2014 Colloquium Participants
Mary Boldt received her B.A. from Wilson College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. For twelve years she taught in the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Hartwick College, where she co-authored the book Learning Interdependence: A Case Study of the International/Intercultural Education of First-Year College Students. She currently is Associate Professor of German at York College of Pennsylvania, teaching courses in German language, literature, and culture. Her most recent publication was the jointly authored “Text Translation: Approaching Otherness” in Language in the Real World. She has delivered talks in the United States and Austria on special-needs learners in the second-language classroom and is also engaged in research on translation of Brecht as well as screen translation. Additionally, she maintains an ongoing interest in Foreign Language Across the Curriculum.
“Art, Graphic Design, and Interdisciplinarity in German Studies”: Opportunities for incorporating visual culture abound at all levels of the hypothetical “standard” German Studies curriculum, beginning at the elementary level, as instructors attempt to embed visual as well as aural, tactile, and kinesthetic elements into their lessons to address multiple learning styles. Images are a powerful tool for stimulating memory as well as motivation, and occupy a place of central importance in popular instructional programs such as Auf geht’s. Some German Studies programs incorporate film-based approaches at the intermediate level. In the rushed world of many German programs whose primary focus is at the elementary and intermediate levels, however, little time exists to discuss the rich visual heritage of the German-speaking world in any depth, as a subject unto itself. This presentation will address the colloquium’s salient questions from a pragmatic, interdisciplinary angle, by providing two examples of York College students who combined their love of visual arts with their love of German language and culture.
Michelle Brüssow (“‘Verstehen braucht Sehen’ - Über die Bedeutung der Visualisierung im Fremdsprachenunterricht”) has been teaching beginning German at Binghamton University since August 2013. She earned her B.A. in German Studies/Philosophy from the University of Potsdam (Germany) and her M.A. in Literary Studies from the Free University in Berlin. She taught German as a Foreign Language at the University in Montenegro. She is currently completing an M.A. in Comparative Literature. Her particular research interests are (alternative) methods and didactics in foreign language teaching.
Tom Hänel (“Potential der Werbung für den Fremdsprachenunterricht anhand praktischer Beispiele”) teaches German at Binghamton University. He earned a Magister in German as a Foreign Language, Political Science and Social- and Economic History from the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.
Christin Weitzmann (“Kulturelle Frames im Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache – ein Unterrichtsbeispiel”) is the DAAD Language Assistant at Binghamton University. She teaches Elementary and Intermediate German and Conversation Courses. She earned an M.A. in Communication Studies and Linguistics as well as a B.A. in German as a Foreign Language and Scandinavian Studies from the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität in Greifswald. She has taught at the Latvias Universitate in Riga. Her research interests focuse on E-Learning methods and their contribution to learners’ motivation.
Panel Abstract: “Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte – Werbung im DaF-Unterricht”: Auch wenn die bekannte Redewendung übertreiben mag, bieten Bilder die Möglichkeit komplexe Sachverhalte zu reduzieren. Nicht zuletzt dadurch bergen sie ein hohes Potential für den Fremdsprachenunterricht. In kaum einem anderen Bereich sind Bilder so prägnant wie in der Werbung. Als spezielle Art des Bildverstehens, eignet sich Werbung zur Vermittlung landeskundlicher Inhalte und als Anregung zum interkulturellen Vergleich. Zudem bietet Werbung einen Anlass, sowohl über sprachliche als auch über stilistische Merkmale zu reflektieren. Als authentisches Bildmaterial kann es Werbung ermöglichen, handlungsorientierte Kommunikation in den Unterricht zu integrieren.
Bastian Heinsohn is Assistant Professor of German at Bucknell University (Pennsylvania), where he teaches German language and culture courses as well as seminars in Film Studies.He received his Ph.D. from UC Davis in 2009. He is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Street Life: The Representation of Berlin’s Urban Space in German Cinema. Among his recent articles are works on 1950s German cinema (in A New History of German Cinema, eds. Michael Richardson and Jennifer Kapczynski, 2012) and on the local as counterspace in recent Berlin literature (in Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel, 2010). Forthcoming is an article on the role of graffiti as text in Berlin’s Linguistic Landscape in an anthology on Social Justice in Germany. The anthology will appear at Camden House in 2014.
“What the Study of Graffiti and Street Art Reveals about Current Issues of Migration and Globalization in Germany – Case Study: Berlin”: The study of visual culture has seen a shift in recent years with an increasing readiness to incorporate the meaning of graffiti, signs, writings, images and posters in the urban landscape into the discipline and thereby impact related disciplines as well. Bridging German Studies, Urban Studies and the Studies of Visual Arts, the examination of graffiti texts on Berlin streets reveals intriguing connections between street art as forms of language and trajectories in urban planning in post-wall Germany, and a discourse among citizens in a contested city space. Street art is an integral part of the landscape in Berlin, which has undergone a dramatic urban transformation since 1989. Entire areas, especially along the former Mauerverlauf, have been completely planned and built or re-designed. Not quite yet a global city, Germany’s capital is nevertheless subject to processes of globalization and to an increasingly rational and well-planned organization of its urban landscape. Graffiti writings are attempts to respond to the language of power exercised by urban planners in times of globalization.These forms of visual culture are increasingly captured in meaningful ways in German cinema such as in Thomas Arslan’s Berlin trilogy (Geschwister [1997], Dealer [1999], and Der Schöne Tag [2001]), which portrays the daily life of young Turkish immigrants in Berlin. Various forms of readable and significant texts mark the visual landscape in Arslan’s trilogy. Graffiti code the protagonists’ immediate urban environment as a site of resistance in highly contested urban area. This talk illuminates the manner in which graffiti on the streets of Berlin and graffiti as visual elements in recent films allow German Studies scholars to decode and to understand the inner workings of contemporary Germany in times of globalization.
Anett Holzheid studierte Germanistik, Anglistik/Amerikanstik an den Universitäten Würzburg und SUNY Albany; Aufbaustudium der philologischen Informations- u. Textanalyse (Würzburg); Dissertation zur Medienkultur der Postkarte; Lehrtätigkeit in der Germanistik der Univ. Würzburg, 2004–2013 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in der Germanistik der Universitäten Erfurt (Lehrstuhl für Sprache der Gegenwart) und Mainz (Bereich: Literaturwisenschaft / Germanist. Medienwissenschaft u. Ästhetik der textorientierten Medien), seit 2013 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Mediengeschichte und Visuelle Kultur der Universität Siegen.
“Literatur im Raum. Zur Neubestimmung von Schrift in der Medienkunst”: In der digitalen Medienkultur ist eine Ausweitung der literarischen Schriftzone zu beobachten, wobei insbesondere in den Künsten die ästhetischen, funktionalen und konzeptuellen Reichweiten von Schrift derzeit ausgetestet werden. Nicht nur folgt die Schrift wie das Bild dem Dispositiv des Displays, wodurch Schrift, anstatt dauerhaft zu erscheinen, von nutzergesteuerter flüchtiger Präsenz und erlebnisorientierter Wahrnehmung bestimmt ist. Als Teil medienkonvergenter multimodaler Szenarien wird Schrift zunehmend vor allem räumlich verankert und gleichermaßen in den institutionalisierten Kunsträumen (Oper, Museum) wie im städtischen Raum inszeniert oder installiert. Damit wird Schrift zu einem validen Bestandteil visueller Kultur, mit dem ein sinnlich-intellektuelles Momentum jenseits kommerzialisierter Bereiche geschaffen werden kann. Vor dem Hintergrund, dass sich ein szenografisch orientiertes Schriftbewusstsein infolge einer veränderten globalisierten Mediennutzung und Rezeption entwickelt, werden in diesem Beitrag ausgewählte Schriftkunstbeispiele, die im deutschsprachigen Raum produziert oder rezipiert werden, vorgestellt und im Bezug auf die germanistische Praxis diskutiert. Befragt werden Prozesse poetischer Bedeutungskonstruktion, semantischer Aufladung und Tilgung sowie Implikation, Zitation, Überschreibung und Ereignispartizipation neben Techniken der Wahrnehmung und nicht zuletzt die mit neuen Schriftfunktionen verbundene Position des Leser-Betrachters.
Ulrich Kinzel, University of Kiel, Institut für Neuere deutsche Literatur und Medien
http://www.ndl-medien.uni-kiel.de/personal/professoren/ulrich_kinzel
“Text Surfaces. German Concrete Poetry and Art and the Creation of Urban Space”: Concrete poetry emerged as a global literary movement at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s. For German poets and artists it entailed a particular focus on urban spaces like Brasilia, Berlin, or London, places that attracted their interest because they were trying to combine poetry with the visual arts in order to create new, mainly typographical spaces. For the creation of this new dimension of literature and arts, the experience of a metropolis was obviously of great importance, as the emerging machinery of traffic and communication provided the inspiration for poets and artists alike to reflect on the rising importance of signs and sign spaces. The exhibitions and activities of the London ICA in the 1960s, for example, became a laboratory for this new movement which also included German poets, artists and printers like Winfred Gaul, Franz Mon or Hansjörg Mayer. As their immediate aesthetic intention was to create typographical, material space in opposition to the traditional concept of an immaterial aesthetic process articulating itself in time, the cultural intentions of German concrete poetry went way beyond the space on or of the page; these artists needed the new experience of urban communication to create their new visions of semiotic urban space, which merged word and image, poetry and visual arts to produce text surfaces that were meant to become real spaces in contemporary cities. This presentation aims to show how German concrete poets and artists in the 1960s fused word and image in order to create a new artistic reality – text surfaces or text graphics. This attempt is placed in the context the emerging theory of semiotic urban space as developed by Max Bense.
Eckhard Kuhn-Osius studied in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States and obtained a Ph.D. in German from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978 with a dissertation on the topic “On Understanding Narrative Texts: Epistemological and Semiological Prolegomena for a Methodology of Literary Scholarship.” He taught at the University of Colorado, Vassar College, Princeton University, Columbia University before coming to Hunter College in 1984. At Hunter he has been involved in various grant-related activities to reconfigure the German program along proficiency principles to make the study of German accessible to non-heritage students. From 1990 till 2012 he served as the Chair of the National German Examination Commission of the American Association of Teachers of German and has worked in various capacities on the German Advanced Placement Test and other standardized tests. He has published numerous articles and reviews on literary and pedagogical topics. He has written an introductory textbook series which has been used at Hunter and other universities for over fifteen years. His literary research focuses mainly on the right-wing response to the experience of World War I and questions of hermeneutics and epistemology. He has been involved in study abroad programs since 1975 and presently directs the Hunter College summer program in Kassel.
“Bevor sie Kunst wurden: Comics in Westdeutschland von Lurchi, Mecki, Jimmy bis zu Seyfried”: The end of the first phase of German comics production is connected with a major shift in German popular culture. Given German intellectuals’ aversion to Kitsch, most German pop culture shied away from ‘serious’ topics for non-juveniles. Probably due to influences from abroad, this situation has changed in the new millennium with an abundance of seriously-intended pop songs and comic books. This presentation will take a look at some historical comics in (West) Germany, coupled with a rudimentary typology of comics based on the intertextual interplay between image and word. The presentation will look at early advertising comics (Lurchi), the Mecki comics of Hörzu, touch on knock-offs of American comics (Hansrudi Wäscher) and the unique role of Der Stern with both early Loriot comics and the series Jimmy das Gummipferd. We will take a look at the long tradition of ironic adult comics from Nick Knatterton to the countercultural works of Seyfried. They are joined by some notable cartoonists who have never aspired to graphic novel status, including Clodwig Poth, Franziska Becker, Ralf König, and Walter Moers.
Lynn M. Kutch is an Associate Professor of German at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She has published on drama pedagogy to teach difficult texts, the comic book humor of Sonnenallee and regional crime fiction. An anthology on German crime fiction, co-edited with Todd Herzog, is forthcoming. She also has presented extensively on the use of graphic texts in the German language classroom. A forthcoming essay examines the graphic novel version of Die Verwandlung and a related curriculum and assessment model that aims to move students from visual literacy to literary proficiency. She also created and maintains The German Graphic Novel web resource that indexes and reviews contemporary German language graphic texts.
“Contemporary German Graphic Narratives as Tools for Reading and Interpreting Alltagskultur”: When learning about a country like Germany, where the distinction between “high” (literature, art, music, philosophy) and “low” culture (pop culture, film, comics) is still heavily emphasized, the concept of teaching culture and cultural competence could seem especially problematic. Given this traditional divide, the recent proliferation of perhaps traditionally low culture graphic novels that treat conventionally high culture themes such as literature, fine art, and music provides a curious platform for teaching aspects of German culture, and in particular Alltagskultur. The large and continually growing selection of German graphic novels significantly enriches the resources that German instructors have for teaching cultural competence, and the offerings can considerably enliven discussions of culture in the German classroom. This presentation demonstrates ways that instructors can employ methods of “Teaching with Comics” to have students analyze cultural cues found in individual frames or series of frames in contemporary German language graphic novels. The technique involves regarding images as if they were texts themselves, which includes more intentionally analyzing compositions, layouts, colors, and lines in order to draw conclusions about cultural messages. In addition to gleaning information about the culture from the visual components, this presentation will discuss ways to understand visual renditions as an artist’s interpretation of various cultural aspects.
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey (moderator) teaches in the German and Russian Studies Department and the Program for Women Gender and Sexuality at Binghamton University. Areas of scholarship are German film (from Weimar to contemporary German cinema). Her publications include the edited volumes Triangulated Visions (with Ingeborg von Zadow); Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar (with Judith Holland Sarnecki); Riefenstahl Screened. An Anthology of New Criticism (with Neil Christian Pages and Mary Rhiel); and European Cinema: Experiment, Mainstream and Praxis as well as numerous articles on German film and filmmakers (Buket Alakus, Percy Adlon, Aysum Bademsoy, R.W. Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Tom Tykwer).
Barbara Mennel is an Associate Professor in German Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She is the author of Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys (2012), Cities and Cinema (2008), and The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature (2007), and co-editor of Turkish German Cinema for the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens (with Sabine Hake, 2012) and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literature and Visual Culture (with Jaimey Fisher, 2010). Her current book project concerns women and work in contemporary European cinema.
“Revisiting Auteurism: Fatih Akın”: Fatih Akın is one of the most important contemporary German film directors. His films have garnered international scholarly and public attention. Primarily his work has been approached from a Turkish German perspective that traces questions of identity across his different films. This presentation will offer a reading of his films with an emphasis of Akın as auteur. It will address the following questions: what are the challenges and implications of such an approach in the context of transnational film reception? How does his global significance situate German cinema in relationship to transnational film studies? What are the key categories for auteurist readings: style? oeuvre? Are the analytical categories of auteur and nation mutually exclusive or do they enhance each other?
Rosmarie T. Morewedge teaches German language, literature and cultural studies at Binghamton University. Intrigued by problems of narration, she works with medieval historical “minstrel” epics, but also the modern short story and Märchen. Other scholarly interests are poetry and pedagogy. She has published on Wolfram von Eschenbach, medieval poetry, medieval folktales, Märchen and on modern authors, as well as in pedagogy, including a textbook for students of German that develops integrated language/culture skills, close reading and literary interpretation.
“Tangent and Core: Templates of Iconic Images Constructed for a German Cultural History Course”: Iconic images can have compelling relevance for students in culture and civilization courses in German Studies. A pedagogically useful template of images has helped learners in a course focusing on pre-modern civilization to remember the impact of historical figures, events, issues, trends, and developments over time. Spurred on by the historical documentaries produced by ZdF that students have viewed as part of the course, students have tapped into the cultural memory bank of images to link concepts, meaning and interpretation. By itself or in small clusters, each image holds but a tangential meaning; however, when connected with the documentary, other images and when linked to texts, it enables students to comprehend core historical concepts.
Emina Mušanović is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores the contemporary “material turn” and asks what contributions literary studies can make to the debates on environmental degradation and marginalization of variously racialized, gendered, and abled human bodies. She is exploring these questions in a dissertation entitled “The Unruly Modern Object: Shadow Matters in German Thought.” This project is largely interdisciplinary, surveying modern literary, philosophical, and theoretical texts composed in the German language. Her background in media, design, and studio arts allows her to also include visual arts (performance, installation, painting, film) in the scope of her dissertation. She is currently navigating the academic job market.
In Expectation of Illumination, Instead of Seeing I am Seen:
X-ray Vision, the Human, and the Nonhuman: “Das Objektiv hatte in sein Inneres geblickt”: In Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, the objective of the x-ray camera looks into the irradiated interior of the human body and reveals something creaturely: a beating heart. While this particular scene in the sanatorium’s x-ray “atelier” is often discussed, the startling discovery of the beastly when the skin is virtually pulled back is largely overlooked. Unlike the static x-ray image that extends the horizon of Castorp’s gaze and allows him a forbidden glimpse into his own grave, the cinematic x-ray vision in vivo discloses a living creature - an animal at the heart. This scene builds a unique bridge and contrast to Dr. Robert Janker’s controversial, cruel experiments conducted in the 1930s. His film of the alimentary system, for example, combines recordings of an irradiated human head and an animal body to demonstrate processes of ingestion, digestion, and excretion. Much like Mann’s, Janker’s collage associates the human and the nonhuman. However, it also explicitly upholds the notions of human superiority and sanctity while maintaining the presumed baseness of the nonhuman. Thus, although the advent of x-ray technology renders all bodies penetrable, indifferently turning their interior inside out, Janker’s scientific films ultimately pull the skin back over the exposed human bones and organs like a chastity garment. (http://vimeo.com/4567689) By setting these two scenes against each other, with a view to psychoanalysis - another “phenomenology of the invisible” (Lippit 5) that emerges in the same year as x-ray technology - this paper explores the politics and networks (technological and discursive) of visibility. It first demonstrates how advances in technologies of seeing register in literary works. Subsequently, it explores the contributions studies of such texts can make to the understanding of emerging technologies, their broader cultural implications, politics, and the conflicts they engender or suspend.
Elizabeth (Biz) Nijdam is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She received her Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Germanic Studies and Art History from the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island in 2005, where she also graduated with her Masters in German Studies in 2007. Her research is interdisciplinary, and Biz has published and presented on a variety of topics including German comics, painting, architecture, literature and film. In addition to completing the requirements for her Ph.D. program, Biz has done extensive coursework in History of Art, completing her preliminary exams with two teaching fields that crossed into the discipline, abstraction and realism in postwar German painting and German design history, as well as a research field in Comics Studies. Her dissertation project is on post-unification German-speaking art and auteur comics, focusing on the artistic production of three comics collectives that emerged in the 1990s, PGH Glühende Zukunft, Renate, and monogatari. She has taught German language and culture at the University of Michigan as well as History of Art at Wayne State in Detroit.
Teaching Comics in German Studies: The examination of German history by comics is nothing new. Since the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus Volume I in 1986, Volume II in 1991 and his award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, several graphic novels have emerged around the world to recount the Holocaust. Maus opened the floodgates of possibility to comics addressing serious subject matter and forever changed the medium’s relationship with history. This manner of addressing Germany’s Nazi past, however, remained a foreign concept to the country that inspired Spiegelman’s graphic memoirs. Even though Maus was translated into German in 1989, no similar historical analysis of the traumatic years between 1938 and 1945 has been attempted by German authors with any success. More recently, however, East German artists have begun adapting their history into graphic narrative form, with over a dozen graphic novels on East German experience published since 2009. While Maus is being taught in Comparative Literature and English departments across the United States, the culture that inspired Spiegelman’s dark and captivating tale has yet to embrace teaching the graphic novel. My presentation addresses this lacuna in German Studies and articulates the pedagogical merits of teaching German history, culture and language with comics. Looking at the formal characteristics of the medium and the types of content that lend themselves well to classroom use, I examine how and why comics are effective teaching tools, provide insight into the representation of history in graphic narrative form and assess the current state of German-speaking comics. The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of a new trend in representing the East German past. Now, over half a decade later, it is about time that German culture’s graphic turn was welcomed into German Studies.
Neil Christian Pages (moderator) teaches at Binghamton University. His research interests include Austrian, German and Scandinavian cultural productions, commemorative practices, translation and the history of criticism. Publications include essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, W.G. Sebald, Adalbert Stifter, on Rachel Whiteread’s Shoah memorial in Vienna and Michael Haneke’s film Caché. He is co-editor (with Mary Rhiel and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey) of Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism.
Kerstin Petersen is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and works as a Teaching Assistant for the Writing Initiative at Binghamton University. At BU, she has taught Elementary German as well as literature classes on fairy tales and detective fiction. She also works for Special Collections at the university library where she helps to catalogue the Max Reinhardt collection and answers research request relating to Reinhardt. She holds an M.A. in English Literature/History/Philosophy and an M.A. in German as a Foreign Language from the Philipps-Universität Marburg. Her dissertation project deals with the portrayal of different types of villains in eighteenth and early nineteenth century British novels. Her other academic interests include concepts of identity in Victorian and Modern British fiction as well as literary theory focusing on fictional characters.
“Max Reinhardt in the Archive”: It may seem surprising that the largest collection in North and South America of materials relating to the famous theatre director Max Reinhardt is housed here in Binghamton, by the Special Collections, Preservation and University Archives of SUNY Binghamton. During the late 1960s, Harpur College (which later became SUNY Binghamton) was able to acquire what today forms the core of the Max Reinhardt Archives. Theater professor Alfred Brooks later managed to obtain further materials and Helene Thimig, Reinhardt’s widow, donated a large number of items. Today, the Max Reinhardt collection comprises a variety of materials: photographs, programs, letters, documents, parts of Reinhardt’s private library, and original scene design drawings, for example. His “Regiebücher,” however, form the heart of the collection. Special Collections possesses about 150 of these promptbooks containing Reinhardt’s annotations about the plays he was directing. This talk will explore Reinhardt, his life, his role in German-speaking theatre, and the content of the Max Reinhardt Archives.
Geetha Ramanathan is Professor of Comparative Literature at West Chester University. Her publications include Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (2006), and Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Woman (2013). In 2004-2005 she was the Distinguished Chair of Gender Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
“Modernist Visualities Across Media”: Current studies of euro-modernism, despite the rather convoluted plea for attention to high/low cultural texts, remains largely segregated. Anglo literary modernism dwells on Joyce, Conrad, Woolf – urban stream of consciousness, impressionism, and the introduction of the feminist/female through stream of consciousness. German modernism focuses on Mann, Wedekind, Brecht - the breakdown of bourgeois relationships, the lack of authenticity, alienation theatre. Modernist painting is studied ardently on the continent, and categorized into familiar movements: expressionism, surrealism, dada, Neue Sachlichkeit, Nachexpressionismus. Film is studied as a genre apart, and questions of modernity are raised, while modernism is not considered in this arena. A model that includes visual culture; viz., painting, and film with reference to literature allows us to understand the specificity of German modernism in comparison to Anglo, or other continental modernisms. Such an approach intersects with comparative literature, film studies, and art history. This paper explores this possibility by considering German modernism in the context of the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Lang, Walter Ruttmann, and Alfred Döblin.
Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German and Faculty Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. Her areas of specialization include German Film and Asian-German Studies. Together with Neil Christian Pages and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey, she edited the volume Riefenstahl Screened. An Anthology of New Criticism. Camden House recently published her Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies (co-edited with Veronika Fuechtner).
“22 Theses on the Contribution of Visual Studies to German Studies”: Just as early film culture threatened the world of high culture and its hold on representation, film/visual studies, once thought to be unworthy of attention in the ivory tower of Germanistik, has invaded our intellectual life. Who now can imagine an undergraduate or graduate German curriculum in which film and the related visual arts do not play a central role? In honor of Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey’s 22 years at Binghamton University, this presentation will develop 22 pedagogical, programmatic and theoretical “theses” on the contribution of film/visual studies to German Studies.
Karl Ivan Solibakke is an Associate Research Professor for Modern German Literature and Culture at Syracuse University, where he is completing three volumes on cultural memory in visual and textual contexts and three new volumes on Ingeborg Bachmann. Since the publication of his monograph on Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard in 2005, Solibakke has edited more than a dozen volumes on selected authors and produced fifty articles on Walter Benjamin, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich Heine, Uwe Johnson, Goethe, Schiller, Kafka, Thilo Sarrazin, Inge Merkel, and Gustav Mahler. Solibakke was appointed Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for Budget and Long-Range Planning in June 2009 and teaches courses on Aesthetics, Cultural Memory and Modern Literary Theory.
“Bachmanns Romgedicht: Gedanken zur ekphrastischen Rhetorik”” Unzweifelhaft gehört Ingeborg Bachmanns 1954 entstandener Text Was ich in Rom sah und hörte zu einem der anziehendsten Textgebilde der vor 40 Jahren verstorbenen Dichterin. In siebzehn Absätzen unterteilt, aus denen zwei größere Teilstücke von jeweils acht Abschnitten oder Oktaven hervorragen, ist das Prosagedicht eindeutig von einem Zentralabsatz unterbrochen. Dieser Zentralabsatz, der sich einer außergewöhnlichen Abstraktheit zu Eigen macht, dient einerseits als Mittelachse einer Spiegelstruktur und andererseits als ästhetisch-philosophische Leseanweisung. Zweimal acht Oktaven ergibt die Zahl sechzehn, in der Quersumme sieben, und sieben sind die umgrenzenden Hügel Roms im 8., die römischen Geschlechter im 10., wie auch die frühchristlichen Sinnbilder im 14. Abschnitt. Auch wegen der magisch-mystischen Verweisungszusammenhänge in der Erkenntnislehre und in der jüdisch-christlichen Mythologie erweist sich die Zahl – nicht nur im Werke Bachmanns – als bedeutsam für das abendländische Symbolarchiv. Darüber hinaus prägen weitere Andeutungen von subtilen ‚Siebener-Reihenbildungen’ für die mikrologische Struktur des Textes: sowohl in der Verklammerung der soziokulturellen mit den religiösen ‚Schriftzügen’ im 11. und 12. Abschnitt – die vier Buchstaben SPQR und die drei Zypressen – als auch in der Gesamtzahl der Dahingeschiedenen am Protestantischen Friedhof im vorletzten Absatz. Nicht zufällig zeichnet sich der 7. Absatz des Textes dadurch aus, dass das Erzähl-Ich sich das Vermögen des Hörens zuschreibt. Kommen Phänomene des Klangs und des Lärms bereits in den Abschnitten 2, 4 und 5 vor, so wird erst mit der eindeutigen Aussage – „gehört habe ich“ – die Erwartungen des Lesers angesichts der Textüberschrift eingelöst. Da Bachmann zweimal acht Absätze entlang einer Zentralachse zusammenbindet, werden insgesamt siebzehn Stationen (wiederum in der Quersumme acht) einer nur scheinbar nach dem Zufallsprinzip organisierten Stadtbesichtigung in Szene gesetzt. Das durchkomponierte Kalkül dieses Prosagedichts korrespondiert dem eines „Weltauges“, dessen Blickfeld zum titelgebenden Sehsinn passt und dessen Blickrichtung zu einer zirkulär angelegten Begehung arbiträr wirkender Sehenswürdigkeiten und Orte in der ewigen Stadt einlädt. Das topographisch-topologische Geheimnis des Gebildes ist, dass die Loci miteinander unverbunden bleiben, dass also nur diskrete Stadtbilder oder optische Bestimmungsmomente – gleich zusammengewürfelten Postkarten, Gemälden oder Photographien – aneinander gereiht werden, ohne räumliche oder inhaltliche Verbindungen aufzudecken. Hauptziel des Vortrags soll sein, Bachmanns Prosagedicht aus der Perspektive der Intermedialitätsforschung zu analysieren. Insbesondere geht es um Gedanken zu einer ekphrastischen Rhetorik, die im Sinne der Vergegenwärtigung optischer Merkmale den kleinen Prosatext zum Glanzstück semiotischer Kunstformen erscheinen lässt.
Oliver C. Speck teaches Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, School of World Studies. His 2010 book Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke explores how a political thinking manifests itself in the oeuvre of the Austrian director, suggesting that the constant shifting of frames of reference in his films is needed to open up ethical perspectives. In addition to numerous essays on German and European cinema, Speck is co-editor (with Robert von Dassanowsky) of the 2011 anthology, New Austrian Film.
“The Mythical Capitalist Community in Fritz Lang’s M”: Part of a larger project on Fritz Lang’s M, this presentation is both an exercise on how to analyze visual culture in their classroom (through work with Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community)and an exploration of different self-representations and reinventions of German-speaking nations after WWII. After the well-known affinity of the fascists for ocular metaphors (“future generations will look back at us”), we can find the same mythical view of history in Austria’s self-image as “Hitler’s first victim” and West-Germany’s image of a decent, hard-working people seduced by a satanic dictator. Although M is set around 1930, Lang evinces a remarkable sensitivity to and appreciation of the power of the image to make community, especially when the image of an undesirable “other,” indeed, of an entire community of undesirables, becomes the touchstone of that production. The Austrian-born director is one of the most visually complex and therefore also the most textual directors of the first part of the 20th century. In other words, the viewer has to actively read Lang’s multi-faceted films as a text – an exercise that the audience is not always willing to undertake, especially when visual and other discourses weave a complex inter-textual pattern. I argue here that all of Fritz Lang’s films are “about” community, especially those of the late Lang, after his turn to a gritty urban realism in M that was influenced by the aesthetics of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Bridget Swanson is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus both in contemporary film studies, specifically the adaptation of German literary classics to the silver screen, and second language acquisition. At Penn, she has taught Elementary and Intermediate German, and currently co-teaches a course on Adaptation Studies in the Cinema Studies Department. Along with Dr. Christina Frei, Bridget Swanson is co-authoring an innovative curriculum for introductory German language and culture entitled Augenblicke: An Introduction to German Language and Culture and has assisted in the implementation of these materials in three sections of Elementary German at Penn over the past year. Bridget Swanson has presented her work both at the University of Pennsylvania and at ACTFL. She received the SAS Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Graduate Student and currently serves as a Graduate Fellow for Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
“Using Authentic Audiovisual Media from the Start: First-Year German Language Education through Film and Television”: While recent publications on German film for the language classroom target intermediate and advanced language learners, the inclusion of authentic film and television for beginners remains unexplored. When carefully incorporated, however, audiovisual media effectively prompt first-year German language and culture learning. The contemporary films Fremder Freund (Fischer, 2003), Der ganz große Traum (Grobler, 2004), Neukölln Unlimited (Imondi und Rasch, 2010), and Fremde Haut (Maccarone, 2005), and the television mini-series Die Nibelungen (Edel, 2004), serve as the contextual foundation for Augenblicke, the innovative first-year language curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania. These materials pique learner interest by encouraging students to access and reflect upon their own background knowledge on themes essential to the twenty-first-century classroom: national identity, multilingualism, social reality, globalization, citizenship, and environmentalism.
Lioba Ungurianu studied at the Universities of Mainz and Bonn as well as at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and earned a Certificate in Film Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center in 2012. Her dissertation, “Georg Büchner in the German Cinematic Tradition: Film, Theater, and the Art of Adaptation, covers the period from the early 1920s to the late 1970s. In her research and teaching she is interested in the interplay of different forms of art and language and in the broader intertextual space that surrounds every artistic expression. She teaches various levels of German language, literature, and film at Vassar College.
“Visual Arts in Max Reinhardt’s Production of Danton’s Death”: Multidisciplinary approaches inherent in the study of visual culture are especially productive when applied to synthetic art forms, such as theater, which lie at the intersection of literature, performing arts and visual arts. This paper focuses on the groundbreaking 1916 production of Georg Büchner’s drama Danton’s Death by Max Reinhardt. It became a landmark in the history of German theater and in many ways opened a new chapter in the reception of Büchner. Although written for the stage, the play eluded a visual realization for almost seventy years. Like Büchner’s other writings, it was all but forgotten in the nineteenth century and had to wait for the age of film and the beginning dominance of the visual in order to gain popularity.
Harald Zils (moderator) earned a Dr. phil. from the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg and teaches in the German Studies program at Binghamton University. His research interests include anthropological perspectives on literature, the German essay and aesthetic theories of production and reception. His book Tradition und Autonomie. Innovativer Konservatismus bei Rudolf Borchardt, Harold Bloom und Botho Strauß appeared in 2009. He is currently working on a study of Ernst Jünger.