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Southeast German Studies Workshop
aaaaaUniversity of South Carolina at Columbia, March 5-6, 2009 |
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Workshop Panel I: German Landscapes, German Cityscapes
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Over the past two decades our field has witnessed the emergence of space (and the human manipulation of space) as an important category of historical and cultural investigation. This “spatial turn” initially found its strongest expression in studies of urban history and culture: Carl Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna (1981) set the precedent for a flood of interdisciplinary work on cities past and present, with the rise of the “ New Berlin” in the 1990s placing that city at the forefront of research on urban culture. Indeed, the explosion of studies on the German capital and its (literary, historical, cartographic, filmic, museal) representations often seems to have obscured important work (by Jennifer Jenkins, Gavriel Rosenfeld, and Martin Geyer, to name but a few) on less prominent cities in German-speaking central Europe. Considerations of the German landscape were neglected, too, when the spatial turn first made itself felt. In recent years, however, interest has begun to shift from urban culture and experience to the rural environment: David Blackbourn’s The Conquest of Nature (2006) and John Williams’ Turning to Nature in Germany (2007) are just two of the most prominent titles among a growing list of works that examine German obsessions with and manipulations of the (supposedly natural) environment.
This panel brings together German Studies scholars who engage in research on cityscapes and landscapes from a wide variety of perspectives (environmental history, theories of space, urban planning, architecture, literary criticism, etc.) for a conversation about the country and the city. We invite position papers that explore notions, representations, and experiences of the urban and/or the rural in German history and culture; we welcome especially contributions that problematize the routine distinctions made between “the urban” and “the rural” in German Studies.
Submissions might address:
--environmental historiography
--the politics of water, aquaforming, and reclamation
--cityscapes and landscapes as palimpsests
--cosmopolitanism
--urban horticulture: Schrebergärten, garden cities, and parks
--the history of “back-to-nature” movements (Lebensreform, Naturheilkunde, FKK, Wandervogel, etc.)
--images of urban and rural life on screen
--“hinterlands” and “backwaters”
--intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the city and/or the country
--ecological imperialism in the German context
--representation of cityscapes and landscapes in music
--landscape and memory
--literary representations of the rural
--New Urbanism and its discontents
--the figures who negotiate urban/rural spaces (the Wanderer, the Flâneur, the pilgrim, the tourist)
--reading and writing the city
--landscape painting and photography
--pastoral nostalgia
--rural, urban, and suburban planning
--war and the (built) environment
--conservation and preservation
--technology and the transformation of landscapes/cityscapes
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Workshop Panel II: Ethnicity and German Studies aa
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An understanding of the deployment of ethnic categories is of signal importance for students of German history and culture. The experience, impact, and legacies of colonialism, Nazism, and genocide together with waves of immigration in the post-war period have contributed to a culture in which ethnic identity and national identity are intertwined in ways that are very difficult to tease out. The German context is complicated by the fact that The Ethnic is not necessarily The Other in German political discourse. Claudia Koonz has argued, for instance, that “the history of Nazi Germany reveals how pretensions to ethnicvirtue created the conditions within which evil metasticized.” The notion of “Volk” mobilized by Hitler effectively reinvented Germans as a virtuous ethnic majority. More recently, the influx of so-called “Spätaussiedler”—ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union—has served to revitalize those notions of ethnic German identity that appeared to have gone underground for several decades. At the same time, the fall of the USSR lead to a resurgence of the Jewish population in Germany. The idea of a “freiheitliche deutsche Leitkultur” sparked fierce debates about the status and role of Turkish-Germans, Afro-Germans, and other ethnic minorities in Germany at the start of this decade, but such debates often serve to simply perpetuate and reify ethnic identities. Meanwhile, the success of the far-right FPÖ in recent elections points to a revival of ethnic panic in Austria: party leader Heinz-Christian Strache ran on an anti-Muslim platform for an Austria in which “the minaret has no place.”
For the historian Michael Geyer, transnational history is a practice that wagers “that even the most parochial and inward-turned worlds are imbricated in other worlds of action and imagination that range beyond parish or nation.” Ethnic identity is just one arena in which we can find evidence of those “other worlds of action and imagination.” We are interested, too, in the intersectionality of ethnic identity with religious, racial, gender, sexual, regional, and national identities. How does an individual negotiate the often conflicting imperatives with which such models confront them? And, conversely, how does the discursive isolation of a particular ethnic identity create the illusion of hegemony and “natural” authority for those in the dominant culture? Does A. Dirk Moses’ notion of the post-Holocaust non-German German (Germans who “disavow their own national selves while excoriating the national selves of their compatriots”) ignore the positionality of ethnic minorities in contemporary Germany?
We invite position papers that explore how the notion of ethnicity has impacted aspects of German history and culture. Contributions that deal with the post-war period are especially encouraged. Submissions might consider:
--the German “Leitkultur” debates
--post-colonial perspectives on German/Austrian culture
--representations of ethnic experience in literature, music, and visual arts
--German-Jewish identity after the Holocaust
--public celebrations of ethnicity in the German-speaking world
--dress and ethnicity
--race and ethnicity as distinct concepts
--Afro-German culture and history
--the gendering of ethnic minorities
--hybridity and ethnicity
--representations of Turkish-German experience
--Germans as ethno-tourists
--German colonialism
--ethnic identity and citizenship
--ethnic panic in contemporary German/Austrian/Swiss society
--religion and ethnicity throughout German/Austrian/Swiss history
--assimilation versus integration
--legacies of cultural relativism
--marketing to ethnic groups
--ethnic groups as communities of moral obligation
--ethnically-identified institutions in the German-speaking world
--Austrian nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire as an ethnic “melting pot”
--ethnic-German minorities
--performativity and ethnicity
--ethnicity and the law |
Workshop Panel III: Why the Senses Matter aaaallllllaaa
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“Sound matters!” insist Nora Alter and Lutz Koepnick in their edited volume of Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). Characterizing sound as “a viable space of critical exploration, a productive register of social and cultural analysis in various academic disciplines,” Alter and Koepnick present a series of studies on sound (or silence) and German nationhood, on the dissonance of modernism, on the soundtracks of globalization, on postmodernism and music. It is in this spirit that, for our third panel, we invite participants to consider just how and why not only sound but also sight, taste, touch, and smell might matter for German Studies.
The historicization of perception is familiar territory when we consider how film, photography, painting, posters, caricatures and a range of other expressions of visual culture have been explored by German Studies scholars in recent decades. We remain in the dark, however, when it comes to the history and representation of the other senses. While plenty has been published on the cultural history of music, other aspects of acoustic culture have been less well explored. Richard Leppert has investigated The Sight of Sound in British and Dutch art, but how is sound represented in the visual arts in the German-speaking world? Is the act of Listening in Paris as described by James Johnson very different from the act of listening in Dresden or Vienna? And what if we approach German history and literature from a gustatory, tactile, or olfactory angle? What can taste, touch, and smell tell us about German notions of self and other; the construction of class, gender, or national identities; or the practice of everyday life?
The panel further offers an opportunity to consider the effects of sensory input, as the history of the senses is entwined with the history of emotions and emotional regimes. Fear, love, shock, disgust, joy, terror, shame, anger—how are such affects triggered by and refracted through the senses? Is the spectacle really relying on visual stimuli alone, or are other senses implicated in the very notion of the spectacular? Are the decadent and aestheticist movements embracing or critiquing a kind of sensory overload? Do fin de siècle diagnoses of neurasthenia privilege certain modes of response to sensory input? What other questions can cultural histories of listening, looking, tasting, smelling, and touching shed light on?
Participants in this roundtable might consider:
--the representation of sensual experience in music
--artistic or literary renderings of listening, looking, tasting, smelling, or touching
--the history of “taste” in its literal and figurative senses
--olfactory experience in literature
--theories of city life as an onslaught on the senses
--class and cooking
--the rise of restaurant culture
--marketing to the senses
--metaphors of consumption
--admonitions not to touch
--ekphrastic writing as a mediation of sensory experience
--disease and the senses
--is there a “sensual logic of late capitalism”?
--the cultural history of blindness, deafness, etc.
--the smell of the city/the country
--taste, smell, and memory
--sensory deprivation as torture
--the senses in Benjamin, Simmel, Kracauer or other cultural commentators
--affect and the senses
--the “sixth sense”
--Catholicism and sensuality
--sensory evocations in representations of the Holocaust
--revisiting Merleau- Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
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