**please send completed application to Lisa Bonnes Johnson/726 University Avenue/Ithaca, NY 14850**

The Technology of Memories: Collective Traumatic Remembrance in Modern Germany

Summer Seminar Director: David Bathrick

A significant cultural and political development of recent years has been the emergence of memory as a key concern in Western societies. This has entailed a looking toward a past, says Andreas Huyssen, “that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity.” Our DAAD Summer Seminar on the technologies of memory defines its starting point as an exploration of one aspect of this paradigm shift, namely the memory cultures that have evolved around particular traumatic historical events. So conceived, we have narrowed the project down to three distinct points of orientation: First, on the historical side of the equation, would be a focus on the collective memory of specific catastrophic events occurring within the period of modernization in Germany from the end of the 19 th Century through World War II. Possible examples here would include memories of World War I; the Holocaust; the air war over Germany in WW II; the memory of Turkey among immigrants living in Germany or of Germany among displaced/exiled Jews and intellectuals; memories of the displacement of Germans westward after WWII; of Germany's colonies in Southwest Africa; memories of specific one-time or circumscribed events, such as the battle of Stalingrad or the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in WW II, memorialized in Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang.

A second concern would a focus on how memory is constructed, preserved, supported and/or redirected, manipulated, circulated (Kittler) and even fabricated (e.g. Willkomirski) via specific medial technologies, some, but not all of which emerged during the period of our concentration. These would include film, photography, radio, the phonograph, or television. Print media would also be encompassed, such as newspapers or comics; but literature as a medium (poetry, novel, short story) as well - - a literature that has been challenged and changed by the emerging “mediascape” in which it was imbedded. In tracing memory work of that earlier time into the present, we would necessarily address recent challenges to established media by digitation, the internet, the blogosphere, etc. Here key questions might include the following: what does it mean that specific historical traumas are re-remembered collectively through the structural changes occurring constantly within the “discourse networks” (Kittler) in which we communicate? What are the potentialities and limitations of different media (photo, film, comic book, etc.) aesthetic styles (realism, modernism, postmodernism) or genres (melodrama, comedy, documentary, reportage) as made apparent in their memorializations of traumatic events?

A third focus that would emerge out of this interface/interplay of catastrophic event and the media in which they are remembered would be issues about what sorts of political, cultural, bureaucratic, linguistic or even “imagined communities” (great and small, conformist and disruptive, etc.) are created or enabled via the circulation of various memories/ memory technologies. Here we would want to reflect on questions such as: what are the limits of "memory," i.e. how mediated or vicarious can memory be and still have a meaningful claim to being "memory"? What are the investments in calling something "memory" rather than something else? Certainly these kinds of questions would also entail thinking through and beyond the trauma theory paradigm that has dominated some areas of memorial scholarship in the recent past.