Julia Hell

Katechon: Carl Schmitt's Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future

ABSTRACT The author proposes an imperial genealogy of Schmitts concept of the katechon. Engaging debates about the role of the concept in Schmitts political theology, the author reads the katechon as a scenario of imperial ruin gazing, tracing its emergence in essays about World War II, which focused on the theme of imperial rise and decline. With the katechon, Schmitt re-conceptualized Reich/empire/nomos as the inextricable link between beginning and end.

The visual archive of colonialism: Germany and Namibia

Colonial memories and images occupy a paradoxical place in Germany. This is due in part to the peculiarities of German colonial history, but it also reflects another aspect of German exceptionalism — the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust. In recent years German colonialism in Southwest Africa (Namibia) has been widely discussed, especially with respect to the attempted extermination of the Ovaherero people in 1904. For reasons explored in this article, these discussions of Germany’s involvement in Southwest Africa have created new and unexpected discursive connections that are reshaping colonial memories in both Germany and Namibia. One possible outcome could be a belated decolonization of the landscape of colonial memory in both countries. Postwar Germany was long preoccupied with its National Socialist prehistory; the German colonial past has only started to come into focus more recently.1 The years 2004 – 5 saw numerous commemorative events around the centenary of the 1904 German genocide of the Namibian Ovaherero people and the completion of the controversial Berlin Holocaust Memorial. On one level this is mere coincidence. At the same time, there is an increasing entanglement of these two central political topics. But little research has been done on the visual archive of German colonialism, in contrast to the extensive studies made of the public circulation of

Modernity and the Holocaust, or, Listening to Eurydice

In this article, I offer a literary-critical reading of Modernity and the Holocaust, arguing that Bauman’s non-Hobbesian ethics is linked to a form of Orphic authorship. I contextualize this reading with a study of three literary authors: W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss and Janina Bauman, and their respective versions of this post-Holocaust authorship. At stake is the drama of the forbidden gaze, the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, killing her a second time. Using Levinas’ ethics and his scenario of recognition, Bauman re-writes this fateful gaze as a loving gaze, implicitly proposing a counter-model to the Schmittian gaze — always ready to recognize the enemy, always ready to kill.

Ruinopolis: Post-Imperial Theory and Learning from Las Vegas

This essay foregrounds a dimension of Las Vegas that other authors only touch on in passing: its connections to empire. The authors propose a post-imperial analysis of the city based on a reconstruction of its history and a reading of the traces of this history in the citys architecture and its self-presentation in American popular culture. This analysis of Las Vegas as ruinopolis draws attention to the ruin sites of the city and its hinterland, reading them through the lens of empire. We work out the imperial territoriality of Las Vegas, including the derelict space of the Las Vegas Paiute Indian Colony, the ‘Pentagon Desert’ around the city with its so-called ‘national sacrifice zone’, and the Strip, with Caesars Palace. We conclude with a post-imperial reading of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenours canonical Learning from Las Vegas and of the ruin signs of the Neon Boneyard.

Demolition Artists: Icono-Graphy, Tanks, and Scenarios of (Post-)Communist Subjectivity in Works by Neo Rauch, Heiner Müller, Durs Grünbein, and Uwe Tellkamp

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of (post-)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect to works by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of the Soviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the author explores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks, drawing on Carl Schmitts 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory and tracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, in the work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions or explode the object through a process of de-scription.

Was bleibt? Wolfgang Hilbig’s Provisorium , or the Disappearance of the Author in a Blind Spot

SummaryDieser Aufsatz geht von der Beobachtung aus, dass Teile der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur auch nach 1989 von den Spuren der traumatischen Nachwirkungen des Nationalsozialismus geprägt bleiben. Hilbigs Roman Das Provisorium wird als Beispiel einer Krise männlicher Autorschaft nach der Shoa gelesen. Provisorium thematisiert die Begegnung mit den Bildern des Massenmords und den Nexus von Scopophilie, Maskulinität und Trauma. Der Aufsatz arbeitet mit einer Theorie des historischen Traumas (Eric Santner), das dessen Ursprung in einem Verstoß gegen das Gesetz sieht. Dieser Verstoß führt zu einer Aufspaltung der traumatischen Nachwirkungen in eine symbolische und eine »spektrale« Geschichte, oder Geschichten. Phantasien über Maskulinität als Zeichen der Übertretung, als vom Verbrechen der Väter »befleckt«, ist eine dieser spektralen Geschichten. Dieser Geschichte folgt der Aufsatz von Uwe Johnsons Jahrestagen über Martin Walsers Friedenspreisrede zu Hilbigs Provisorium.

Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig

ith Caravaggio’s painting Medusa and Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head,” W Medusa irrevocably enters the modern imaginary. Embodying a disturbing insight-that a searching gaze might produce overwhelming terror-Medusa has come to displace Clio, as the notion of history as catastrophe has gained ground among historians and philosophers of history and culture. In his magisterial Film Theory, Kracauer evokes Medusa when he discusses the role of film in the representation of the Holocaust. Proposing to think of this particular medium as Perseus’s shield, Kracauer expresses his hope that film might deflect the gorgon’s monstrous gaze, screening the spectator from history’s murderous force, while at the same time allowing us to catch sight of that deadly reality.2 But we now also find Medusa in less-likely places, places such as “Ferropolis Stadt aus Eisen,” the border territory of industrial modernity near Leipzig that architects from the Bauhaiis Dessau have transformed into a vast outdoor museum since 1989. In this ravaged landscape, we find Medusa in a rather unlikely incarnation: At Ferropolis, one of the five gigantic earthand coal-moving machines that are the main attractions of the museum is called “Med~sa . ”~ Kracauer’s Medusa obviously has to do with representation. But what about the antediluvian Medusa at Ferropolis, the Medusa Machine, as Heiner Muller would most likely have called her? The Dessau architects justify their use of the gorgon’s name by pointing out that their exhibit of iron dinosaurs symbolizes “Technikfaszination und deren F01gen.”~ But there is another, somewhat odd connection between knowledge and representation that lies buried in the East German prehistory of this particular Medusa. Experimenting with new forms that might satisfy the directives derived from Lukacs’s realist aesthetic, authors of the East German Republic’s (GDR) so-called production novels of the 1950s had