Panel: Jewish-Christian Dialogues
"Sacrifice and Redemption in Albrecht Goes’ 'Das Brandopfer' " — Mary Boldt, York College
One of the early German postwar writers whose fiction addressed the Holocaust directly, and in whose writings God played a role, was the German theologian Albrecht Goes. Through his novella “Das Brandopfer” (1954), Goes invites the reader to wrestle with the questions of God’s role or existence in post-World War II Germany. Although Goes was a Christian pastor and theologian, “Das Brandopfer” is notable in its focus on a Jewish perspective in its narrative, and on the centrality of Jewish grace in any redemption that might be possible to Germans following the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust. Risk, kindness, and self-immolation are all types of Christian sacrifice in “Das Brandopfer,” but it is ultimately the Jewish sacrifice of risk, forgiveness, and grace that brings any measure of redemption. “Das Brandopfer” brings to life through its haunting narrative Goes’s deep desire for relationship and reconciliation in post-World War II Germany – a desire that is affirmed in his correspondence with Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, and that ultimately led to Goes’s acclaim as a facilitator of Christian-Jewish dialogue and understanding in Germany.
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 publications include “Translating Irony and the Irony of Translation in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children” and “Text Translation: Approaching Otherness” (with Esperanza Roncero) in Language in the Real World. Along with her work on Albrecht Goes’ Das Brandopfer, current interests include the role of foreign languages in higher education.
Juden und Judentum in Franz Werfels Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit — Helga Schreckenberger, University of Vermont
Franz Werfels zweiter, 1929 erschienener Roman Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit wird in der Forschungsliteratur überwiegend als autobiographisches Werk oder sogar als „Schlüsselroman“ rezipiert. Beeinflusst wird diese Lesart von der Tatsache, dass die Lebensgeschichte des Protagonisten Ferdinand R. in vielen Einzelheiten Parallelen zu jener des Autors aufweist. Daneben steht fest, dass Werfel mit der Titelfigur des Romanes seiner geliebten Kinderfrau Barbara Šimůnková ein Denkmal setzen wollte. Aber auch in anderen Figuren des Romans sind Menschen aus Werfels Umkreis zu erkennen. Dies führte zu einer Identifizierung des Protagonisten mit seinem Urheber und zur Reduzierung des Romans auf seinen rein biographischen Gehalt.
Neuere Untersuchungen stellen die Glaubensfrage, vor allem die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Verhältnis zwischen Christentum und Judentum in den Vordergrund. Die Glaubensthematik steht auch im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit. Die Aufmerksamkeit gilt jedoch nicht dem Verhältnis zwischen Christen- und Judentum, sondern Werfels kritischer und pessimistischer Gestaltung der jüdischen Identitätsproblematik in der postemanzipatorischen Phase des Modernisierungsprozesses, einem Thema also, mit dem sich der Autor auf verschiedene Weise in nahezu allen seinen Werken auseinandersetzt. Viele von Werfels zeitkritischen und glaubenstheoretischen Überzeugungen, die er später in seinen um 1930 entstandenen Essays „Realismus und Innerlichkeit“ und „Können wir ohne Gottesglauben leben“ formulierte, sind in Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit eingeflossen. In dem Roman werden die jüdischen Figuren als Opfer der zunehmenden Säkularisierung gezeigt, die den naiven Gottesglauben zerstört und die Menschen auf der Suche nach identitätsstiftenden Korrelaten in die Arme kurzlebiger moderner Weltanschauungen treibt. Selbst der Christus-gläubige Jude Alfred Engländer, dessen Verachtung für materialistisches Fortschrittsdenken und politischen Aktivismus auf die Gegenseite der assimilierten jüdischen Intellektuelle stellt, scheitert letztlich an mangelndem Gottesglauben.
Helga Schreckenberger, Professor of German an der Universität von Vermont; Forschungsgebiete sind Exilliteratur und österreichische Literatur des zwanzigsten/ einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Veröffentlichungen u.a. über Gerhard Roth, Lilian Faschinger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Wolf Haas, Erich Maria Remarque, Adrienne Thomas und Erika Mann; Herausgeberin von Ästhetiken des Exils (2003), Alchemie des Exils/Exil als schöpferischerImpuls (2005), Networks of Refugees from Nazi Germany: Continuities, Reorientations, and Collaborations in Exile (2016); Mitherausgeberin (mit Primus-Heinz Kucher und Johannes Evelein) von Erste Briefe/First Letters aus dem Exil 1945-1950. (Un)mögliche Gespräche. Fallbeispiele des literarischen und künstlerischen Exil (2011).
Rudolf Otto, Martin Buber, and the Science of Religion in the Weimar Republic — Cohen Tzemach and Yekutiel Shoham, Tel Aviv University
Martin Buber's "I and Thou" (1923) is considered to be a Master-Piece in the Jewish philosophy of the 20th century and in the religious thought in the German culture of the Weimar Republic. It was written while Buber strived to put his religious faith and his desire for God under the scientific framework of the Religionswissenschaft. In this context, we will show his dialogue with Rudolf Otto — a dialogue that began in Otto's "Das Heilige" (1917), continued in Buber's response in the "Religion as Presence" lectures (1922) and in "I and Thou", through Otto's answer about the possibility to meet God as "thou", up to Buber's dedication of his book "Zwei Glaubensweisen" (1950) to a man with "important religious individuality" - Rudolf Otto.
We will focus on two aspects in the ongoing conversation between them: first, the spiritual dialogue between Otto's "the wholly other" and Buber's "the Eternal Thou" as a conception of God – both based on their personal spiritual experience of the divinity. The second is the scientific dialogue they held as part of the emergence of the Religionswissenschaft, as an attempt to objectify their personal religious experience, and take it as touchstone of the true spiritual experience and the validity of the religious faith as part of an inner-German cultural tradition.
Dr. Cohen Tzemach holds a Ph.D. from School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, Israel, in the subject of history and philosophy of the Science of Religion, titled: "Religion between Annulment and Segregation: The Science of Religion in Martin Buber's 'I and Thou' Compared to Émile Durkheim's and Rudolf Otto's Theories of Religion". Cohen Tzemach teaches courses in the field of philosophy of Religion and Economic in several academic institutions, including - Tel Aviv University, Shalem College in Jerusalem, and Open University of Israel. he also co-manages the Israeli Humanities Network.
Dr. Yekutiel Shoham teaches Early Modern Philosophy at the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities and at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv University. His Ph.D. dissertation analyses the relations between state and religion in England after the German and English reformation. Specifically, he focuses on the roots of John Locke's political philosophy and its relation to philosophy of religion of his time.
Panel: What Do The Classics Mean?
Romanticizing the Spirit: The Legacy of Luther in Lessing and Novalis — Matthew Stoltz, Cornell University
Heine famously declared that “since Luther, Germany has produced no greater nor better man than Lessing.” What struck Heine as most significant was Lessing’s mutiny against the status of the letter [Buchstabe] in the prevailing confessional systems of his day. This, Heine argued, triggered a “spiritual revolution” in Germany that brought the legacy of Luther’s religious liberation to the center stage of enlightenment theology. Yet considering how the letter—the bible itself as authority—supplied Luther with the necessary leverage to break with the Church, Heine’s analogy is perhaps more seductive than precise. Unlike Lessing, Luther presupposed the letter to be a stable object of faith and rejected humanist interpretations of spirit [Geist] that were designed to mitigate offensive contradictions and paradoxes inhering in “the word of God.” This paper explores how Luther’s spirit/letter distinction undergoes significant transformations in the hands of Lessing during the fragment controversy (1773-1780) and eventually becomes radicalized even further by Early German Romantics like Novalis, Fichte, and Schleiermacher in the 1790s. Drawing from Luther’s polemic “Concerning the Letter and the Spirit” (1521), Lessing’s Laokoön (1766), “On the Proof of the Spirit and Power” (1777), and Novalis’ “Christianity or Europe” (1799), I challenge Heine’s analogy, which continues to serve as an influential guidepost for eighteenth-century scholarship today. I claim that Lessing ushers in an aesthetic regime of faith that mobilizes the indeterminacy of spirit to guarantee the infinite striving of religious subjectivity. With Lessing faith becomes oriented around Bildung rather than obedience, and insofar as Bildung is characterized as a relentless process the door to a romantic spirit is opened.
Matthew Stoltz is a PhD Candidate in the department of German Studies at Cornell University. He received his BA from the University of Washington in 2006, where he studied English Literature and Comparative History of Ideas. In 2015 he completed his MA degree from Cornell University and he is currently working on his dissertation titled: “Towards a Positive Faith: Religious Skepticism in German Letters, 1750-1800.”
Der Sinn von Unsinn: The Function of Nonsense in Goethe’s Faust — Arthur Salvo, Columbia University
Beginning with Faust’s famous monologue on the impossibility of knowing anything (“Nacht”) and ending with Gretchen’s death (“Kerker”), Goethe’s Faust: Erster Teil dramatizes the search for meaning and the human cost of this enterprise. More than an indictment of morally untethered striving, I argue in this paper that Goethe’s tragedy has an analytical agenda. Faust’s Sinnsuche follows a specific trajectory: one where knowledge, and its failure to render the infinite accessible, is ultimately replaced by another mode of understanding: experience. It is this mode of pursuing meaning—through experience—which necessarily generates collateral damage because it involves others.
This shift from knowledge to experience is, I contend, brought to fulfillment in the scene “Hexenküche.” Here, Faust drinks the Witch’s brew, which allows him to undergo an erotic rejuvenation and perceive mythical beauty (Helen of Troy) in every woman he sees—all preconditions for the so-called “Gretchen Tragedy.” And yet: while the Hexentrank is a convenient plot device for this transformation, it is, in fact, the Witch’s nonsensical incantations that make this liquid potent: “Sie [die Hexe] muß als Arzt ein Hokuspokus machen, / Damit der Saft dir wohl gedeihen kann.” This raises the following questions: (1) is nonsense, which is per se non-conceptual, nevertheless capable of performing conceptual work? (2) what relationship might nonsense have to the search for meaning?
The paper investigates these questions by comparing the “Hexenküche” scene with two other scenes that foreground meaning: Faust’s conjuring of the Erdgeist in “Nacht” and his translation of the Book of John in “Studierzimmer.” I will argue that nonsense, rather than being opposed to meaning, facilitates the transition from knowledge to experience, and that nonsense is thus constitutive of the search for meaning in Faust. Nonsense, I will show, defamiliarizes knowledge—Faust’s prior means of engaging the world—and privileges the materiality of words and language as well as the performativity of ritual. It thereby creates the preconditions for experience’s ascendancy as the prime mode of pursuing meaning. Considering different instantiations of nonsense in this scene—as Affentheater, incantations, declamation and Hexeneinmaleins—my talk will also examine its construction as a gendered practice that is marked by its belonging to an archaic sphere.
Arthur Salvo holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages from Columbia University (2015). Before coming to Columbia, he completed his B.A. and M.A. in German at New York University and studied at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on German literature from 1750 to the present, with specializations in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, aesthetic theory, intellectual history and visual culture. His dissertation, Transformations of the Beautiful: Beauty and Instability in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature, investigates the problematic status of beauty in modernity—and literary responses to it—in works by Winckelmann, Schiller, Jean Paul and Eichendorff. Arthur’s newest project, “Metaphysical Landscapes: 1850-2000,” explores how German literary texts use landscapes to stage a relationship between transcendental insight and earthly experience. Fellowships from The Fulbright Program as well as The Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies have supported his research at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin.
"'Seid ihr in Nöten, geht doch zu Goethen': Goethe as Savior of the 1932 Weimar Republic — Thomas Beebee, Pennsylvania State University
Julius Petersen’s fulsome address to those gathered in Weimar on 22 March, 1932 for the official commemoration of the centenary of Goethe's death compared the wreath-laying at the Fürstengruft with a pilgrimage to Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem. Petersen's formulation was an extreme version of a sentiment expressed repeatedly by Germans 1932, who celebrated the death of their national poet while they simultaneously looked in the eye the death of their country’s experiment in democracy.
This paper explores one of history’s more eerie coincidences, the one hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s death that occurred during the final full year of existence of the Weimar Republic, a phase of German political life associated through its unofficial name with the Goethean republic of letters. 1932 was a year, furthermore, in which the eventual demise of the Republic had become clear to many, including, it seems, to its President von Hindenburg who, on the front page of the Vossische Zeitung, called for a focus on Goethe's transcendent spirit in order to put an end to the "selbstzerfleischenden Streit der [politischen] Meinungen" that in fact spelled the Republic's immanent doom. The Goethe celebration thus became, in Joachim Seng’s words, “eine der letzten grossen Selbstdarstellungen der Republik vor ihrem Untergang” (375), in fact a series of self-portraits that ranged from the idealistic to the brutally realistic and unflattering, and from those that made use of Goethe as a band-aid to heal the gaping political wounds of Germany -- what we might call the "zwei Seelen in einer Brust" thesis -- to those who used him as a knife to amputate the disastrous experiment in democracy. Communists, Socialists, Monarchists, and National Socialists struggled over Goethe’s legacy as they struggled over the Reich's future, while others denied the relevance of Goethe’s feudal Weimar to their eponymous but democratic republic, and still others lamented the “Vergötterung” of Germany’s greatest writer and called for a return to the worship of Christ instead. Nearly all these writings, of whatever political spectrum, strongly contrasted the glorious Age of Goethe with the decadent present, with the cause of said decadence ranging from Communism through atheism to the absence of Führung.
Thomas O. Beebee is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the Pennsylvania State University. His most recent monograph is Transmesis: Inside Translation’s Black Box. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Comparative Literature Studies and of the series with Bloomsbury Press, “Literatures as World Literature.” He is also President of the Association of Departments and Programs of Comparative Literature.
Heilige Ansichtssache? Lucas Cranachs Bibel-Illustrationen — Julia Ludewig, Allegheny College
Dass Luthers Bibel ein Bestseller war, ist nicht nur seiner wegweisenden Übersetzung, sondern auch den beigefügten Illustrationen von Lucas Cranach geschuldet. Mein Vortrag beschäftigt sich mit der Beziehung zwischen Bibel-Text und diesen Illustrationen und blickt durch die Linse der Visual Cultural Studies auf das resultierende Gesamtkunstwerk. Ich frage danach, welche Bibelstellen Cranach für die Illustration auswählte, welche Funktionen die Illustrationen im Gesamttext haben und in welcher Relation sie zu den entsprechenden Textstellen stehen. Können wir von Autonomie, Dominanz oder “visuellen Dienstfertigkeit” der Bilder sprechen? Wie verhalten sich die Illustrationen zu Luthers Überzeugung, dass jede(r) selbst die Bibel interpretieren können soll? Und lassen die Bilder eine kultur- oder gar sprachspezifische Darstellungspraxis erkennen? Ich verstehe meinen Vortrag nicht nur als eine bild-orientierte Fallstudie zur “Marke Lutherbibel”, sondern auch als eine Möglichkeit, einer akamische Neugier an der Schnittstelle zwischen deutscher Kulturgeschichte und Visual Cultural Studies nachzugehen.
Julia Ludewig is an Assistant Professor of German at Allegheny College. Her research interests include foreign-language pedagogy, graphic novels, and questions of genre.
Religious feelings, emotional communities, the search for meaning in sixteenth-century Protestantism — Sean Dunwoody, History/Medieval & Early Modern Studies, Binghamton University
It has been said that the concept of “religious feelings” is ill suited when applied to an early modern era in which orthodoxy (and orthopraxy) has often been the focus. By contrast, Susan Karant-Nunn’s recent Reformation of Feeling demonstrates the degree to which the meaning of right religion, for the congregation as for the believer, in the early modern era can be understood in terms of what we might call the “emotional scripts” of the learned clergy. Karant-Nunn has pointed out the centrality to Protestant faith of a “religiosity [that] was calm, interior, and unrelated to material objects.” Ministers strove to ensure that their flock felt little “inclination toward emotive piety” (68f). Powerful feelings had to be curbed.
In two key ways, I wish to unsettle this picture. First, I will show that in the first decades of Lutheran teaching, religious feelings of a boisterous, exuberant nature were central to the force as to the cogency of the new teaching’s core message. Second, I look to the case of Augsburg—its chronicles and clerical texts—to show how the new Gospel truth manifested its meaning not only intellectually, but also in the passionate, disruptive religious feelings it engendered.
Sean Dunwoody is Assistant Professor of History and Medieval & Early Modern Studies at Binghamton University, where he teaches courses on the history and culture of early modern Europe. His current monograph project, based on his dissertation and tentatively titled Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Early Modern Germany, deploys insights and methodologies from the history of emotions to offer a new framework for analyzing and understanding religious peace and religious violence in premodern Europe.
Eine Revolution der Reformation? Evolution und Auswirkungen der Texte Johann Valentin Andreaes — Marie-Christine Merdan, University College, London
Nach den 1517 veröffentlichten Thesen Martin Luthers gegen die Praxis der katholischen Kirche verlief ein Prozess der Spaltung des Christentums in Deutschland. Dieser Reform entsprang bekanntermaßen der lutherische Protestantismus, innerhalb dessen sich allerdings bereits 100 Jahre nach der lutherischen Reformation eine “Gegenbewegung” entwickelte. Die Reformation wurde als stagnierend empfunden, zugleich eine Öffnung zu den nun immer einflussreicheren wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen gefordert. Dieser Zeitgeist findet sich in den Schriften des protestantischen Theologen Johann Valentin Andreae widergespiegelt, der mit drei seiner Werken die „Manifeste“ der Rosenkreuzer-Bewegungen hervorbringt. Seine fiktive literarische Figur „Christian Rosencreutz“ stellt eine Fusion von Religion und Wissenschaften dar: Seine Charakterzüge weisen Anteile von sowohl Martin Luther als auch dem Alchemisten Paracelsus auf. Es ist bemerkenswert, wie die Rezeption dieser Werke verläuft: Zeitgenossen Andreaes halten Christian Rosenkreuz und dessen literarischen Orden bereits für historische Fakten, konnten sie jedoch nie mit Sicherheit feststellen, ob der in den Werken beschriebener Orden tatsächlich existierte. Zu diskutieren ist anhand dieser Texte die Frage nach der Synthese von protestantischem und alchemistischem Ideengut, auch die entstehende Forderung nach einer „Generalreformation der ganzen Welt“. Des Weiteren stellt sich die Frage, warum ausgerechnet protestantische Bewegungen für wissenschaftliche bzw. alchemistische Ideen so offen waren.
Marie-Christine Merdan is a DAAD-Lektor at University College London, UK, where she teaches undergraduate courses in German language, literature and culture. In the past years, she has taught at Binghamton University, US, and at Universität Regensburg, Germany. Her interest mainly focuses on literature in the 18th and 19th century, where she is particularly interested in the influence of alchemy in literary works. She is currently working on a dissertation project on this topic.
Religion without Content in Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften — Thomas Bell, University of Washington
In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930, 1932, 1942) Robert Musil presents a radically secularized social, cultural and political milieu, a “vernünftige[s] Zeitalter” (MoE 552). Yet, religion – “der andere Zustand” (Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik 1925) – is still present. What then is the form of this religion? How is it experienced, and how does it shape the way in which the characters in the novel adopt their specific political and social perspectives? Exploring Musil’s novel, my paper will evaluate how the text represents the discourse between religion and reason in the context of the intellectual and political atmosphere of early 20th century Austria. I will investigate how leading philosophical ideas – including those propagated by Kant, Nietzsche and Buber – inform this discourse. My analysis will involve three distinct steps: a delineation of the intellectual precursors behind the formation of Musil’s subject; an assessment of the cultural context in which this subject is situated; and, a description of a ‘new’ religion without content, adopted by the religious subject without identity in early 20th century German-speaking society.
Tommy Bell received his Ph.D. in Germanics from the University of Washington in 2015. The title of his dissertation was “The Postsecular Traces of Transcendence in Contemporary German Literature.” In 2009 he obtained his MA in Germanics from the UW. During graduate studies he spent four years in Germany teaching and researching at the Westfälische Wilhems-Universität Münster. There, he was a member of the Graduate School Practices of Literature. Prior to studies in German Language and Literature he attended Princeton Theological Seminary where he received his Master of Divinity in 2003. In 2000, he graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in History and Theology. His research interests include: Contemporary German Literature (W. G. Sebald, Daniel Kehlmann, Sibylle Lewitscharoff and Peter Handke), German Philosophy (Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger) and Postsecularism (Habermas, Taylor and Derrida).
The Divine Spark: Origin Stories of Electricity from Christian Mysticism to Wireless Technology — Erik Born, Cornell University
This paper examines the changing meaning of Funken from the late medieval discourse of mysticism to the modern invention of wireless technology, a shift exemplified by one little-known modern German fairy tale.
Originally related to the elemental power of fire as a transcendent force, the concept of sparks first acquired spiritual connotations in Seneca’s De Otio where it referred to the divine spark that jumped to earth, thereby bestowing knowledge on humankind. Translated as the Seelenfünklein, or “little spark of the soul,” in the late Middle Ages, the concept became key for a group of Christian mystics centered around Meister Eckhart. In modernity, Funken continued to evoke aspects of the transcendent, as the shift from divine sparks to human-made sparks was linked to the domestication of fire in the process of Enlightenment. Eventually, the concept was largely secularized in the modern German verb for sending a message via wireless technology—funken.
I argue that the discursive overlap of physics, cosmology, and theology, in this conceptual history of Funken had a significant effect on the understanding of media and technology in German modernity. As a figuration of electricity, Funken provided a means of understanding the tension between man-made and naturally-occurring phenomena that has come to define electronic technology. In media studies, moreover, the discovery of electricity frequently serves as the master figure for describing an epistemic shift from premodern cultural techniques to modern electronic technologies. As is well known, Marshall McLuhan’s famous mantra “the medium is the message” was inspired by the seemingly innocuous electric light bulb, and Friedrich Kittler’s call for an “Austreibung der Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften” was based on the apparent lack of sense in modern electronic media around 1900. In all of these cases, I argue that the modern meaning of electricity preserves connotations of the divine spark.
In tandem with this conceptual history, the focus of my paper will be on Kurd Lasswitz’s modern fairy tale “Der gefangene Blitz” (1902). A dialogue between a light bulb and a mechanical timer, the plot of the Märchen concerns the subjugation of lightning through the discovery of electricity and the invention of the lightning rod. In Lasswitz’s hands, modern technology takes on a cosmic dimension, as the spark in the story recounts its divine origin and its search for answers to questions about the meaning of work, mastery, and humankind. At the same time, a frame narrative referring to the scene of writing allows Lasswitz to provide answers from Kantian moral philosophy about the categorical imperative and the meaning of literary creation. Ultimately, Lasswitz’s story is representative of literary attempts to reclaim the lack of inherent meaning in electricity through the creation of meaningful narratives.
In the end, the aim of this paper is not only to introduce the conceptual history of Funken but also to indicate avenues for further research in literary and cultural studies. Drawing on Wolfhang Hagen’s work on the medial genealogy of electric sparks and Kai Steffan Knörr’s preliminary examination of funken as a cultural technique, this paper will highlight the overdetermination of electricity in modernity due to its inheritance of the complex spiritual connotations described above. Even if modern Funktechniken seem largely devoid of meaning, they still retain a touch of the divine spark.
Erik Born is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities and the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. His research and teaching focus on relations between old media and new media, and particularly on questions of mobility. Drawing on insights from the fields of media archaeology and the study of cultural techniques, his current book project examines the emergence of wireless technology in Europe around 1900. Erik is also the co-editor of a volume on the figure of the neighbor in German modernity, and the author of articles on early avant-garde films and medieval media theory, as well as translations and book reviews on topics in film and media studies.
Somatic Wisdom and the Power of the Metaphor — Cara Tovey, UC Berkeley
The intersections of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and the pioneers of Ausdruckstanz in the context of the Lebensreformbewegung are abundant. The Lebensreformbewegung, sought to reform life, especially culture and intellectual culture, in all aspects mainly through a renewed emphasis on physical health and exercising the body. Passages from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra in conjunction with the writings of both Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban, two leading dancers of Ausdruckstanz, indicate an overlap of philosophy regarding the body. I argue that for Nietzsche and dancers of Ausdruckstanz there is a wisdom that originates in the body. Additionally, using Nietzsche’s ideas on the metaphor from his essay “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne,” I show that the metaphor can be a method of translation between the body and the intellect, thus transcending the current state of existence. Using language metonymically to indicate the human intellect, the metaphor is therefore the key to unlocking the somatic wisdom that these cultural reformers saw as essential to life. This paper contributes to the larger body of research on the Lebensreformbewegung as well as functions to bridge the body-mind divide.
Cara Tovey is a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her BA in 2011 and her MA in 2012 from the University of Cincinnati, also in German Studies. Her research interests include the confluence of early cinema and German literature with the evolution of modern dance in the early 20th century. She is particularly interested in the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and how aesthetics function as a positive (or negative) force of change in one’s life. She is currently writing her dissertation on dance as a metaphor for how to live one’s life in the Lebensreformbewegung from the late 19th century through WWI to the beginning of the Third Reich.
The Quest for Meaning in War: Walter Flex and World War I — Eckhard Kuhn-Osius, Hunter College, CUNY
The traditional rationalizations for war in Germany lost their grounding after the World War I was lost. Gone were notions of national teleology and German greatness. Gone was any idea about war as a continuation of politics by other means. And since the democratic parties had initially supported the war that wasn't theirs, but in the end were the ones that had to sign the surrender, one could not even celebrate it as the event that had brought democracy. Instead, it became necessary to find the justification for the war in the moral, ethical nature of the fight itself. Especially the altruistic enthusiasm of the "Spirit of August" became an oft-repeated trope when it came to the question about the lessons to be drawn from the Great War. And one of the chief propagandists of war as an ethical experience was Walter Flex with his book Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten: Ein Kriegserlebnis. This book was literally written in the trenches and extols war as a way for the educated bourgeois to better himself and his subordinates by applying the teachings from Goethe, Nietzsche, and Christianity to their military mission. The narrator recounts his encounter with a German Wandervogel and student of theology who pronounces these teachings with Christ-like certainty until the time he dies in battle. The war has provided him with an elevated opportunity to attain individual perfection, which the narrator begins to realize after a period of intense grief. This book was among the top ten bestsellers in the first half of the twentieth century because it spoke to the needs of the educated survivors of the war and insists on the uninterrupted validity of traditional quests for meaning in the seemingly meaningless carnage of the war.
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 titled 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 presently directs the Hunter College summer program in Kassel.