturauffassung vorgestellt werden, um dann abschlie?end auf die Neupositionierung der Literatur in dieser nicht länger hochkulturell, sondern popularkulturell ausgerichteten Medienlandschaft einzugehen. In seiner Zielsetzung wie in seiner Verfahrensweise ist der Beitrag insofern als kultur- und mediengeschichtlichlich zu bezeichnen.

Steuer, Daniel (University of Sussex), Laws of Conservation and the Metaphysical Imagination
In 1847, Helmholtz formulated the principle of the conservation of force which later turned into the principle of the conservation of energy (still considered to be one of the most fundamental pillars of physics). Even earlier, Büchner, in his novella Lenz, had already formulated a principle of the conservation of beauty throughout all of nature’s manifestations. The metaphysical images associated with these two conceptions may be considered as either opposed, or complementary; in any case, they exert a continuing influence on the imagination of writers and scientists alike. This paper will sketch the parameters and qualities of both models, and then go on to look at their presence in Musil’s psychological thought and his notion of essayism, and in Wittgenstein’s recently published notebooks from 1931/2 and 1936/7. Two things emerge: firstly the distinction between organicist and empiricist (atomistic) ontologies is less clear-cut than is sometimes assumed, and secondly, both principles are involved in the way the identity of the self is imagined by the two Austrians. Musil and Wittgenstein, both writers with a scientific training, through the form of their reflections thus put a question mark over the division between an organicist-romanticist (and politically regressive), and a positivist-reductivist (and politically progressive) intellectual tradition.

Steigerwald, Jörn (Ruhr-University, Bochum), Galanterie als kulturelle Identitätsbildung: Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im Zeichen der ‘Querelles‘ (Christian Thomasius – Benjamin Neukirch)
Die Galanterie kann als Paradebeispiel für die ‘brüchige Tradition‘ der deutschen Kulturgeschichte gelten, da sie sowohl als ein Scharnier zwischen den großen Epochen des Barock und der (Früh)Aufklärung steht als auch ein eigenständiges, an der zeitgenössischen ‘modernen‘, französischen Theoriebildung ausgerichtetes Fundament in Anspruch nimmt, das an die Stelle von Hegemonie den ‘Transfer‘ (Espagne / Werner) in den Mittelpunkt rückt. Der Fokus des Vortrags liegt dabei auf zwei zentralen Momenten der galanten Theorie und Praxis: 1. die Übernahme bzw. Transformation des ‘bel esprit‘ in den deutschen Kontext und 2. die veränderten Formen der dichterischen Produktion, hier vorgestellt am Beispiel der Lyrik. Dabei wird zu zeigen sein, daß der ‘bel esprit‘ einerseits nicht begrifflich gefaßt werden kann, da dies seinem eigenen Ideal zuwider läuft, andererseits er sich aber durch klare Distinktionen und eine Kultur der Selbstsorge auszeichnet, die es produktiv umzusetzen gilt. Desweiteren soll vorgestellt werden, daß die Ausrichtung an der französischen Theoriebildung zu einer undogmatischen, aber pragmatischen Evaluierung bzw. Nobilitierung des Deutschen als Dichtersprache führt. Diese kommt besonders in der dichterischen Praxis zum Ausdruck, wenn eine eigene, d. h. deutsche und galante Dichtkunst gefördert und produziert wird.

Stocker, Günther (University of Salzburg), Lesebilder und Mediengeschichte: Zur Selbstreflexion der Literatur am Beginn der modernen Lesekultur und an ihrem vermeintlichen Ende
Die Anfänge der modernen Lesekultur im deutschsprachigen Raum in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts wurden von einem ausführlichen und vielgestaltigen Diskurs über das Lesen begleitet. Ein großer Teil der Diskussion über die Hoffungen, Erwartungen und Ängste, die die Verbreitung des Lesens von fiktionaler Literatur im Bürgertum und in der intellektuellen Elite auslöste, fand im Medium des Romans selbst statt. Auch in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur macht sich seit einigen Jahren eine vermehrte Thematisierung des Lesens bemerkbar, die von Bestsellern wie Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser bis zu avantgardistischen Experimenten reicht. Diese sich intensivierende Diskussion lässt sich als Reaktion des literarischen Feldes auf die Verunsicherungen verstehen, die durch die Verbreitung der neuen Medien ausgelöst wurden. Anhand von ausgewählten Beispielen sollen die Lesedarstellungen in der Gegenwartsliteratur mit ihren historischen Vorläufern verglichen und innerhalb ihres jeweiligen mediengeschichtlichen Kontexts analysiert werden.

Ward, Simon (University of Aberdeen), The Ruins of Culture in Germany after 1945
This paper offers an examination of lines of continuity and change in the representation of the ruin in German culture after 1945 within the context of the tradition of the ruin in art, literature and philosophical thought, focussing on the considerations of the ruin by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin in the first half of the twentieth century as key interpreters of that cultural tradition within the context of modernity and modernization. This paper examines and elaborates on the suggestion made by W.G. Sebald in his lectures on Luftkrieg und Literatur that the representation of the ruins of war in German literature after 1945 was both sparse, and where it did take place, inappropriate. This paper shows how the representation of the ruin in the post-war era fluctuates between aestheticizations, reworkings of vanitas, and memories of different kinds of German traditions that now lie in ruins. Historical studies of monuments and ruins such as Koshar’s From Monuments to Traces (2000) have been almost exclusively concerned with the representation of, and the relationship to, a specifically German national past. This paper argues that cultural representations of ruins in the post-war era can fruitfully be read as indicative of a complex negotiation with a transnational, cosmopolitan sense of both modernity and modernism which was central to the work of Simmel and Benjamin. Placing the post-war writings of authors such as Wolfgang Koeppen, Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass within the discourse on ruins and reconstruction after 1945, this paper shows, first, how the tension between reconstruction and remembrance embodies ambivalent perspectives towards modernity and progress, and, second, how the ruin as the location of a cultural tradition becomes an imagined space which destabilizes assumptions about past, present and future.

Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen (Exeter College, Oxford), ‘Kunstkammer’ and ‘Cedern=Wald’: Knowledge, Memory and Text at the Dresden Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
The mid-sixteenth century was a time of intense interest in science and technology at German-speaking courts. This interest gave rise to alchemical laboratories and observatories, but also to collections of works of art and applied art, of tools and scientific instruments, of zoological and mineralogical specimens which were often organised spatially into a Kunstkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities. The same kinds of knowledge were collected in the form of texts, which had a different kind of organisation imposed on them in the Library. These collections were often given a further ‘virtual’ existence in that important early modern tool of princely administration, the manuscript inventory. These inventories set out the organisation of the collections but also, as texts, took on a reality of their own. Even more independent of the actual collections were the printed texts which described and extolled them for a wider audience but also imposed upon them another kind of organisation. Both the collections and the texts that codified them were part of the panoply of fame or ‘Ruhmeswerk’ of particular prince and could also serve as a monument to him after his death, as a tool of memoria. Knowledge codified into a system became a central element in the tradition of a particular dynasty.The collection continued to exist physically but the collection as an idea became part of the legitimising myth of the dynasty in question. This is exactly what we see happening in Dresden. The city first became a princely residence around 1550 under Moritz, the first Albertine Elector of Saxony. Both the dynasty and the city needed to establish themselves as centres of court culture. It was Moritz’s brother and successor August who founded a Kunstkammer in 1560 and a library at around the same time. August died in 1586 and his successors added to and changed his collections. His grandson, Johann Georg I, introduced a new element to the collections when he founded a Chamber of Anatomy in 1616, based on recent Italian insights into zoology and physiology. At the same time, August was becoming mythified as the founding father of the Albertines, his mastery of knowledge as displayed in his collections constituting a major element in the myth. We see this strategy fully established in the most important printed texts to describe the Dresden collections, Tobias Beutel’s Chur=Fürstlicher Sächsischer stets grünender hoher Cedern=Wald (1671) and Anton Weck’s Der Chur=Fürstlichen Sächsischen weitberuffenen Residentz= und Haupt=Vestung Dresden Beschreib: und Vorstellung (1680). Mastery of knowledge is presented here as a central element in the public image of the Albertine Electors of Saxony, uniting material culture, knowledge, memory and tradition in textual form.

Whaley, Joachim (Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge), The Right Kind of Memory? Recent German Attempts to Revive the Long-Term Past
Considerable attention has been devoted over the last twenty years to attempts by German historians to find an appropriate way of situating the holocaust in German history and an appropriate language for its description and analysis. There has been almost no commentary, by contrast, on the more recent controversies generated by suggestions that the Germans might once again draw inspiration from the medieval and early modern periods. Yet these controversies have been a striking feature of the on-going debate about the significance of the past in Germany over the last ten years. I propose to illuminate the following examples: Karl Heinz Bohrer’s views on the necessity of restoring some degree of ‘Fernerinnerung’ to the German mentality; the dispute over the degree of ‘Staatlichkeit’ achieved by the Holy Roman empire in the early period; the debate over the extent to which the Peace of Westphalia may be regarded as the first German constitution; and the controversy this year over the proposal to amalgamate Berlin and Brandenburg in a new Land ‘Preußen’. I shall discuss these issues with reference to parallels in the debates of historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the relevance and meaning for their own age of the medieval and early modern history of Germany.

Woodford, Charlotte (Selwyn College, Cambridge), ‘Mit Gott für König und Vaterland’: Contrasting Models of Patriotism in the Historical Novels of Theodor Fontane and Gustav Freytag
Theodor Fontane and Gustav Freytag are two of the most important figures in the development of prose fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both were convinced of the influence fiction could have on public opinion, and aware too of the important social and political function of history in the founding of the Second Empire. Freytag’s best-selling series of historical novels, Die Ahnen (1872-80), justified Unification by tracing German history back to the early Middle Ages. However, Fontane expressed grave concern about the novels’ nationalist, and racist content, which was echoed in other patriotic historical novels too. His first novel, Vor dem Sturm (1878), was intended as historical fiction of a very different kind, and questions the very role of history in society (see R. Humphrey, The Historical Novel as a Philosophy of History). However, it was rarely reprinted, and largely ignored by lending libraries, while Freytag’s novels, among with similar works such as Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom (1876), were great commercial successes. This paper examines the influence of popular political ideas on the commercial book market, and explores the role of historical fiction in the creation of national identity in the early years of the Second Empire.