Carol Jacobs (Yale University) delivered her keynote lecture, “Ruins are in the Eye of the Beholder,” on perception amongst ruins in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Air War and Literature. Jacobs showed how both works suggest as an aesthetic imperative the need to learn a new way of reading. Turning first to Air War and Literature, Jacobs noted the importance to Sebald of a correct way of witnessing the ruins left in Germany after the air raids of World War II. In this text Sebald discusses Alexander Kluge’s gaze on Halberstadt through a comparison to Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history. Just as the angel views history from a position frozen in horror, Kluge’s removed irony, which makes it possible for him to maintain a distance from his knowledge, also, according to Sebald, freezes his critique in horror. The Unentwegtheit of this viewing position refuses the process of learning that could perhaps allow for a space of human autonomy such that human history must not simply collapse into a natural history tending toward destruction. Jacobs stressed the central importance of the performative aspect of Sebald’s citation of Kluge which, by transforming the text through its insertion into a new historical moment, might be able to intervene when autonomous human history threatens to revert to natural history.
In Austerlitz, the potential restitution of history lies in the narrator’s perspective on Austerlitz’s recollection of his life. As Austerlitz recalls his history, the chronological events become layered and photographs interspersed throughout the text provoke allegories or reorganized relationships between the text and the images. The condition of possibility lies not so much in what Austerlitz says, but in what the narrator performs as he perceives the story and his reception of it connects disparate events. This type of perception could perhaps offer clarity at the limits where a network of interconnections forms – if the reader knows how to read them. Jacobs concluded with the suggestion that the boundary conditions demand a new type of reading in which causal logic no longer limits the strokes of a potential alphabet: a type of reading that could resist the course of natural history.
(Katrina Nousek)

Panel I
The first panel of the conference, “Ruined Temporality,” was comprised of three papers exploring the peculiar relationship between ruins – whether as guiding metaphor, hypothetical vantage point on presents past, or site of competing historical temporalities – and time, across the media of the digital archive, the film, and the novel.

In “Digital Ruins: Media Archaeology, the Internet Archive, and Our Future Memory of the Internet’s Past” Marcus Burkhardt (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) took on celebrations of the world wide web as the great hope of archival storage. These celebrations place a naive faith in an indestructible and infinitely vast digital architecture, one that could store any and every piece of virtual information without decay or ruin. Following Michel Foucault and several of his German interlocutors (Kittler and Ernst), Burkhardt argued that archaelogy is the proper methodology for rethinking this archive, one that finds in the past not a perfectly retained trace of living history, but only a monument of a past moment’s silence, its decay over time. Foucault’s approach is borne out in contemporary discussions of the digital archive, which already reflect a massive, ceaseless destruction of information. Focusing on the so-called Internet Archive, Burkhardt suggested that the very notion of a universal archive should itself be considered nothing more than a ruin, a brief and momentary desire that cannot maintain itself against temporal flux.

Alan Itkin (University of Michigan) began his “Thinking in the Future-Perfect: Ruins-to-Be in W. G. Sebald and Werner Herzog” with an entertaining analysis of the sci-fi classic, Planet of the Apes. Departing from that film’s famous last scene, Itkin went on to analyze the literary form of the future-perfect, a way of speaking about the future as if it had already happened in a usually apocalyptic past. This form has definitive examples in the works of W.G. Sebald and Werner Herzog. In the former, Itkin focused on several texts (including Vertigo and Austerlitz), using Walter Benjamin’s concept of Natural History to articulate a vision of time corrupted by inevitable ruin, gazing upon the present from the imagined vantage point of a future catastrophe. Likewise in Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World, Itkin locates an apocalyptic future of the world, this time visible at the extreme limits of both the human and natural world, in the frozen isolation of Antarctica. Though such visions of the future-perfect may be unnecessarily pessimistic, Itkin concluded that in both these artists we find a complex temporality with rare moments of intense vibration among past, present and future.

In “The Ruins of Rationalization: Placing Death in the Economy of Elective Affinities” Brian Jones (University of California, Santa Barbara) focused on the role of space in the landscape, architecture and territory in Goethe’s novel. Reflecting a vital transition point from a feudal form of governance to rationalistic, bourgeois land management, Elective Affinities stages the increasingly contradictory relations that involve the nascent middle class and its private property and land. From Eduard and Charlotte’s moss hut to their friend the Captain’s estate map to the interior space of Ottilie’s crypt, land is less a natural, given environment and more a site for competing, contradictory forms of historically-mediated life. Attempts to visually order the land through maps, windows, and architectural designs reflect this contestation and demonstrate, for Jones, that Goethe’s modernity not only breaks off from a feudal legacy, but that it too is internally broken, alternating between an organic subject’s productive rationalism and a reified subject’s attempt to escape this cycle of life and death for an interior world of ever-fixed images.
(Paul Flaig)

Panel II

The second panel, “Structures Decayed, Ruins Reclaimed,” approached structures that have been identified as ruins, examining the motivations behind such classification, the manner in which decay occurs, as well as the implications that this designation had for the historical context in which it was made.

The first panelist, Anne Hillenbach (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen), presented a paper titled “Former Glory, Today’s Decay: The Importance of Ruined Hotels in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten.” Hillenbach provided a reading of the hotels that serve as the settings for the four narratives in Sebald’s text, in which four Jewish men suffer in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust. For these men the hotels provide a location where they are able to access the past; the hotels are steeped in memory and history, however it is the absence of boundaries at these points of transit that is comforting to the travelers. The process of decay observed in these hotels defies the conventions of aesthetically pleasing Romantic ruins. Rather than nature appropriating the structures, it is another sort of decay that marks these hotels – that left in the wake of either capitalism or the violent destruction of war, in which mankind destroys the structures which it itself has built. Such decay reflects the conception of history in Sebald’s narrative, in which WWII is viewed as a caesura, after which historical events follow a consistent pattern of human self-destruction and decline. According to this view, Europe and its history constitute ruins in and of themselves.
Hillenbach also elaborated upon the manner in which the hotels are depicted as ruins in the narratives and the relevance of this textual process to broader debates on the construction of meaning between text and image. By themselves, the photographs of the hotels reproduced in Sebald’s text do not convey the status of the buildings as ruins; rather, it is the text that depicts them in a state of decay.

In a paper titled “Ein Bild von Teutschland: The Cologne Cathedral as a Ruin in the Writings of Joseph Görres,” Alexander Phillips (Cornell University) depicted the Cologne Cathedral through the lens of Joseph Görres’ publications from 1814, 1824, and 1842, demonstrating how the cathedral was read as a ruin in its state of incompletion, symbolic and symptomatic of the German people’s apathy and dispirited Volksgeist during the early stages of national unification. Görres was a scholar and publisher of the Rheinische Merkur, and was influential in drawing public attention to the incomplete cathedral. In its “trümmerhafte Unvollendung,” Görres wrote that he saw a “Bild von Teutschland.”
The Cologne Cathedral stood only partially built for nearly three hundred years, damaged under French occupation and, in Görres’ opinion, an embodiment of the ruined state of the German Volksgeist. Görres viewed the Middle Ages and the initial stages of the cathedral’s construction as a time when a cohesive German culture flourished. Prior to the creation of the German Confederation in 1820, he therefore advocated a return to medieval social institutions not out of nostalgia or a preference for their functions, but because he considered them to be German and a product of the German Geist. Görres’ Romantic understanding of the cathedral led him to see it as an expression of a national character and the work of a visionary master builder. Interpreted as a ruin, the cathedral embodied the glory of the past and the destitution of the present but, more importantly, the promise of a new beginning, a return to eminence in the future. The restoration of the German Geist was the motivation behind Görres’ founding of the Rheinische Merkur; his interest in the cathedral throughout his entire career and the national transformation that he believed would be necessary for its completion were therefore central to his political engagement.

The final presentation, by Shannon Connelly (Rutgers University), was titled “Skein of Memory/Skin of Suffering: the Isenheim Altarpiece in Munich, 1989-19.” The Isenheim Altarpiece was brought from French Alsace to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek for restoration in 1917, where it remained for two years and was enthusiastically integrated into public life and memory. Connelly focused on the reception of Grünewald’s depiction of the brutally maimed and decaying body of Christ after WWI in Germany in textual and visual media and the public sphere. In the image of Christ on the cross, the public saw reflected the sufferings of victims of brutal warfare as well as the privations of the German body politic following its defeat in war. While on display in Munich the altarpiece became a secularized destination of pilgrimage and a site for the construction of collective memory.
The Isenheim Altarpiece was painted in the sixteenth century by Matthias Grünewald and was commissioned for the Monastery of Saint Anthony in Colmar to raise awareness for the treatment of degenerative skin diseases. Connelly traced the iconography of the image of the crucifix as the body of Christ was replaced with the violated body of a German soldier, which in turn was a locus of transference in the eye of the viewing public, representative of the nation’s degradation. During its two-year stay in Munich, Grünewald’s altarpiece, and the figure of Grünewald himself, were appropriated as figures in the conceptualization of Germany as a suffering victim and in the construction of the nation’s post-war memory.
(Miyako Hayakawa)

Panel III
The third panel, “Post-war Reflections,” dealt with manifestations of ruins in literature and film, with a shared interest in the ways ruins are evoked not just to demonstrate a radical rupture but also to connect to other discourses or forms, whether by seeing the translator as interlocutor, interrogating discredited figurations of God, or reappropriating a Romantic aesthetic.

Opening the panel, Leeore Schnairsohn (Princeton University) presented his engagement with reading and translating poetry in a paper called “The Horseshoe-Finder: Paul Celan reads Osip Mandelstam.” Schnairsohn used Celan’s translation of Mandelstam’s poetry as a starting point to analyze the position of the translator-reader as an interlocutor. He invoked a host of scholarship on both authors as well as the entanglement of their works to develop his view on dialogism in poetic discourse and one of its most controversial issues – that of imagining the addressee as an absent interlocutor participating in a dialogue with the author.

Stella Isenbuegel (University of Wisconsin-Madison) presented a talk entitled “Finding and Losing God among the Ruins: Selected Texts from the ‘Literature of the Rubble.’” Isenbuegel began her presentation by pointing out that elements of the divine seem to be typically represented in Trümmerliteratur in one of two ways: either within the context of the institution of the Church, or as unified in a personified God. Her analysis focused on the literary occurrences of the latter. This God has become alienated from and even victimized by those who at one time secured his existence through faith, devotion and even fear. While some texts represent him as a helpless and powerless outcast or a benign but ignorant father figure, others go even further by unceremoniously burying his dead remains altogether. Such provocative depictions of God as incompetent, outdated, ignorant or even deceased force into question fundamental views on human existence, life, and death. Isenbuegel addressed this topic in a contextualized analysis of two key texts from the immediate postwar period, namely Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s Das Begräbnis and Wolfgang Borchert’s Draußen vor der Tür.

Martina Moeller’s talk, titled “Ruins in Rubble Films: a visual element of an aesthetic opposition?” focused on the immediate postwar genre known as the rubble film. Moeller (Université de Provence) observed that almost every rubble film employs the setting of ruined and destroyed German cities in the aftermath of World War II: ruins appear as an element of decoration or are referred to in a metaphorical way. These ruins indicate an aesthetic of fragmentation and crisis that expresses feelings of defeat, loss, and despair and serves as an allegorical representation of the traumatic memory of the National Socialist past and its influence on the aftermath of war. Using the example of the rubble film The Murderers are Among Us by Wolfgang Staudte (1949), Moeller suggested that many rubble films revert to a Romantic aesthetic of ruins such as that found in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. During the occupation of Greifswald and Pommern by Napoleon (1806-1810), Friedrich used the motif of Gothic ruins as a major visual element of an aesthetic of opposition against the victor Napoleon. Moeller’s talk showed how these intermedial references function and affect the meaning of ruins in rubble films.
(Claudia Schmidt)

Panel IV
In the panel entitled “Fragmentary Philosophy,” philosophical reflections (or investigations) were merged with other categories relevant to the conference. How different philosophers, literary critics, and poets alike have defined and delimited the ruin qua fragment was the central theme of this panel.

Zakir Paul (Princeton University) delivered a talk entitled “Blanchot’s Athenäum,” in which he defended Blanchot’s engagement with romanticism against Tzvetan Todorov’s accusation that Blanchot was a romantic ideologue incapable of seeing beyond this totalizing horizon. Paul defended Blanchot, however, not by countering the facticity of this claim, but by showing how it rests on a faulty understanding of the romantic project, by questioning whether one can even speak of such a project in the singular. Drawing on both selected fragments by Schlegel as well as passages from Blanchot’s Writing the Disaster, Paul showed that if there is indeed a “tendency” inherent to the romantic project, it is that of the eternal self-questioning of the entire apparatus of writing “in all of its protean forms.” Romanticism cannot be reduced to a political or poetic doxa, but rather must be understood as providing a legitimate challenge to any literary theory that endeavors to render the relationship between word and world, or text and reality, unproblematic.

Working with similar texts, though from a vastly different perspective, Andreas Hjort Møller (Aarhus University, Denmark) delivered a talk entitled “Homer Ruined: The Impact of Analytical Philology in German Klassik and Early Romanticism,” in which he attempted to articulate a relationship between Goethe and Schlegel based on the findings of the contemporary philologist Friedrich August Wolf.
Wolf was the first to deconstruct Homer, as it were, by suggesting that his epics were not as “whole” as had been previously thought, but were rather composed of fragmentary episodes, assembled much later by the “classicist” Greeks of the literate era. Goethe’s and Schlegel’s reactions to this discovery, according to Møller, are particularly revealing when trying to understand the differences between the so-called classical and romantic periods in German literature. Goethe, while initially open to this discovery, eventually rejected Wolf, a gesture that was epitomized by his attempt to combine the tragic ethos of the story of Achilles with an epic “Gestalt,” thereby reestablishing a mythic unity of forms that was devoid of fragmentary character: the result was Achilleïs. Schlegel, on the other hand, welcomed Wolf’s theory wholeheartedly, and used it as a way to justify his elevation of the fragment to the highest possible form of writing, as “more whole than the whole.” These diverging tendencies, Møller argued, shed significant light on the complex relationship between Weimar Classicism and Romanticism.

The third and final panelist Jacob Brogan (English Department, Cornell University) shifted the focus to the twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Specifically, Brogan examined how the form of the latter’s Philosophical Investigations engages in a struggle with its stated project. Brogan essentially argued that Wittgenstein is not ultimately concerned with “concrete objects,” but rather with the linguistic conditions of possibility that allow one to say anything at all. His is a fragmentary philosophy not because he was not capable of writing in the form of an essay or treatise, but because his methodology necessitated this form of writing.
Each new “language game,” or “form of life” in the text, Brogan suggested, must be read in the context of those other paragraphs which frame it, and by doing so, reveal its limitations. If truth as a metaphysical concept is alluded to at all in the text, it is only negatively, that is, only by unveiling the “limits of each new account of language the book offers.” In the various images of language that the text produces, Wittgenstein is constantly reminding the reader of the “perpetual incompleteness” of language, of its ability to generate new meanings every time it is used. For Wittgenstein, language is not a thing but rather a social activity that binds us together and creates a community that is resistant to any form of exclusivity because its boundaries are never fully articulated.
(Ari Linden)

Panel V

The final panel of the conference, “Present Ruins, Diverted Memories,” traced varying relationships in literature between ruins, memory, and narrative.

Caroline Kita (Duke University) opened the final panel of the conference with a paper entitled “Breaking Down the Historical Gaze: Reevaluating Projects of Memory through Architectural and Literary Space in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften and Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between a “restorative” and “reflective nostalgia” and on Walter Benjamin’s “archaeology of memory,” Kita proposed a rethinking of the projects of memory in both novels. Kita traces in Ottilie’s reflections on the chapel as a monument of memory and Austerlitz’s thoughts on the Antwerp Central Station a “self-conscious suspension of the historical gaze” signaling a shift in the very stakes of the anamnetic process. Memory and spaces of memory cease to function as devices for recuperating or restoring the past. Architectural and literary spaces become sites for anamnetic and narrative negotiation and elaboration. Under negotiation is memory itself.

The second paper of this panel was given by Dania Hückmann (New York University). Entitled “The Ruin as Distraction – Jean Amery’s Lefeu oder Der Abbruch,” the paper discussed the function of the ruin in both Jean Amery’s Lefeu and Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Hückmann showed how Benjamin’s conceptualization of the ruin as a “signifier of the past and future,” as a commemorative space, undergoes a process of deconstruction in Amery’s text. His ruin functions as a substitute for an absent site of the past and textually as a “metaphor of loss.” Metaphors function in Lefeu as placeholders for a loss he fails to articulate outside of metaphoric language. In this sense, Amery’s metaphors figure differently from Benjamin’s allegories, as they only function as fragments and never develop into a way of reading the world.

Jessica Riviere (Vanderbilt University) concluded the panel with a paper called “Goethe’s Campagne in Frankreich and Belagerung von Mainz as Attempts at a Literary Ruin.” Riviere began her talk by foregrounding the fact that what would seem to be narration of historical events in both texts actually builds on a bracketing of “historical immediacy” and at the same time tends towards aestheticization. Riviere argued that by choosing to aestheticize historical events and his experience of these events in order to retell them from a position of temporal distance and renounce the claim of historical accuracy, Goethe engages in a project in which war as a scene of destruction is raised to the status of a ruin. By undermining the sense of immediacy typical to the diary as a genre and by building his narrative project on the omission of events, Goethe constructs the texts themselves as aestheticized ruins.
(Andreea Mascan)

Anette Schwarz, chair of Cornell’s Department of German Studies, gave the plenary address, entitled “Do We Need Ruins?” In beginning, Schwarz noted that she had rethought her paper’s title, concluding that yes, we do need ruins, but for different reasons. Schwarz linked ruins and states of ruination to times of radical change and uncertainty, because of ruins’ ability to define a relationship between people and decline. Specifically, Schwarz cited the ruin as an emblem of the Baroque and went on to examine how this motif functions in a different way but with no less urgency in modernity, drawing examples from the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. In Simmel’s 1911 essay Die Ruine, the ruin represents nature’s supremacy over man’s claim to power, vengefully putting man in his place in a cycle that, though violent, is still harmonious. Ruins construct a work of art in nature by petrifying the conflict between nature and man, by performing a nostalgia-inducing “cosmic tragedy,” and by eventually becoming a peaceful part of the surroundings. The nostalgic nature of ruins offers man a feeling of “homecoming via destruction,” a mood Simmel equates with decadence.
Schwarz then turned to Benjamin for examples of non-conciliatory ruins. Unlike Simmel, Benjamin views ruins as frozen unrest rather than petrified peace. Benjamin’s melancholic ruins insist on finality, denying transcendence. Schwarz cited Benjamin’s line that “allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things”; under the gaze of the melancholic, the ruin loses its own meaning and gains significance only as projected by the allegorist as a form of self-preservation, much as in the Baroque preoccupation with libraries and archives. Schwarz additionally touched on Benjamin’s writing on the ruined state of language after the Fall, concluding that while the ruin is a permanent reminder of imminent decay, it also holds, as a site for the collection of dispersed memory of pre-ruined times, hope for rescue and rebirth.
(Megan Eaton)