ABSTRACTS

Esther Leslie Deploying something of Walter Benjamin's methodological interest in Goethe's tender empiricism and the idea of turbidity, the concepts of city light is troubled through an investigation of forms - neon, ultra- violet, infra-red and the light of the photographic flash. Under these lights, obscurity is not eliminated but becomes the context of a dark knowledge of the world, which persists in unenlightened gloom, readable only under the surges of a messianic light to come.

Tianjue Li

Selbsterhaltung und Selbstentfaltung: Georg Simmels Auffassung vom Geistesleben in Großstädten

Ausgehend vom kontroversen deutschen Urbanisierungsdiskurs um 1900 untersucht die Studie zunächst die geistgeschichtlichen Prämissen und die disziplinübergreifende Herangehensweise von Georg Simmels Essay Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903). Im Mittelpunkt steht eine eingehende Auseinandersetzung mit Simmels dialektischen Diagnosen von den durch Strukturwandel bestimmten Wirkungen der Metropolen auf das einzelne Individuum. Anhand von seiner psychologischen Auffassung vom urbanen Leben lassen sich die sonst diversen Repräsentationen der Metropolen in Großstadtliteratur, wie prägnante Beispiele aus Le Spleen de Paris, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Mrs Dalloway illustrieren, eher als zusammenhängende Mosaiken des Großstadtkomplexes lesen. Abschließend zeigt ein vergleichender Blick, wie Simmels Großstadtauffassung unsere Verständnisse von virtuellen Metropolen des 21. Jahrhunderts erhellen kann.

Taking its cues from the controversial German discourse of urbanisation around 1900, this study examines at first the premises from history of ideas and the interdisciplinary approach of Georg Simmel’s essay Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903). The focus is a detailed analysis of Simmel’s dialectic diagnoses of the profound impacts from metropolis upon the individual, which are determined by the structural transformation in urban spaces. In light of his psychological concept of urban life, concise examples from city literature e.g. Le Spleen de Paris, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Mrs Dalloway will illustrate how the diverse representations of metropolis and experiences in metropolis can be interpreted as coherent mosaics of the city-complex. Through a final comparative view, I shall argue how Simmel’s perception of city can illuminate our understandings of the virtual metropolis in the 21th century.

Thomas Scholz, Washington University. Comparative Literature [email protected] CB 1107, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 +1 314 600 5889

DAS RHIZOM DER FANTASTISCHEN METROPOLE: MITTEL DER HERRSCHAFT BEI ALFRED KUBIN, MICHAEL ENDE UND WALTER MOERS

Wie ein Rhizom vereinigt die fantastische Metropole Widersprüchliches: Rationalität, die Sphäre dessen, was Georg Simmel als „Verstandesmäßigkeit“ diagnostiziert, mit den Emotionen und dem Triebhaften, das im sozialen Druckkessel des urbanen Ballungsraums entsteht. Im Gegensatz zu realen Metropolen, in denen soziale, politische und ökonomische Kräfte eine Balance dieser widerstrebenden Kräfte gewährleisten (oder daran scheitern), ist es in der fantastischen Literatur oftmals ein Herrscher, der mittels machiavellistischer Instrumente die explosive Mischung unter Kontrolle hält. „Brot und Spiele“ sind in Walter Moers Romanen der Schlüssel, um die Großstädte Atlantis (in Die 13 1/2 Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär (1999)) und Hel (in Rumo und die Wunder im Dunkeln (2003)) beherrschbar zu machen. In Michael Endes Momo (1973) wird eine Stadt zur Metropole transformiert, um sie dann durch Rundfunk und Fernsehen ruhigzustellen. Alfred Kubins Perle (in Die andere Seite (1909)) wird in einem prä-modernen, prä- metropolischen Zustand gehalten, indem der Herrscher das Leben magisch durchdringt und als tägliches, albtraumhaftes Spiel inszeniert, bis sich das Unterdrückte den Weg an die Oberfläche bahnt. Gemein ist allen Beispielen, dass durch die Unterhaltung der Massen der Status quo für eine Zeit aufrechterhalten wird, dass dieses Unterfangen aber letztendlich scheitert. Die Fantastik legt somit die fragile Balance bloß, die realen modernen Metropolen eingeschrieben ist, und deren Vorhandensein der Leser im realistischen Roman als implizit gegeben erachtet. Charlotte Neubert

"Metropolen der Vormoderne - Die Konstruktion metropolitaner Identität am Beispiel Nürnbergs"

Simmels Schlüsseltext „Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben“ versucht sich an einer Beschreibung des neuen, nie dagewesenen Lebensgefühls der Moderne, in der Industrialisierung und Technisierung in den städtischen Räumen einen immer schneller werdenden Takt vorgeben. Solche Beschreibungen lassen sich - genauso wie das neuzeitliche Konzept Metropolität - nicht direkt auf die Vor-Moderne übertragen, deren Alterität mitgedacht werden muss. Was macht Metropolität in der Vormoderne aus? In meinem Vortrag will ich Kriterien wie Ausdehnung, Einwohnerzahl, Infrastruktur, Vorhandensein einer Universität etc. außenvorlassen und den Fokus auf das besonders für die Vormoderne interessante Kriterium städtischer Identitätskonstruktion richten. Nehmen sich schon Großstädte des spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Reichs selbst als solche wahr? Wissen sie um ihre Größe, ihre Bedeutung, ihre Strahlkraft? Entwickeln sie einen metropolitanen Gestus? Das Bewusstsein des metropolitanen Charakters und seine Einschreibung in die eigene Identitätskonstruktion soll exemplarisch anhand des spätmittelalterlichen Nürnberg Thema meines Vortrags sein. In seiner Stadtchronik bezeichnet sich Nürnberg als quasi centrum Europae und will in der bildlichen Stadtansicht der Schedelschen Weltchronik als exzeptionelle Großstadt auftreten. Diese bewusste Darstellung findet nicht nur auf politisch-offizieller Ebene statt, sondern auch in der Lebenswelt der Bürger, die ihr Wissen, Teil eines besonderen Gemeinwesens zu sein, über verschiedene mediale Kanäle (Historiographie, architektonisch-bauliche Zeugnisse etc.) kommunizieren.

Alessandra Rosati

The city and the province in Irmgard Keun’s Das Kunstseidene Mädchen

In my paper I will look at the interplay between the city and the country/province in Irmgard Keun’s novel Das Kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932). This remarkable work of the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (‘New Objectivity’) conveys, through the character of Doris, a specific female perspective of Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

I will start by asking what role is played by the province in the perception of urban space. I will argue that the two poles are closely related in the novel, as the province is a constant reference in reading and understanding the cityscape for the young woman who leaves her provincial town and moves to Berlin. This will allow me to show how Keun’s novel challenges the male archetype of the ‘young man from the province’ (see Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 59-60), by portraying an emancipated young woman whose conscious aim is to become a ‘Glanz’ in the capital. I will also suggest that the novel’s indeterminate closure, with Doris’s possible flight from the metropolis to the garden colony on the outskirts, connects Keun’s text to the broader cultural debate ‘Berlin vs Landschaft’, which animated the last years of the Weimar Republic.

The issue will be discussed in connection with the changing attitude towards the two traditional poles of country and city identified by Raymond Williams (The Country and the City, 1973, 2011) and, more recently, by Hana Wirth-Nesher (City codes: reading the modern urban novel, 1996) in the modernist urban novel.

Richard Hronek

Dubious Beacons: The modern metropolis as seat of hope and despair in Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922)

The modern metropolis, with its possibilities for great failure and success, captivated writers around the turn of the 20th century. With this trend in mind, one can draw parallels between two seemingly unrelated texts and cultivate an enriched understanding of both. Superficially, F.W. Murnau's vampire film Nosferatu (1922) and Irmgard Keun's novel about a teenage girl Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) do not have much in common. However, both protagonists move to a city, suffer from being an outsider, and have their ultimate dreams dashed. These similarities demand that the reader ask whether the two works resemble each other on a deeper level. Indeed, both follow the trajectory of what Elana Gomel calls "plague narratives" in her essay "The Plague of Utopias." The stories err, according to Gomel's model, in viewing their respective afflictions as the harbingers of utopia. In Nosferatu, the happy ending is explicitly announced. Intriguingly, despite a lack of monsters, it is Mädchen’s conclusion that leaves open the possibility for more terror. After establishing the analogies between these works, using Gomel's framework reveals that the American-style consumerism from which Keun's Berlin and Doris suffer is akin to the vampirism that washes over Wisborg in Nosferatu.

Iga Nowicz

Sex and the city: female bodies and destroyed cities in Alma Hadžibeganović's prose texts

Ali Jones

Urban Spatial Protest as Counterviolence?: Gentrification and Structural Violence in the Radical German Left

In 1988, Hamburg’s Senate released a Westlichen Inneren Stadt (WIS) Report detailing plans to modernize a poor, working class district in the centre of the city. Plans included forming and them partnering with a ‘Stadterneuerungsgesellschaft’ (STEG): a public-private enterprise tasked with gentrifying the neighbourhood in order to improve security, raise land values, and attract new middle class tenants. They sought to accomplish this urban restructuring by first turning the old 'Flora' theatre into a new 'Crystal Palace' for musical theatre. The STEG and Senate hoped to bring over 2000 tourists to the tiny, 0.47km2 neighbourhood nightly, thus establishing the area as a high-income entertainment district, and substantially raising land values. However, the ‘Schanzenviertel’ was populated largely by immigrants, students, low-income seniors, and labourers who interpreted the restructuring plans as an 'assault' by forces of state structural violence, and they organized grassroots protest against the planned gentrification. After unsuccessfully attempting peaceful methods of political engagement, residents allied with radical Autonomists to ultimately occupy the old theatre in 1989. Despite many odds, the plan succeeded, and the ‘Rote Flora’ cultural centre remains to this day as the symbolic centre of Autonomous identity and left wing protest in Germany. Using Etienne Balibar’s notion of structural violence, this paper will examine the use of counterviolence as a strategy in negotiating the restructuring of urban space. It will critically inquire whether such counterviolence is effective in contesting state structural violence, or whether it might instead present a radically conservative force that itself slips into the dialectic of violence that Balibar describes.

Amanda Hsieh

Franz Schreker the Cosmopolitan: A Music Reception History

Max Nordau in his 1892 polemics Degeneration condemned the city-dwellers for their ornate fashions and affected mannerisms, and declared them degenerate and hysterical. In more positivist and measured language, Georg Simmel continued the discourse connecting metropolitans with weakened yet excited nerves. In the broader discussions, one such metropolitan was the Berlin-based composer Franz Schreker, whose operas were often viewed as suspect because of their apparent ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics. I examine how his WWI-era opera Die Gezeichneten became a site in which associations of cosmopolitanism were framed at a time of heightened nationalism in the language of music criticism. The term ‘cosmopolitan’ frequently appeared alongside other words such as ‘internationalist’ and even ‘un-/non-German’, suggesting that the notion was perceived inherently incompatible with traditional (provincial) German values. Moreover, Schreker was often described as a ‘German Debussy’, with the French Impressionist composer active in Paris taken as a symbol to be not just of a world’s great metropolis but one that was from enemy culture. However, I suggest through detailed analysis of strategies used in newspaper reviews that the debates were much more ambiguous. Sensationalist language might be understood as tactics of commercial interests as well as any real, substantial musical-political opinions.

Giulia Iannucci

The purpose of this research is to delineate the metropolitan topography of homosexuality in Weimar Berlin. More in detail, the relation between the urban theorization and development – as investigated by Georg Simmel, György Lukács, Siegfried Kracauer, and the Chicago school’s scholars - and the alternative scene shows the dynamics that lead to the creation of new internal and external city-spaces in which the movement and the physical geo-localization of homosexuality corresponds to a complementary urban adaptation mechanism. Such a dynamic is mainly investigated through the fundamental scientific and social approach by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, notably in Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (1904) and Die Homosexualität des Mannes und Weibes (1914). On the one hand, the internal dimension is to be found in the contact with the clubs and bars where the “cult of the entertainment” was perpetuated following the guide lines given by the journalist Ruth Margarete Roellig in Berlins lesbische Frauen (1928) and the writer Curt Moreck in Führer durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin (1931). On the other hand, the external element is objectified within the real crossing of the city, notably the schwuler Wege and the Tiergarten, and in all the places where prostitution was present, as explained by Richard Linsert in Der Strichjunge. Eine Darstellung von einhundert Lebensläufen männlicher Prostituierter, in § 297,3. »Unzucht zwischen Männern«? Ein Beitrag zur Strafgesetzreform (1929) and Willy Pröger in Stätten der Berliner Prostitution (1930). Consequently, the homosexual phenomenon is studied within these new metropolitan spaces, as integral part of the rationalized urban society, in turn characterized by two typical elements of Weimar homosexuality: the anonymity of the mass dwelling the city and the definitive commodification of the city and the individual.

Sina Stuhlert

Berlin der Jahrhundertwende - Max Reinhardts „Salomé“-Inszenierung und die Berliner Kritik

Im Berlin des frühen 20sten Jahrhunderts entwickelte Max Reinhardt sein modernes Regietheater und die Auffassung der Theaterinszenierung als ein Gesamtkunstwerk. Oscar Wildes „Salomé“ war das erste Experiment dieses modernen Regietheaters und Reinhardts symbolistischer Ästhetik, mit der er sich vom realistischen und naturalistischen Theater abgrenzte. 1903 inszenierte er das Stück im Neuen Theater, nachdem es ein Jahr zuvor zunächst im Kleinen Theater als Privataufführung gespielt wurde. Diese erste Inszenierung inspirierte weitere bedeutende Bearbeitungen des Stoffes, wie Richard Strauss` Oper. Die Bühne des Neuen Theaters bot Reinhardt den Raum und die technischen Möglichkeiten seine spektakuläre Inszenierung umzusetzen, für welche Max Kruse als Bühnenbildner als einer der ersten den Rundhorizont kreierte und ein indirektes Beleuchtungssystem einsetzte. Die Inszenierung sowie das Stück Oscar Wildes schockierten und standen im Fokus der Berliner Kritik. Die Rezensenten lobten die beeindruckende Inszenierung, viele verurteilten jedoch die angebliche Perversität des Stückes. Die besondere Gestaltung der Bühne und der Fokus auf der Regiearbeit, inspirierte eine neue Art von Kritikschreibung, die nun einen großen Raum für diese Aspekte einräumte. Mein Vortrag wird die spezielle Situation in einer Stadt wie Berlin zur Jahrhundertwende betrachten, in welcher es Reinhardt möglich war sein Regietheater zu entwickeln, sowie die Reaktionen der Berliner Kritiker auf diese innovative und provozierende Inszenierung untersuchen.

Catherine Angerson

Women Translators of German Literature in the Late Eighteenth-Century Metropolis: Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Plumptre and Maria Geisweiler

This paper will examine the important role of women as translators of German literature in late eighteenth- century London. Mary Wollstonecraft and Anne Plumptre were members of Unitarian intellectual circles in London and Norwich, which gave them personal contact with the publishers Joseph Johnson and Richard Phillips, who were looking for able translators to meet a growing demand for German drama and scientific and educational literature. Maria Geisweiler collaborated with her husband, the German bookseller Constantin Geisweiler, by translating German plays for an English readership. Anne Plumptre is best known for her translations of at least ten Kotzebue plays and Wollstonecraft’s translations included Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, an educational treatise for children. The translation of devotional literature had long been considered an appropriate pastime for literate women, but the translation of ‘immoral’ plays was frowned upon. The role of women translators (Plumptre, Geisweiler and Elizabeth Inchbald) in the phenomenal success of Kotzebue’s plays on the London stage has still to be fully considered. Plumptre’s own faithful versions tended to be further adapted to suit English sensibilities and, in the case of Sheridan’s Pizarro, loyalist sentiment. As members of close-knit but outward-looking dissenting networks, these women were able to develop their intellectual powers and knowledge of modern languages in order to work as professional translators and writers and gain some degree of financial independence.

Daniele Nuccetelli

A tale of three cities: Uwe Tellkamp’s Dresden

My project investigates the transformations and the interconnection between space and time in the city of Dresden as narrated by Uwe Tellkamp. After a century of destruction, division, reunification and reconstruction Dresden stands for a perfect example of contemporary German Großstadt with a stratified past and a multiple identity and its urban space and architectural plan reflect the changes and losses the city has witnessed since the devastating bombings in 1945. Tellkamp’s prose is thus a journey into the memory of a three-faced city: the utopian splendor of pre-war Dresden with its Baroque Old Town, the war ruins and the new Socialist architecture during the GDR, the reconstruction and the repression of a controversial past through modernization and cancellation after the reunification of Germany. The first part of my work focuses on the novel Der Turm (2008) and aims to demonstrate the crucial role the city plays in terms of individual and cultural memory in Tellkamp’s Zeitroman, while the second part explores the transformations of present-day Dresden in the memoir Die Schwebebahn (2010).

Leila Essa

East German, West German, German at All? Post-Reunification Berlin as a Stage for Negotiations of Cultural Identity in Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin and Thomas Arslan’s Geschwister – Kardeşler

Berlin: emblematic site of German partition and reunification. It is here that the discourse around the ‘growing together’ of that which ‘belongs together’ (Willy Brandt, 10 November 1989) finds its three-dimensional expression in the removal of the wall, and it is the sudden wall-less-ness of this city that would henceforth serve as a metonym for German-German unity. The fact that Berlin is also a heterogeneous metropolis – home, for example, to the largest Turkish diaspora – marks it as a uniquely suitable setting to ask the question how inclusive the sense of German-German unity really is: who may consider themselves part of this elusive whole that ‘belongs together’? In examining Yadé Kara’s novel Selam Berlin (2002) and Thomas Arslan’s film Geschwister – Kardeşler (1997), this paper aims to explore the very distinct ways in which these two works draw our attention to the artificiality of the notion of national and cultural ‘belonging’ via their protagonists’ interactions with the city, while also considering the shifting status of the Turkish-German community in recent years.

Chloe Fagan Department of Germanic Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

“Albanisches Wien”: Placing Vienna in German Language Albanian Migrant Literature

The past fifteen years have seen an increase in texts produced by authors originally from Albania writing in German- as evidenced by recent trends in the Chamisso Prize winners, with authors of Albanian origin winning in 2012 and 2013 (Ilir Ferra, and Anila Wilms, respectively; both based Vienna)- as well as texts by Germans and Austrians taking Albanian issues as their focus. This Albanian community in Vienna can be contextualised within the development of Interkulturelle Literatur in Austria and the so-called “Eastern Turn” in German language literature, as termed by Brigid Haines, which understands the increased presence of East European and Former Yugoslav authors in German language literature as a result of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Secession Wars in Yugoslavia, and the ensuing refugee culture. Applying Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space as a temporary area where difference can be articulated and which enables a neutral meeting with the Other, my paper will explore how the city of Vienna becomes a Third Space for these authors with a migration background (Ilir Ferra’s Rauchschatten, and Jonila Godole’s Der Kuss des Führers) and enables them to produce texts treating the trauma of the Albanian Communist regime which they would have been unable to in their country of origin, and so contributing to a counter-narrative in Albanian diaspora writing. Following on from this, I will analyse how this Third Space is ultimately ambivalent, as Vienna is portrayed in these texts as a dystopia and an alienating place for these migrants attempting to integrate (Ilir Ferra’s Minus). Finally, my paper will examine the Viennese reception of Albanian migrants (Andrea Grill’s Tränenlachen) before drawing conclusions about how Vienna has come to play a pivotal role in this Albanian extension of the “Eastern Turn”, which I term the “South-Eastern Turn”. Alex Anaya

The German Metropolis Through Japanese Eyes: Existential Angst and Societal Estrangement in Tawada’s Missing Heels and Urasawa’s Monster

The metropolis is an expansive, multiplicitous space governed by social conventions and hierarchies which divide its people into different realms of experience. By merit of traits such as profession, class, or ethnicity, a section of its populace often attain privileged status and come to typify the representative image of citizens and city life. Consequently, alternate ways of being are suppressed or made subaltern and, because the dominant population cannot completely understand or empathize, labels are employed to generalize and other the subaltern. Accordingly, foreigners cannot easily traverse social boundaries and often occupy subordinate domains. Yet, despite their different ethnicity, the Japanese protagonists in Yoko Tawada’s short story “Missing Heels” and Naoki Urasawa’s manga Monster gain membership amongst the Caucasian milieu. Through a close reading of the protagonists’ experiences within metropolitan Germany, this presentation explores their position within the social hierarchy as tempered by labels applied to them. In doing so it will also detail their disconnection from their homeland and the impact of becoming an estranged Other. Given the continued prevalence of discrete immigrant populations within contemporary society, a greater acknowledgement of these internal Others within our communities is key to stimulating conscious reflection and, perhaps, overcoming ingrained social divisions.

Hugo Fagandini

“Maschinenmusik”: Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis

Throughout its numerous incarnations, brought about by various processes of editing and reconstitution, Fritz Lang’s landmark science-fiction film “Metropolis” has also attracted its fair share of musical interpreters, with more than ten different alternative versions now following on from Gottfried Huppertz’s original score. This paper will look primarily at perhaps the best known, yet also most frequently derided of these: namely that produced in 1984 by electronic musician and producer Giorgio Moroder, a veritable slice of 1980s synth- flavoured nostalgia featuring vocal performances from Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler, Jon Anderson and Freddie Mercury. While certainly the sound of Moroder’s instrumentation may be very much of its time, so too is the way in which it views and reflects the mechanised society observed in Lang’s film, in many ways an update of that divined from Huppertz’s 1927 original. Regardless of its ultimate effectiveness as a film score, far from being a glorified, feature-length music video, it instead presents an alternative means not so much of seeing as hearing the future, as it recontextualises Lang’s visuals to bring their very subject matter – the march of technological progress and its increasing interconnectedness with human civilisation – further into the 20th century.

Matthias Bock

Fetischismus und Selbstentfremdung in Fritz Langs METROPOLIS (1927)

Die Welt- und Selbsterfahrung des modernen Subjekts wird in Fritz Langs Stummfilm Metropolis (1927) als auf grundsätzliche Weise ‚korrumpiert‘ dargestellt: Durch den Rhythmus eines maschinell getakteten ‚Zeitregimes‘ (Rosa 2013) wirken die Individuen ihres Selbst entfremdet, d.h. unter der Gewalt der Maschinen büßen sie ihre Subjektautonomie ein. Während die technologischen Apparaturen, an denen gearbeitet wird, quasi zu leben beginnen, scheinen die Menschen ihrerseits wie zu verdinglichten Automatenwesen degradiert. Dieserart Selbst-Entmächtigung des modernen Subjekts kulminiert im Film in der Erschaffung der unheimlichen Androide Hel, die als dämonische Verführerin der Arbeiterklasse auftritt. Auf einen analytischen Begriff gebracht, kann die beschriebene Transformation des Subjekt-Objekt-Verhältnisses als ‚Fetischismus‘ verstanden werden (vgl. Böhme 2006). ‚Fetischistisch‘ ist aber nicht nur das entfremdete Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Maschine zu nennen; vielmehr entspinnt sich um die (Heils-)Figur der Maria ein archaisch- religiöser Götzenkult, wobei die Frauengestalt selbst zum angebeteten, „fetischisierten Kultobjekt der Faszination und Verehrung der Arbeiter“ (Böhme 2001, S. 289) wird. Die These meines Vortrags lautet, dass Fetischismus nicht nur Symptom einer Selbstentfremdung des Subjekts in der Moderne ist, sondern zugleich auch dessen Kompensation verheißt.

Dennis Schäfer, The Ohio State University

Monströse Metropolis: E.T.A. Hoffmann und die Schatten des expressionistischen Films

In der expressionistischen Filmepoche lebt „jene halb-reale Zwischenwelt E.T.A. Hoffmanns“ (Lotte Eisner) fort. Anstatt jedoch die schwarzromantische Folie umtriebiger Figuren wie Caligari, Orlok oder Mabuse wie oftmals in der Kritik anzuführen, ohne sie näher zu betrachten, konstatiere ich eine Kontinuitätslinie zwischen Hoffmann und Filmemachern wie Robert Wiene, F.W. Murnau und Fritz Lang, für die das Monster als konstitutiver Konnex fungiert. Wie Hoffmanns Serienmörder Cardillac, der in Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819) die finsteren Gassen der Pariser Großstadt beherrscht, machen auch seine expressionistischen Wiedergänger die Stadt zum Schauplatz des Verbrechens über die Mobilisierung einer Ästhetik des Helldunkels. Einerseits fungiert der monströse Cardillac als spiritus rector der dichterischen Entfaltung seiner Gegenspielerin Madeleine de Scuderi. Andererseits steht beispielsweise Fritz Langs Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) als teufelsgleich-monströser Herrscher über die Unterwelt im völligen Fokus cineastischer Darstellungsmodi. Das Monster sollte demnach in seiner wesentlichen Rolle in der Kunstproduktion gesehen werden, die die Schwarze Romantik wie auch der expressionistische Film qua der Exploration einer in Finsternis getauchten Großstadt – einer Metropolis der Monster – artikulieren.

Julia Scho

Polyphonie der Metropole - Alfred Döblins "Berlin Alexanderplatz" und Simon Evans Sprachkunstcollagen im Kontext poststrukturalistischer Lesarten

Es lebten einmal im Paradies zwei Menschen, Adam und Eva. [...] Mit den Händchen klapp, klapp, klapp, mit den Füßchen trapp, trapp, trapp, einmal hin, einmal her, ringsherum, es ist nicht schwer. (Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz)

In Döblins Roman „Berlin Alexanderplatz“ durchschreitet der Protagonist Franz Biberkopf die Großstadt und ihre verschiedenen Sprachebenen. Beheimatet in der Sphäre des Dialektes und der einfachen Handlungsebene wird sein Weg von einer höheren Macht durchstoßen. Die verschiedenen Sprachebenen – Alltagssprache/Dialekt – journalistischer Stil/Werbung – Wissenschaftssprache und die Ebene der „Ursprache“ des Mythos / der Bibel formen die Schauplätze der Großstadt. Gerade die letzte Ebene der „Ursprache“ verlässt die deskriptive Ebene und wird zu einem erhöhten Standpunkt, der die Stadt und die Schicksale seiner Bewohner lesbar macht. Anhand von poststrukturalistischen Lesarten im Sinne Michel de Certeaus Raumproduktion, Roland Barthes Intertextualität und Deleuze und Guattaris Rhizoms, soll Döblins Metropole neu entdeckt werden und die Implikationen ihrer Vielsprachigkeit offen gelegt werden. Die Polyphonie ist nicht nur Reizüberflutung, sondern öffnet den Roman und die Sprache.

In einem zweiten Schritt sollen die Sprachkunstcollagen des britischen Künstlers Simon Evans und seine produktive Polyphonie im Zuge der Metropole genauer eruiert werden. Evans schafft in seinen Kunstwerken einen Dialog mit der Stadt und verortet sich durch seine Sprache in ihr.

(Werkbeispiele von Simon Evans finden sich unter: http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/simon-evanstm)

Syamala Roberts (Cambridge)

Sounds of the Modern City

The new outer and inner impressions diagnosed by Georg Simmel in 1903 were naturally accompanied by a changing soundscape. New forms of transport and developments in ‘mass culture’ led to very different categories of aural perception. The assault of stimuli discussed, among others, by Simmel and Walter Benjamin, is often visual in nature, and I will begin my paper with a consideration of the visual art of Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most famous creators of modern music. Schoenberg became well-known for his use of dissonance – the defining trait of modern acoustic experience – in his twelve-tone serial compositions. After considering one of Schoenberg’s ‘city paintings’, the Gehendes Selbstporträt (1911), we will move on to a discussion of acoustic representations of the city, examining how the noises of traffic, hawkers, crowds, etc. are incorporated into modern music. Our main concern will be to reflect upon the purpose of urban music - we want to hear familiar, everyday sounds in music? Is music for dancing, for listening, for background? Is the purpose of music to echo our normal soundworld, or should it be edifying? Many of the questions here suggest the same issues that were raised by the advent of abstract art, with which Schoenberg was associated. This paper will consider sound, ‘the forgotten sister of the image’, and its potential for representation and revolution in the modern city. Syamala Roberts Jesus College, Cambridge [email protected]

Daniel Kubiak (HU Berlin)

Ostdeutsche Großstädte als Diskussionsfolie für Identitätskonstruktionen

Seit der Wiedervereinigung werden Ostdeutsche zum Thema gemacht. Sie tauchen in den öffentlichen Diskursen meist dann auf, wenn etwas besonderes passiert: Prügelnde Fußballfans, Kindsmörder*innen, Rechtsextremismus. Der "Othering"-Diskurs über Ostdeutsche beeinflusst Identitäts- und Identifikationsprozesse (siehe für die Theorie dazu vor allem Stuart Hall) der jungen ostdeutschen Erwachsenen, die in den neuen Bundesländern geboren wurden, so meine These. Sie haben die DDR nicht mehr selbst erlebt und sich doch durch die Biografien ihrer Eltern und den medialen Diskursen für ihr Selbstbild als Ostdeutsche beeinflussen lassen. Wie geschieht das? Zu dieser Frage habe ich für mein Promotionsprojekt Gruppendiskussionen mit jungen Ostdeutschen zwischen 20 und 25 Jahren in ost- und westdeutschen Großstädten (Berlin, Bremen, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, Köln, Leipzig, Rostock) zum Jahreswechsel 2015/2016 geführt (also zur Hochzeit von PEGIDA in Dresden) und sie darüber diskutieren lassen, was Identität und Ost-/Westdeutschsein für sie bedeutet. Für meinen Vortrag werde ich die Aushandlungsprozesse zwischen Stadt und Land im Identitätsprozess der jungen Ostdeutschen vorstellen. Dabei spielt sowohl die Herkunft aus ländlichen Regionen und die "Flucht" in die Großstadt eine Rolle, als auch die Aushandlungsprozesse mit den aktuellen Phänomenen wie PEGIDA und LEGIDA in Dresden und Leipzig. Viele ostdeutsche Großstädte stehen in den Diskursen eben nicht für Simmels kosmopolitische Stadt der Freiheit. Für junge Ostdeutsche bedeutet das Leben dort die Auseinandersetzung mit Bewegungen, die das urbane Leben be- und einschränken und Menschen aus der städtischen Bürgergesellschaft ausschließen wollen. Insofern scheint der Begriff "Metropolis" für den speziellen Fall ostdeutscher Großstädte eine hervorragende Diskussionsfolie zu sein, um die die Stadt-Land-Differenz auch globaler besprechen zu können.

Ariel Leutheusser

Inheriting and Constructing the Past as Object: Making and Filling Gaps in Julia Franck’s Berlin

Julia Franck’s writings make manifest the metropolis as a breathing, pulsating site – where present, past and future are woven together in its very material nature. The city of Berlin is made palpable within her pages as a living, still-present space that one can walk through, recall and recognize while also preserving the complicated histories of the city. The ways in which these histories adhere and disappear, in terms of both their surfaces in terms of architecture and mainstream culture, as well as in terms of the subcultures and diverse lives that are able to be fostered in their myriad niches, are placed in relief within the pages of her novels. Franck’s family’s history undergirds her historically-inflected works, and within them she constitutes an astonishing amalgam of historical and imaginative experience towards illuminating affective histories and memory. Allowing the writings of family members to inspire and to weave their way through her work enables for her to illuminate lives lived and forgotten, heretofore only preserved in within her discrete family history. Her use of family members’ writings and life histories as the frameworks for her works also begs the question of the agency of her subjects – grounded strongly in historically existing people – and forces us to confront the accompanying ethical questions to such an effort. The historical, family novel and the stakes of writing one’s family’s history – and the particular complications when that history is folded into the many-layered history of a metropolis, lies at the center of this consideration of Franck’s writings. The work of the individual in service of the family and of the greater collective of city and nation, as presently conceptualized and as coping with its past, is integral to reading Franck’s work, illuminating contemporary ways of literarily relating to the past. The site of the metropolis, a dense, living whole made of myriad, disparate parts, constitutes a particularly charged site in which to examine one’s family’s history and the history of nation written within the city. The task of confronting the past through writing one’s own and one’s family’s life constitutes a double-act of making and filling gaps in order to weave a palpable affective encounter with lives lived, and with those lives intertwined with the living history of the metropolis.

Elizabeth Baldwin Gray

Hannah Höch: Dadaist Photomontage and the Modern City

Through congested accumulations of re-appropriated mass media clippings, Dadaist photomontage seeks to convey the self-contradictions Dada sees as inherent in the lived experience of modern urban existence. Sharp-edged contrasts within Dada’s visual “constellations” recreate the crowded, discontinuous external environment of the modern city. Unexpected, abrupt juxtapositions of familiar images were meant to shock the viewer out of his or her presumed bourgeois complacency, revealing cultural patterns of hypocrisy, self- deception, and repression. As Eberhardt Roters explains, rather than the “ideal picture of an intact world” represented by painted composition, “the principle of montage embodies the picture of the tangible contradictions within the urban world.” As a representation of modern subjectivity, formally analogous to urban existence, Dadaist photomontage is arguably a form of realism, akin to the disintegration of cohesive structure Erich Auerbach discerns in modernist literature, in favor of a profusion of apparently random incidents. As a form of political engagement, Dadaist activity, including but not limited to art, addresses the same kinds of concerns about “alienation” which the sociologist Henri Lefebvre considers in his response to Hegel and Marx. Dada can be understood as an example of what Lefebvre calls “disalienation,” reclaiming the space of the city from the political forces that control it and returning it to its inhabitants.

Hannah McMurray University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Designing the City: Kurt Schwitters and the Dammerstock-Siedlung

In 1929 avant-garde artist, Kurt Schwitters, won the contract to design all printed matter for the Dammerstock-Siedlung exhibition, “Die Gebrauchswohnung”. This new suburb of Karlsruhe, designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, was intended to reimagine modern city living in affordable, hygienic, and artistic [künstlerisch] homes. In his designs, Schwitters sought to create a logo and new typeface that would reflect the ideals of the Gebrauchswohnung. While initially only intended for the purposes of the exhibition, both are still in use today and have become an integral part of the aesthetics of the Dammerstock-Siedlung. This is just one example of a widespread phenomenon in the 1920s, in which avantgarde artists were hired by cities to design typography, official documents, and adverts, that brought experimental design to the forefront of city life (Walter Dexel’s Lichtreklame in Jena and Paul Renner’s typography for Frankfurt’s street signs, for example). I use Schwitters’ designs for the Dammerstock-Siedlung as a case study, firstly, as a means to consider the seeming tension between avant-garde art and functional design for everday life. And secondly, I explore the intersection of graphic design and architecture/urban planning that became a central concern in avant-garde circles at this time.

Tara Hottman

The Metropolis, Film, and History: Hito Steyerl’s Die leere Mitte

In this paper, I examine filmmaker and media artist Hito Steyerl’s exploration of the history of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in Die leere Mitte (The Empty Center, 1998). Juxtaposing contemporary footage of the square with archival images taken from Weimar feature films and documentary footage of pre- and post- wall Berlin, Steyerl’s film reveals the visible and invisible political and cultural borders that crisscross this modern space and traces the relationship between image production and technologies of state violence and control. The film superimposes moving images from disparate moments in Berlin’s history upon one another, illustrating moments of similarity and coherence. In contrast to a linear, irreversible or homogenous continuum, The Empty Center conveys an understanding of history as a discontinuous space. The philosophy of history articulated by the film consciously references the work of Siegfried Kracauer and his writings on film, mass culture, and history. The film takes up Kracauer’s premise that cultural phenomena expresss underlying social tendencies and communicate historical knowledge. Steyerl uses these current and archival images of Berlin as pieces of historical evidence to construct a history of the metropolis, one that illustrates the ways in which the past is not always past.

Ben Dalton

Dwelling after affect: Michael Haneke's cityscapes at the end of the world

Michael Haneke's metropolitan cityscapes are fragmented, disaffected worlds in which social, affective existence is already over. Haneke’s “emotionale Vergletscherung” trilogy – Der siebente Kontinent (1989), Benny’s Video (1991), and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994) – portray individuals and families for whom the worst has already happened. Whether the suicidal family with no reason to continue in Der siebente Kontinent, the sociopathic boy who murders a young girl without feeling in Benny’s Video, or the disjointed snapshots of lives that lead to seemingly senseless mass murder in 71 Fragmente, Haneke’s protagonists seem to be unwittingly living an existence past emotion and affect. The traumas they have undergone – often unlocatable or unexplained – defy the redemptive frameworks of psychology or psychoanalysis, and hint at the workings of more radical, non-dialectical traumas. In this paper I will draw upon Catherine Malabou’s theory of disaffection in the post-traumatic subject to argue that Haneke’s subjects suffer in ways beyond that of the psychoanalytic subject; further, I will argue that Haneke stages this exploration directly in relation to the architectures of the urban metropolis, and the forms of dwelling possible within it.

In her 2007 book “The New Wounded”, Catherine Malabou re-examines Freudian conceptions of trauma, arguing that contemporary examples of trauma – from brain injury to the victims of natural disaster – demonstrate radical changes in post-traumatic subjects that are irreducible to psychoanalytic disturbances of the libido or drive. These subjects have “died before being dead”, having somehow lived past “the end”, irrevocably changed and unrecognizable to even themselves. I argue that Haneke’s oeuvre privileges exactly this class of the “new wounded”, and that the urban dwellings that they inhabit stage these new conceptions of trauma in architecture. Whilst I will concentrate on Haneke’s glaciation trilogy, my paper will end with a consideration of Haneke’s most recent Francophone film Amour (2012); here, the disintegration of the protagonist Anne’s brain following a stroke is narrated through the architectural primacy of her Parisian apartment, a cinematic inhabitation which simultaneously problematizes and supports the capacity for dwelling of its post-traumatic inhabitant.

Stephan Ehrig

'The flâneuse and modernist space' in Lothar Warneke's 'Die Beunruhigung' and Helmut Dziuba's 'Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre'

In the context of DEFA’s so called ‘Frauenfilme’, the paper will investigate female city walking and its relation to the representation and implementation of modernist architecture and urban space in Lothar Warneke’s ‘Die Beunruhigung’ and Helmut Dziuba’s ‘Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre’, (both 1982). For both female protagonists, city walking becomes an existential means to overcome a personal crisis: Inge Herold, a cynical couple therapist and single mother, is diagnosed with breast cancer, and the orphan Sabine Kleist learns that her substitute mother, a caretaker, will abandon her due to her pregnancy. After a moment of shock, both ‘women’ decide to abandon their routines and start wandering around East Berlin. In their existential flânerie, the urban space becomes a metaphor for their forlornness, and they discover various microcosms that represent the diversity of city living even under ‘really existing socialism’. Simultaneously, East Berlin is subject of their quest for self-assurance. Sabine desperately seeks to find new parents and Inge visits old acquaintances from her youth to fix the wounds of the past, and even whilst partially looking back, both female characters must walk the city in order to have a future at all.

Ruth Dawson

Texting the classed and gendered (eighteenth-century) metropolis

Eighteenth-century writers and artists were fascinated by the fast-growing cities around them, “those stupendous works of time and human industry, which mankind, by whom they were produced, behold at length with astonishment, as doubting whether in reality they are the work of their hands.” When the texts, in words and images, that eighteenth-century observers produced are examined across the grain, it is possible to tease out the less obvious references to two of urban society’s powerful structural elements, the status categories of gender and class. The metropolis, with its functions of commerce, communication, entertainment, and, usually, royal representation, was a place where possibilities of class mobility confronted often gendered efforts to maintain social boundaries and restrain animosities. Using a street-level approach and focussing chiefly on German accounts of London, we can notice the urban rhythms of gendered and classed work and play (who was doing what, where and when), can inquire into how the poor were problematized and surveilled, and can see how even a simple innovation in the city’s built environment, the sidewalk, helped both to organize and obstruct the functioning of the two status categories.

Anna Rick

Kulissenempfindungen. Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns "Rom, Blicke"

1972 bricht Rolf Dieter Brinkmann zu einem Stipendium nach Rom auf. Als Buch erhält sein "gesteigertes Bewusstsein" für die Stadt den programmatischen Titel "Rom, Blicke". Aus "schnell vorbeispringenden" Eindrücken entstehen "Sinnbilder", in denen sich "die ganze auseinandergesprengte Realität" zusammendrängt. Die ewige Stadt inspiriert ihn zu Kultur- und Kunstkritik ("Kunst: ist keine mehr"). Was bleibt, sind Kulissenempfindungen. Angesichts antiker Ruinen und urbanen Abfalls attestiert Brinkmann Rom und den Römern rein kommerziell ausgerichteten Tourismus. Und entspricht damit Walter Benjamins Sozialtyp des Flaneurs, denn: "Wenn man alle Städteschilderungen, die es gibt, nach dem Geburtsorte der Verfasser in zwei Gruppen teilen wollte, dann würde sich bestimmt herausstellen, daß die von Einheimischen verfaßten sehr in der Minderzahl sind. Der oberflächliche Anlaß, das Exotische, Pittoreske wirkt nur auf Fremde." Goethes "Italienische Reise" dient Brinkmann zugleich als Vor- und Gegenbild. Im Fokus stehen "Ort, Raum, Zeit" und der "Verrottungszusammenhang" der gesamten westlichen Zivilisation, aber immer auch das Schreiben, genauer: eine Poetologie der Gegenwart. Wie sich diese in seinem Aufzeichnungskonvolut entfaltet? Unter anderem, so eine vorläufige These, qua Materialität, nämlich mittels Collagen aus Notizen, Briefen, Land- und Postkarten, die das Auseinandergesprengte zusammensetzen.

Hanna Hesse

„Belehrung mancher Art“: Fanny Lewald und Julius Rodenberg in London

Im 19. Jahrhundert wird das Reisen zu einem Massenphänomen und der „Wahrnehmungsreiz“ Großstadt (Brüggemann) führt zu einer Konjunktur an Stadtbeschreibungen, von denen zwei herausragende im Mittelpunkt meines Vortrags stehen sollen. Die Schriftstellerin Fanny Lewald (1811–1889) verbringt den Sommer des Jahres 1850 in London, und bereits im Folgejahr erscheint der erste Band ihres zweiteiligen Reiseberichts „England und Schottland“, in dem sie die englische Hauptstadt ausführlich schildert. Der Journalist und Schriftsteller Julius Rodenberg (1831–1914) reist nur wenige Jahre später mehrfach durch England, Wales und Irland und lebt für längere Zeit in London; von seinen Aufenthalten zeugen u. a. die Reisebeschreibungen „Alltagsleben in London. Ein Skizzenbuch“ (1860) und „Tag und Nacht in London. Ein Skizzenbuch zur Weltausstellung“ (1862). Lewald wie Rodenberg begegnen in London erstmals dem Tempo der modernen Großstadt. Wie gehen sie mit der „Massenhaftigkeit“ (Lewald) der Stadt um, welche Sehgewohnheiten entwickeln sie und wie schlagen sich diese narrativ nieder? Welche räumlichen Semantisierungsmuster lassen sich angesichts der Konfrontation mit der irritierend-überwältigenden Metropole erkennen, welche topischen Konstanten? Und lässt sich möglicherweise zwischen einem weiblichen und einem männlichen Großstadtempfinden bzw. einer geschlechterspezifischen Aneignung des Großstadtraumes differenzieren? Hier setzt der Vortrag an und analysiert die beiden Reiseberichte hinsichtlich der Selbstbehauptung des (schreibenden) Individuums.