Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708293
Jennifer Fay
In 1959 Theodor W. Adorno asked, “What does working through the past mean?” Post–World War II German society and much of Western Europe was in the full throttle of the economic miracle and bent on normalizing the present by suppressing the Nazi past and the Holocaust. Adorno’s diagnosis brings together an analysis of the unprecedented postwar prosperity, forms of evasive historical thinking, and the persistence of racialized violence. This essay turns to Adorno to grapple with catastrophe of another, historically continuous order: the crisis of climate change, the persistent racialization of environmental harm, and the question of the future on a warming planet as vividly described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2022 report. The late 1950s matters to the history of the Holocaust and its connections to the experience of prosperity in the postwar period. The European and US economic boom in the 1950s also marks the onset of the Great Acceleration and, by some accounts, the beginning of the Anthropocene and its claims on the future. Prompted by Adorno, this essay asks: What does working through this future mean? How does Adorno’s essay speak to us today?
1959年，西奥多·阿多诺(Theodor W. Adorno)问道:“回顾过去意味着什么?”二战后的德国社会和西欧大部分地区都在全力推动经济奇迹，并决心通过压制纳粹的过去和大屠杀来使现在正常化。阿多诺的诊断汇集了对战后空前繁荣的分析，回避历史思维的形式，以及种族化暴力的持续。这篇文章转向阿多诺，以应对另一场灾难，历史上连续的秩序:气候变化的危机，环境危害的持续种族化，以及政府间气候变化专门委员会在其2022年报告中生动描述的地球变暖的未来问题。1950年代后期对大屠杀的历史及其与战后繁荣经验的联系至关重要。20世纪50年代欧洲和美国的经济繁荣也标志着“大加速”的开始，一些人认为，这也是“人类世”及其对未来的主张的开始。在阿多诺的推动下，这篇文章提出了这样一个问题:穿越未来意味着什么?阿多诺的文章对今天的我们有何启示?
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708265
Fatima El-Tayeb
This article explores the structural dependence of humanities disciplines on a Eurocentric model of knowledge production that inevitably marginalizes racialized communities, scholars of color, and their intellectual productions. Using the increasing attacks on the interdisciplines in the United States as its starting point, the article shows that a defense of the humanities as “above politics” contributes to this delegitimization of marginalized knowledge. Turning to the European context, it suggests that a decolonizing of academe must include a reckoning with the Continent’s colonial past (and present), including the role of the Left, and involve a radically different approach to disciplinarity. Finally, the article offers the recent intersectional Black European studies initiative as an example of such a radically different model of academic knowledge production.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708405
Jessica Nitsche
One aspect of Walter Benjamin’s approach that can undoubtedly be described as visionary is the high value he accorded film among the arts. Today time-based, audiovisual media is viewed as an integral and extraordinarily important part of the art system, but when Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” was enthusiastically rediscovered in the 1960s, this was by no means the case. Video artists of the first generation had to fight for recognition, and Benjamin’s writings matched their goals. This essay gets to the basis of the connection between media art and the figure of Walter Benjamin, examining his art- and media-related reflections, subjecting them to a critical examination, and at the same time attempting to make them productive for our understanding of contemporary conditions.
{"title":"More Than an Old Love Affair: Media Art and Walter Benjamin","authors":"Jessica Nitsche","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708405","url":null,"abstract":"One aspect of Walter Benjamin’s approach that can undoubtedly be described as visionary is the high value he accorded film among the arts. Today time-based, audiovisual media is viewed as an integral and extraordinarily important part of the art system, but when Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” was enthusiastically rediscovered in the 1960s, this was by no means the case. Video artists of the first generation had to fight for recognition, and Benjamin’s writings matched their goals. This essay gets to the basis of the connection between media art and the figure of Walter Benjamin, examining his art- and media-related reflections, subjecting them to a critical examination, and at the same time attempting to make them productive for our understanding of contemporary conditions.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"45 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708335
Yuliya Komska
Frequently, to be an immigrant is to be submerged in one’s new physical and institutional settings, to be inside without feeling like an insider. The position is at odds with critique, which is traditionally predicated on distance. This article attempts to undo the contradiction between the two circumstances. From inside a unit that the preeminent postwar psychoanalyst and critic Alexander Mitscherlich helped plan for the developer Neue Heimat Städtebau in Emmertsgrund, outside Heidelberg in Germany’s southwest, it articulates a critique of his pedagogical foray into mass housing and urbanism. In the process, it stakes out a critical position for Germanists with immigrant backgrounds.
{"title":"A More Immanent Critique; or, Inside the House That Alexander Mitscherlich Built","authors":"Yuliya Komska","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708335","url":null,"abstract":"Frequently, to be an immigrant is to be submerged in one’s new physical and institutional settings, to be inside without feeling like an insider. The position is at odds with critique, which is traditionally predicated on distance. This article attempts to undo the contradiction between the two circumstances. From inside a unit that the preeminent postwar psychoanalyst and critic Alexander Mitscherlich helped plan for the developer Neue Heimat Städtebau in Emmertsgrund, outside Heidelberg in Germany’s southwest, it articulates a critique of his pedagogical foray into mass housing and urbanism. In the process, it stakes out a critical position for Germanists with immigrant backgrounds.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708419
Jessica Ruffin
This essay proposes an ethics for critical philosophies attuned to global white supremacy and its effects of violence, erasure, and precarity. The essay examines Arthur Schopenhauer as a potential forefigure for critical practices that aim to attend to the precarious survival of the global majority engulfed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Through Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and Sara Ahmed’s philosophies of race, the essay carries out an autotheoretical dissection—tracing Ruffin’s own myopic relation to the white supremacist moralities that continue to thrive in critical interdisciplinary German studies. As a way out of the aporia that white supremacy enacts, the essay proposes an orientation away from what is thought to be life and toward a critical aesthetics that attends to the unsurviving.
{"title":"Preface to a Philosophy by Which No One Can Live","authors":"Jessica Ruffin","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708419","url":null,"abstract":"This essay proposes an ethics for critical philosophies attuned to global white supremacy and its effects of violence, erasure, and precarity. The essay examines Arthur Schopenhauer as a potential forefigure for critical practices that aim to attend to the precarious survival of the global majority engulfed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Through Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and Sara Ahmed’s philosophies of race, the essay carries out an autotheoretical dissection—tracing Ruffin’s own myopic relation to the white supremacist moralities that continue to thrive in critical interdisciplinary German studies. As a way out of the aporia that white supremacy enacts, the essay proposes an orientation away from what is thought to be life and toward a critical aesthetics that attends to the unsurviving.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"40 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708391
Leila Mukhida
What if critique were understood as a form of Choose Your Own Adventure, the second-person young adult format in which readers are given the agency to decide what happens next in a story? To embark on critique as you would Choose Your Own Adventure is to be intentional in your orientations; it is to situate your framework, materials, and your self in relation to each other and to reflect on what this hermeneutic constellation produces and obscures. This article argues that transparency about critical positionality is a precondition for German studies to flourish and for epistemological abundance to endure. It asks what this might look like in practice, offering the reader three critical excursions through a single film, Angelina Maccarone’s Unveiled (2005).
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708433
Quinn Slobodian
This essay offers a capsule memoir of a part-time Germanist. It recounts the author’s experience of coming of age in the 1990s when it was salad days for All Things German in North America and the sheen of Weimar shone. This decade was followed by the years of the global war on terror and eventually the global financial crisis, when German studies seemed to lose the plot and many historians of German quietly exited the subfield. The essay concludes with a reflection on political geography as a way to engage with German history and the German contribution to the world of ideas. German history is dense with suggestive answers to the evergreen questions of what a state should be and what kind of world it should exist in.
{"title":"The Call to Political Geography","authors":"Quinn Slobodian","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708433","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a capsule memoir of a part-time Germanist. It recounts the author’s experience of coming of age in the 1990s when it was salad days for All Things German in North America and the sheen of Weimar shone. This decade was followed by the years of the global war on terror and eventually the global financial crisis, when German studies seemed to lose the plot and many historians of German quietly exited the subfield. The essay concludes with a reflection on political geography as a way to engage with German history and the German contribution to the world of ideas. German history is dense with suggestive answers to the evergreen questions of what a state should be and what kind of world it should exist in.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"37 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708475
Mathura Umachandran
Birthdays are good moments for Janus-faced self-reflection: where have we been and where might we go? This essay undertakes such a reflective enterprise from the outsider perspective of a scholar trained in classics. It apprises a critique of German studies not in the mode of maudlin navel-gazing or in bitter lamentation of the decline of the humanities but in the hope that it is possible to sketch out and to build a more epistemically capacious field. Running a micro-experiment to demonstrate the narrow range of topics that have been thought proper to New German Critique, this essay enjoins those of us who study Europe’s past, both recent and distant, to imagine our relationships to our objects of study beyond that of haunting and of debt owed to tradition. With such flexing of the imagination, this essay makes suggestions for how disciplinary overhaul and an explicitly decolonial reckoning can offer hope of another fifty years of vibrant intellectual life in the pages of NGC.
{"title":"Where Next for <i>New German Critique</i>?","authors":"Mathura Umachandran","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708475","url":null,"abstract":"Birthdays are good moments for Janus-faced self-reflection: where have we been and where might we go? This essay undertakes such a reflective enterprise from the outsider perspective of a scholar trained in classics. It apprises a critique of German studies not in the mode of maudlin navel-gazing or in bitter lamentation of the decline of the humanities but in the hope that it is possible to sketch out and to build a more epistemically capacious field. Running a micro-experiment to demonstrate the narrow range of topics that have been thought proper to New German Critique, this essay enjoins those of us who study Europe’s past, both recent and distant, to imagine our relationships to our objects of study beyond that of haunting and of debt owed to tradition. With such flexing of the imagination, this essay makes suggestions for how disciplinary overhaul and an explicitly decolonial reckoning can offer hope of another fifty years of vibrant intellectual life in the pages of NGC.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"46 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708447
Chenxi Tang
This essay rethinks the meanings of German, critique, and new to delineate the contours of German studies in the present historical moment. The discussion of the concept of “German” suggests an understanding of German studies as a discursive site for reflecting on the political and for making sense of community and belonging, while the discussion of “critique” suggests an approach that places German thought and literature in the pluriverse of thinking and imagination around the world. Finally, by tracing the morphing of the imperative of newness into singularity, the essay proposes to conceive of German studies in terms of a curated exhibition of the ideas, visions, images, and models of community associated with the designation “German.”
{"title":"Singularly German in the Pluriverse","authors":"Chenxi Tang","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708447","url":null,"abstract":"This essay rethinks the meanings of German, critique, and new to delineate the contours of German studies in the present historical moment. The discussion of the concept of “German” suggests an understanding of German studies as a discursive site for reflecting on the political and for making sense of community and belonging, while the discussion of “critique” suggests an approach that places German thought and literature in the pluriverse of thinking and imagination around the world. Finally, by tracing the morphing of the imperative of newness into singularity, the essay proposes to conceive of German studies in terms of a curated exhibition of the ideas, visions, images, and models of community associated with the designation “German.”","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"44 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708279
Özkan Ezli
From the 1980s to the early 2010s, intercultural novels were often characterized by a liberal impulse to question prejudices and free characters from victim positions as well as cultural and identity-political constraints. This process has been analyzed and sometimes celebrated by scholars in countless literary studies claiming that hybrid actors and multivoiced narratives have replaced passive tales of suffering. More recent novels replace the heterogeneity and freedom of narrative agents with their experiential vulnerability and perceptions of discrimination. The central thesis of this essay is that this shift from freedom to vulnerability closely correlates with the disappearance of figural effects of mediation. The disappearance of a mediating function, which according to Georg Simmel is what makes face-to-face interaction social in the first place, fundamentally changes the intercultural narrative situation, the structure of encounter, and ultimately the forms of sociability in postmigration society. For the future of diversity-oriented and interdisciplinary research in German studies, it will be crucial to grasp this change precisely to develop new theories of inter- and transculturality from these insights.
{"title":"The Sociability of Narrative: Freedom, Vulnerability, and Mediation in the Intercultural Novel","authors":"Özkan Ezli","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708279","url":null,"abstract":"From the 1980s to the early 2010s, intercultural novels were often characterized by a liberal impulse to question prejudices and free characters from victim positions as well as cultural and identity-political constraints. This process has been analyzed and sometimes celebrated by scholars in countless literary studies claiming that hybrid actors and multivoiced narratives have replaced passive tales of suffering. More recent novels replace the heterogeneity and freedom of narrative agents with their experiential vulnerability and perceptions of discrimination. The central thesis of this essay is that this shift from freedom to vulnerability closely correlates with the disappearance of figural effects of mediation. The disappearance of a mediating function, which according to Georg Simmel is what makes face-to-face interaction social in the first place, fundamentally changes the intercultural narrative situation, the structure of encounter, and ultimately the forms of sociability in postmigration society. For the future of diversity-oriented and interdisciplinary research in German studies, it will be crucial to grasp this change precisely to develop new theories of inter- and transculturality from these insights.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"47 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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