Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708307
Cristina Florea
This article calls for studying German history and culture from the margins, an approach that highlights unexpected mutual influences and entanglements between German and non-German cultures in Europe and beyond and that challenges essentialist understandings of German identity. Moreover, by looking at peripheries of German culture, scholars can break out of the straitjacket of national narratives and rediscover the transnational dimensions inherent in German history. Bukovina, a multiethnic former province of the Habsburg Empire that now spans the border between Ukraine and Romania, is one such place. The article sketches how the German concept of Kultur was first used to legitimize the Habsburg Empire in Bukovina and was later absorbed into a new language of rights in a postimperial age.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708363
B. Venkat Mani
This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation between a republic and its reading public. In the fraught political topography of contemporary Germany, marked by the arrival and eventual acceptance of over one million Syrian refugees since 2015, the rise of the extreme right-wing party Alternatives for Germany, resurgence of discussion on German colonialism in Africa, and extended public debate around the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the essay centralizes questions of race, colonialism, and migration. Connecting these key terms with current debates on decolonizing and diversifying the literary canon, the essay argues that decolonization is a direction, not a destination; it is a method, not a product, and attempts to decolonize a national literary canon must be conducted in connection with the larger public spheres, indeed by decompartmentalizing the classroom and the society.
本文以当代德国文学公共领域为研究对象，聚焦于一个共和国与其阅读大众之间的关系。自2015年以来，超过100万叙利亚难民抵达并最终接受了当代德国，极端右翼政党德国替代方案(alternative for Germany)的崛起，关于德国在非洲殖民主义的讨论重新抬头，以及围绕柏林有争议的洪堡论坛(Humboldt Forum)展开的公开辩论，这些都是当代德国令人担忧的政治格局，本文集中讨论了种族、殖民主义和移民问题。本文将这些关键术语与当前关于非殖民化和文学经典多样化的辩论联系起来，认为非殖民化是一个方向，而不是一个目的地;它是一种方法，而不是一种产品，要使一种民族文学经典非殖民化，必须与更大的公共领域联系起来进行，实际上是通过使课堂和社会去分化。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708349
Olivia Landry
At a contemporary moment of sweeping scholarly interest in and interrogation of the archive, this brief essay returns to Walter Benjamin. Formulating the archive as a fugacious site of ruin and excavation, Benjamin’s approach presents an early counterposition to the modern view of the same as a bulwark of historical permanence and national stability. To illustrate the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s work, the essay turns to recent discussions of the topic “archives of migration” in the German transnational context. Distinct from official archives comprising collected and cataloged documents and objects, these archives present transient sites of negotiation, reterritorialization, and self-determination that work against national projects of historiography and their mechanisms of suppression. The example of bi’bak, a transnational project space in Berlin established in 2014, and its revival of the Turkish-language videotape culture in 1980s West Germany furthermore reanimate Benjamin’s commitment to media’s role in the archaeological processes of the archive, which set it loose.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10708251
Kristin Dickinson
This article reads the final moment of Fatma Aydemir’s 2022 novel, Dschinns, as an instance of heterolingual address, which provides an alternative to the progressive logic of assimilation in both Germany and Turkey and the cyclicality of transgenerational trauma. Opening out onto the possibility of a forthcoming counter-address marked by queer spectrality, the novel prompts readers to engage in an open-ended process of community formation by rethinking their own modes of address and the myriad power structures that undergird them.
{"title":"Queer Spectrality and the Hope of Heterolingual Address","authors":"Kristin Dickinson","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708251","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads the final moment of Fatma Aydemir’s 2022 novel, Dschinns, as an instance of heterolingual address, which provides an alternative to the progressive logic of assimilation in both Germany and Turkey and the cyclicality of transgenerational trauma. Opening out onto the possibility of a forthcoming counter-address marked by queer spectrality, the novel prompts readers to engage in an open-ended process of community formation by rethinking their own modes of address and the myriad power structures that undergird them.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"48 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":"135514517","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-10708489
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
The essay compares the back-breeding of the extinct aurochs by the German zoologists Lutz and Heinz Heck with the reconstruction of past Germanic languages and mythologies by Jacob Grimm. It then points to similarities between current rewilding projects and the absorption of the Hecks’ back-breeding venture into the broader National Socialist vision of racial rewilding in the conquered eastern territories. Finally, it argues that the aurochs resurrection heralds the coming of a future age of total bioengineering.
{"title":"<i>Deutsche Rindergrammatik</i>; or, The Once and Future Aurochs","authors":"Geoffrey Winthrop-Young","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708489","url":null,"abstract":"The essay compares the back-breeding of the extinct aurochs by the German zoologists Lutz and Heinz Heck with the reconstruction of past Germanic languages and mythologies by Jacob Grimm. It then points to similarities between current rewilding projects and the absorption of the Hecks’ back-breeding venture into the broader National Socialist vision of racial rewilding in the conquered eastern territories. Finally, it argues that the aurochs resurrection heralds the coming of a future age of total bioengineering.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"44 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":"135514543","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-10708377
Kalani Michell
This essay redirects attention to questions of reception in German-speaking contexts, instead of a limited stress on what is “produced” there. This not only affords us, German studies scholars at North American universities, an opportunity to take into account our own reception of imported European goods within our specific institutional and local cultural contexts. It also confirms what we so often claim in our teaching statements, namely, that our students play a key role in the meaning of these objects, not as mere “receivers” but as fellow interlocuters, since the questions asked about these objects structure them in the first place. The messiness of these transcultural European trade routes needs to be taken seriously so that the noise, mixed messages, and missed signals might become part of our objects of interpretation, instead of being relegated to the footnotes of standard histories.
{"title":"“The 62 Members of the Mickey Mouse Club”: Yearbook Impressions","authors":"Kalani Michell","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708377","url":null,"abstract":"This essay redirects attention to questions of reception in German-speaking contexts, instead of a limited stress on what is “produced” there. This not only affords us, German studies scholars at North American universities, an opportunity to take into account our own reception of imported European goods within our specific institutional and local cultural contexts. It also confirms what we so often claim in our teaching statements, namely, that our students play a key role in the meaning of these objects, not as mere “receivers” but as fellow interlocuters, since the questions asked about these objects structure them in the first place. The messiness of these transcultural European trade routes needs to be taken seriously so that the noise, mixed messages, and missed signals might become part of our objects of interpretation, instead of being relegated to the footnotes of standard histories.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"31 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514625","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-10708321
Katja Garloff
This essay calls for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics and politics of comparison in contemporary German Jewish literature and beyond. It describes the tendency of recent German Jewish writers and thinkers to compare and connect the experiences of Jews to those of other minoritized groups. The essay briefly discusses several theoretical paradigms that spell out the political stakes of such comparisons, including touching tales (Leslie Adelson) and multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg). It then draws attention to another modality of comparison that is particularly promising because of its purposive abstractness and its relevance for literary texts: similarity. Finally, the essay offers two examples of the productive use of similarity in recent German Jewish literature: Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (which connects different instances of historical trauma) and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (which weaves the experience of a Syrian refugee in Istanbul into a web of similar migratory movements).
{"title":"On Similarity in Contemporary German Jewish Literature","authors":"Katja Garloff","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708321","url":null,"abstract":"This essay calls for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics and politics of comparison in contemporary German Jewish literature and beyond. It describes the tendency of recent German Jewish writers and thinkers to compare and connect the experiences of Jews to those of other minoritized groups. The essay briefly discusses several theoretical paradigms that spell out the political stakes of such comparisons, including touching tales (Leslie Adelson) and multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg). It then draws attention to another modality of comparison that is particularly promising because of its purposive abstractness and its relevance for literary texts: similarity. Finally, the essay offers two examples of the productive use of similarity in recent German Jewish literature: Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (which connects different instances of historical trauma) and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (which weaves the experience of a Syrian refugee in Istanbul into a web of similar migratory movements).","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"46 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":"135514530","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-10708237
Erik Born
This essay outlines a program for updating German media studies by reformatting, repartitioning, and potentially rebooting German media theory. As a temporary placeholder, German media studies 2.0 describes current transatlantic research committed to fixing bugs and patching vulnerabilities that emerged from historical encounters between media and critique, ideology and epistemology, and the Frankfurt School and the Kittler Network. To update German media studies in a critical mode, we need to keep defining our concepts and delimiting our disciplines, accounting for the effects of media change on our research methods, and negotiating our field’s complex relations to culture, history, and politics.
{"title":"German Media Studies: A Critical Update","authors":"Erik Born","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10708237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10708237","url":null,"abstract":"This essay outlines a program for updating German media studies by reformatting, repartitioning, and potentially rebooting German media theory. As a temporary placeholder, German media studies 2.0 describes current transatlantic research committed to fixing bugs and patching vulnerabilities that emerged from historical encounters between media and critique, ideology and epistemology, and the Frankfurt School and the Kittler Network. To update German media studies in a critical mode, we need to keep defining our concepts and delimiting our disciplines, accounting for the effects of media change on our research methods, and negotiating our field’s complex relations to culture, history, and politics.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"46 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":"135514532","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-10708461
Enzo Traverso
The highly controversial idea of Sonderweg, a special path to modernity, is frequently invoked to depict the history of Germany in the twentieth century. Initially claimed by nationalists as an exceptionalism proudly opposed to the development of both France and the United Kingdom, the German Sonderweg became a stigma after 1945, the mark of the wrong turn that had led to National Socialism. Beyond these debates, the thought remains that, under the shadow of this supposedly unique destiny, Germany was a volcano of aesthetic and intellectual creativity. This article analyzes the mental and cultural inversion produced by the end of the Cold War and the birth of a new “Berlin Republic.” From 1990 on, German politics and society tenaciously pursued a project of “normalcy” that consolidated both its democracy and its economy by establishing Berlin leadership in Europe. But this spectacular accomplishment also meant intellectual dryness and a memorial “wisdom” combined with a conservative “constitutional patriotism.” This inverted Faustian fate—conformist and mediocre prosperity instead of evil genius—is the transitory aftermath of a century of fire and blood.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10459940
Rüdiger Campe
Georg Lukács’s argument of form and formation is traced from The Theory of the Novel to History and Class Consciousness, especially “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” The concept of form in The Theory of the Novel is compared to the contemporary philosophy of science by Émile Boutroux’s and Georg Simmel’s lectures on Kant and, in particular, Kantian aesthetics. Form and formation are in the scientific and in the aesthetic context developed against the backdrop of the deficit or even lack of formal organization and, consequently, as a necessary yet contingent intervention. This understanding of form characterizes, for Lukács, the modern novel as well as the capitalist economic and social system. Against Hegel’s teleology of the spirit but consistent with Marx, the modernity of the novel and of capitalism, respectively, appears in Lukács thus as structurally defining in and of history.
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