Colloquium Series Fall 2007

As part of a dissertation that will attempt to describe modernist literary innovations as intensifications of the problems and practices of German Lebensphilosophie, Josh Dittrich (German Studies) presented a paper that worked to expose the paradoxical conception of “style” found in the “genre-bending” writings of Wilhelm Worringer. Dittrich began by discussing the problem of the relationship between words and concepts, building on references to Goethe’s Faust found in Worringer’s writings to emphasize the devilish way in which words can cover up the absence of a proper conceptualization. Dittrich hypothesized that Lebensphilosophie is marked in particular by the vicissitudes of the word-concept relation, in that its key terms (such as “life” and “expression”) take on a life of their own and cause the certainty of philosophical discourse to break down. In order to approach this problem as found in Worringer’s texts, Dittrich resolved to compare what Worringer’s texts say with what they actually do. Beginning with Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, Dittrich explained how this work describes two opposing motives driving artistic creation: the drive for empathy and the drive for abstraction, which correspond to the demands of “organic life” (tangible, human) and “inorganic life” (primordial, mysterious, undefined). On the example, then, of Worringer’s Form in Gothic, Dittrich showed how these opposing poles eventually collapse into one another, and how the “inorganic forms” of gothic geometry seem to come alive, no longer forming as a means of expression but as the very content of expression; this is what Worringer calls “the radical self-expression of Gothic art,” which “imposes itself violently on the viewer.” (Paul Buchholz)

The topic of PatrickSchmidt’s (University Gießen) colloquium paper was “‘Monsters’ and ‘Wondrous Births’: Cases of Physical ‘Otherness’ as Media Events in Early Modern Europe.” A visiting fellow at the Institute for German Cultural Studies, Schmidt is a member of Gießen research group that investigates transnational media events from early modernity to the present day. The special focus of his own project is the reporting on instances of bodily alterity (that is, “monsters” and “wondrous births”) in the mass media of the early modern period. The subject throws light on both the continuities and transformations in the mechanisms that bring about media events: for example, while fascination with unusual bodies persists in the media to this day, the reception of such phenomena has changed over time. Whereas a Flugblatt in the sixteenth century would interpret extraordinary natural phenomena—among them abnormal births—as ill omens or warnings from God, the newspaper in the Enlightenment era would dismiss such irrationality and seek more scientific explanations.

While the invention of printing with moveable type allowed for broader transmission of reports of bodily alterity, documentary accuracy was not always characteristic of such reports. On the one hand, narratives and visualizations of unusual bodies could be guided by interpretation first, and with that by established mythology or symbols that purveyed instant meaning. On the other hand, tales of “monstrosity” could be instrumentalized in political and confessional struggles to dehumanize opponents or to highlight a kind of overall decadence. Sometimes rumors located odd creatures in remote places, thus making verification impossible. On other occasions, authors of publications made special efforts to validate their reports, invoking eyewitnesses and special qualifications. Whether accurate or not, events that objectively had only private significance were elevated to the position of “media events,” claiming relevance for and scrutinized by the greater public. That, too, remains characteristic of today’s media.

Newer research reveals further functions of narratives of bodily alterity: as ways to reinforce social discipline, patriarchal order, norms of sexual behavior, and more generally, notions of identity and alterity. Pamphlets could also serve as marketing devices for actual shows involving unusual bodies. Later in history, publications might reflect a strange juxtaposition of fascination, enthusiasm, uneasiness, satire, and criticism of this type of media events. Whatever the motivation for publishing such material, the eventfulness and uniqueness of the natural phenomena have remained unquestioned and often taken for granted. (Martins Masulis)

Wolfgang Emmerich, an internationally acknowledged expert in the literatures of the DDR and co-founder of the International Graduiertenkolleg on Interdisciplinary Studies in Bremen, presented a paper focused on German literature of so-called “third spaces.” Emmerich’s theoretical point of departure was Homi Bhabha’s metaphor of “in-between spaces” and he discussed this metaphor’s applicability to German Studies. Professor Emmerich tried to sketch a plausible method for understanding changes in the field of Germanistik since its founding, from the insistence on the national, self-centered character of German literature to its embrace of difference. Emmerich noted six historical tendencies that justified the emphasis on difference: a) exile literature from 1933 until 1945 and the transformation from a national literature to a de-territorialized literature; b) literature of Jewish authors of German origin, writing under the trauma of the Shoah; c) works of Jewish authors of the third or fourth generation, who raise the problem of belonging to a language or culture even more dramatically; d) literature of German authors, many of them products of multiple linguistic identities, forced to relocate from East to West Berlin and vice-versa; e) literature of authors belonging to German speaking minorities in Sibiu, Banat and Bukovina; f) contemporary literature of migration. Emmerich then elaborated his understanding of the “third space” with Kafka’s infamously enigmatic short prose piece entitled Die Sorge des Hausvaters.

The attempt to define German literature according to the “third space” metaphor is not unproblematic, as revealed by the debates following the paper presentation, as colloquium participants proposed that the theorization of the “third space” seemed to be yet another version of enforced homogenization. Discussion emphasized the difficulty of undertaking German Studies nowadays without considering discourses of media studies, post-colonial studies, and other recent theoretical and methodological complications of the discipline. From this perspective, the “third spaces” become spaces of prime importance, and “minor” voices become major in contemporary approaches to modern German literature. (Arina Roturu)

In his colloquium paper John Noyes (University of Toronto) returned to the question, or lack thereof, of Africa in Hegel's philosophy of history through a reading of Urs Widmer's Im Kongo (1996). By engaging with the mythic narrative of timeless African nature, and “taking the steps that Hegel wouldn't,” Widmer's novel compels a reassessment of Hegel's exclusion of Africa from the dialectic of world history.

Hegel's Africa, as delineated and dismissed in his Berlin lecture of December 2, 1830, is a showcase of man in his natural state, the “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit.” By situating Africa exclusively in the natural realm, Hegel ignored contemporary sources that could have offered him a different, historical reading and necessitated Africa's exclusion from his system. If indeed “the Negro represents the natural human,” then he is also the ungraspable interiority and the accidental of the vanishing present that must be edited out of the grander scheme of dialectic history – left, tellingly, to the novelist. As Noyes claimed, what Hegel is to be faulted with here is not merely obvious racism or shoddy historiography, but the attempt to neutralize negativity. By banishing what is accidental and embodied in Africa and his own lecture hall in order to claim a narrative standpoint beyond history, Noyes argued that Hegel's system leaves itself open to an undermining. Widmer's novel, through a variety of narrative strategies that point to the historicity of Nature's supposed timelessness and Spirit's complicity in historical forgetting, poses the question about what needs to be left behind in order to authorize history as Hegel conceived it. As Noyes argued, Africa is thus central not peripheral to the Hegelian concept of world history. (Carl Gelderloos)

Professor Claudia Brodsky (Princeton University) delivered the last talk of the colloquium series. Her paper took as its point of departure the indispensable presence of architectural motifs in modern literature. What purpose do they serve? Brodsky discussed the discursive uses of “architecture” and the “architectonic” in both Goethe and in a short scene in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The paper sparked a spirited debate. Brodsky’s central claim was that literary language conjoins architectural and architectonic figures to form historical reference in different ways. To demonstrate her point, she analyzed a moment in Shoah in which Lanzmann engages a long-time resident of Sobibór at the site of a former extermination camp. Lanzmann points to a spot on one side of the train tracks, identifying where one would have been “inside the camp,” then points to a spot just on the other side of the tracks, signifying where one would have been “outside the camp.” The two fates—untimely death and prolonged life—both earn the verbal designation “here.” This filmic moment, argued Brodsky, sheds light on the dual nature of the referent, and thus on the relationship between history and language. Lanzmann has successfully created a “pure moment of reference.” Without any explicit narrative informing the scene, the viewer is led to ponder the physical space that has been buried with the passage of time, and with it, the memories and voices that have been left “unmemorialized,” leaving no trace to serve as testimony of their existence. A lively discussion focused on the multifaceted relationship between historical and literary referents. (Ari Linden)