Rolf J. Goebel

Benjamin Heute: Gross-stadtdiskurs, Postkolonialitat und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen

Goebel, Rolf J. Benjamin Heute: Gro[beta]stadtdiskurs, Postkolonialitat und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen. Munich: Iudicium, 2001. 191 pp. euro21.50 paperback. In this book Rolf Goebel provides a new angle on Germanistik and Benjamin studies in the US. In a less orthodox way than usual in Benjamin scholarship-namely without dwelling extensively on the philological and historical analysis of Benjamins thought-the author considers the relevance of Benjamins work for some prominent postcolonial theorists active today in the US and elsewhere (e.g., in Germany and Brazil). He investigates Benjamins reception in recent works by Homi Bhabha and Rey Chow (with whose theories the book opens), by Willi Bolle, Helmut Lethen and John Kranauskias, among others. In addition to illustrating the connections between postcolonial theory and Benjamin, Goebel expands the postcolonial appropriations of the German philosopher to include his own analyses of well-known 19th century and contemporary philosophers and writers who, too, explored theoretically, as in Benjamins work, the terrains of travel and the metropolis. For example, Goebel engages Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearns travel writing as well as Roland Barthess texts on Japan through the lens of Benjamins flaneur figure. Goebels view of Benjamins reception in post-colonial thought is twofold. On the one hand, the focus is on the translation of Benjamins methods of citation and quotation-as exemplified in Benjamins work on the flaneur and the European metropolis-into contemporary theoretical constructions and representations of the sub-altern and the migrant and their respective experiences as colonial and postcolonial subjects. On the other hand, questions are raised about the concern by Benjamin and the postcolonial critics about (1) the existence of an original, authentic native (a question more associated with Subaltern Studies than with postcolonial theory) and (2) the representability in and by the Western critic of the Others voice as hybrid. Goebel elucidates Benjamins dialectical construction of otherness and his rejection of the divide between either the authentic or the impure, thereby aligning Benjamin with post-colonial idioms of hybridity. In Goebels account, positive and negative evaluations of postcolonial theorists themselves divide on the issue of authenticity and representability of the Others voice. Without disregarding important critiques of Benjamins own Eurocentrism, Goebel concludes that Benjamins technique of quotation, although violent and sometimes mirroring the plundering technique of Imperialist assimilation of the Other, always engages the latter in its dialectical move and shows the Western critics ambivalence about the possibility of speaking from the Others position. In this regard, in Goebels rendition, Benjamin does not believe in the Others absolute authenticity. Benjamin evokes the flaneur as the figure that experiences the fragmented historical and spatial layers of the metropolis. The flaneur is able to see through the everyday to perceive the presence of the repressed and forgotten material as that of another. The flaneur ties together Benjamins analysis of modernitys periphery (as manifested in Paris) and the contemporary, post-colonial urban centers at the periphery of the Western world. In Goebels view, the Western flaneur catches indirect glimpses of the colonial and imperialist enterprise through his observant strolls in Parisian urban space, while the writer-himself a flaneur-proceeds by constructing a textual space that is mimetically fragmented, constituted by quotations of the foreign spaces and images in the book, one reconstructed as metropolitan space. Thus Benjamins flaneur never familiarizes and assimilates the exotic. Rather, he uncovers strangeness in the familiar, and points to the dialectical coexistence of both dimensions. For Goebel, the flaneur is a forerunner of the reflexive ethnographer, who theorizes his or her own impact in the construction of the notion of the native, a notion also developed by the Other. …

Berlin’s Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity

Reunified Berlin’s ubiquitous examples of architectural citation—such as the Reichstag, the plans for the Stadtschlos, the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, the new Hotel Adlon, and the FriedrichstadtPassagen—variously inscribe contemporary architectural styles with allusive reinventions of previous forms and cultural discourses, incorporate remnants of older edifices, or use partial reconstructions for new social purposes. In the process, these projects problematize conventional principles of architectural restoration by dramatizing a productive tension between past and present, between authenticity and simulation, between genuine nostalgia and the sometimes cynical manipulation of historical memory. Relying on the synchronicity of (seemingly) nonsynchronous styles, architectural citation goes beyond postmodern pastiche; such citation signifies Berlin’s renegotiation of its identity as the new-old capital by recycling half-obliterated and yet irrepressible traces of urban history within the parameters of i...

Benjamin’s Arcades Project today: From the European metropolis to the global city

This essay reads Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40) as an analysis of 19th-century Paris that anticipates non-western and global urban space in the postmodern age of a late capitalist consumer society. In Benjamin’s analysis, the French capital cites images of colonial or non-western cultures for the formation of its European identity. Conversely, the accelerating hybridization and virtualization of today’s global cities, here exemplified by Hong Kong, appropriate images from Europe, fusing these by borrowing from their own history in order to fashion their own metropolitan diversity. As a result, Benjamin’s Europe-centred text can be re-employed as a framework for analysing representations of non-western cities; correspondingly, focusing on a (western) description of a city like Hong Kong allows Benjamin’s reconstruction of 19th-century Paris to appear as a foundational space of today’s transnational capitalism.

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated. By Theodore Ziolkowski. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017. xii + 248 pages.

the mobile phone theatre project Call Cutta (2005), the term “spectator” is rightly called one-sided but then seems to take on again rather traditionally visual and scriptural connotations: as directed by a phone operator, the participant moves through urban space to create “a linear trajectory similar to writing narrative lines for a story” (176), “searching for visual traces of a past Indian presence in Berlin”; this spatial “tracking of visual traces demands meaning-making through narration” (180). Don’t phrases like these reveal a tacit re-subordination of sonic sense perception and auditory media to visuality and writing practices? By contrast, however, other contributors stress the radical subversion, not only of visuality and textuality, but of narrativity generally. Lars Bernaerts goes so far as to propose that avant-garde radiophonic experiments may not only “reveal or reject the illusion of realism” but even “defy narrativization” altogether (133). In her comparison of audiobooks and print narratives, Anežka Kuzmičová intriguingly suggests that audiobook listening redirects theoretical attention and critical reflection, which according to some critics are presumably required by textual reading, in order to stimulate “purely hedonic purposes such as daydreaming or, more generally, aesthetic pleasure across sensory modalities” (218). Such artistic explorations, especially in their more directly avant-gardist or experimental forms, it seems to me, document especially well the paradigmatic and wide-ranging expansion of the traditional borders of literary analysis, textual and visual media, and narrativity advocated by audionarrativity, even if, as perhaps can be expected from an emerging field, this inquiry so far remains partially attached to the more traditional approaches it seeks to dislodge.

34.95.

The third section yields some intriguing but unexplained asymmetries: some of the essays consider an individual author, others movements or epochs, others transhistorical genres or concepts. Similarly, most articles examine a particular example, while a handful consider examples and their reception, such as the first two essays (Manfred Koch, III.1: “Der Dichter-Sänger: Antikes Modell und spätere Adaptationen,” and Caroline Welsh, III.2: “Antike Musikerzählungen und ihr literarisches Nachleben. Orpheus, die Sirenen und Pan”). While these asymmetries are perhaps inevitable, and not problematic in themselves, neither the introduction nor the articles themselves reflect upon the varying types of exemplarity operative in the volume. Nonetheless, all of the articles will make excellent points of entry into the topics addressed, either for beginning researchers seeking to outline a field or for more experienced scholars interested in filling in knowledge gaps. The editors have made a clear effort in this section to expand the volume’s horizons beyond that of European art music, as the articles by Philipp Schweighauser (III.19: Das Rauschen modernistischer Form: John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston und die Soundscapes der Moderne und frühen Postmoderne”), Frieder von Ammon (III.21: “Von Jazz und Rock/ Pop zur Literatur”), Ursula Mathis-Moser (III.22: “Das (französische) Chanson: Eine Mischgattung par excellence”), and Fernand Hörner (III.23: “Rap, orale Dichtung und Flow”) attest. But because these articles exist outside the theoretical and historical horizons of the rest of the volume, they come off as somewhat isolated and perfunctory, particularly as they are amongst the section’s shorter contributions. They too, however, successfully open up the topics and provide resources for further research. A handbook cannot do everything; the things this one does best—theoretical sophistication, historical scope, up-to-date scholarship—it does very well, and if it perhaps tries to do too much, then this is a testament to the richness of the field of study in music and literature that it opens up for its readers.

Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. viii + 267 pages + 6 b/w illustrations. €99,95 /

“perversity” while challenging Stefan George’s ideal of the poet as “Führer” (57). Walser empathizes with the figure of the writer as an outcast. Kafka points to the artifices of writing and questions his authority as a writer. During his exile, Musil develops a bleak view of the artistic condition that is tinged with feelings of powerlessness and existential despair. Furthermore, Böschenstein’s philological approach is combined with an interest in contextualization. By pointing out the importance of Ernst Bertram’s book on Nietzsche as an overlooked source of Doktor Faustus, Böschenstein stresses how this book allowed Thomas Mann to critically confront his own youthful fascination with Germanic culture as well as the resonance of Nietzscheanism in the 1920s. Another common thread is Böschenstein’s interest in the transformative power of metaphors as bridge builders and tropes that defy boundaries and that are quintessentially “in-between” (111): Metaphors are powerful and playful instruments of metamorphosis and irony that at once mask and disclose, combine authenticity and illusion, and link death to revival. Bernhard Böschenstein writes on authors with whom he has deep affinities. He explores texts with the flair and keen eye of the flâneur eager to share his enthusiasm for literary wanderlust. His combination of philological insights and erudite details as well as his careful analyses provide a stimulating foray into an exemplary collection of short modernist prose.

140.00 hardcover or e-book.

des Stalinismus überaus erfolgreich wurde. Zwei weitere Tendenzen des utopischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert charakterisiert Voßkamp als Möglichkeitsdenken und Messianismus. Möglichkeitsdenken, das schon ein zentraler Gesichtspunkt der Einleitung war, wird zum Abschluss an Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930ff.) nochmals exemplarisch aufgegriffen. Denn für Ulrich, den Helden des Romans, gilt es als ausgemacht, dass es einen Möglichkeitssinn als Gegenpart zum Wirklichkeitssinn geben muss, dessen utopische Tendenz sich in einem ironischen Konjunktiv artikuliert. Dass Ernst Blochs und Walter Benjamins Marxismus von Voßkamp als Messianismus charakterisiert wird, mag überraschen, wenn sich auch Spuren davon bei beiden finden. Es folgen Interpretationen, die jenes Schema verdeutlichen. Was überraschenderweise fehlt, sind feministische Utopien, die zwar auf einer Seite erwähnt (91), aber nicht weiter besprochen werden. Dennoch: einer der seltenen Sammelbände zur Geschichte des utopischen Denkens, der sich Seite für Seite zu lesen lohnt.

Inheriting Walter Benjamin by Gerhard Richter (review)

Christian Spang also details the history of the Tokyo-based German East Asiatic Society and its close ties to or even obedient submission to the German Nazis. Thomas Pekar’s short but rich piece insightfully sheds light on the lack of research on the ambivalent attitudes of the Japanese toward Jewish refugees in Japan. Pekar succinctly and interestingly delineates the change of Japan’s Jewish policy before and after Pearl Harbor. While Japan, to Nazi Germany’s dismay, was quite lenient toward Jewish refugees in Japan and Shanghai before 1941, it adopted a more stringent anti-Semitic policy after the war had become more extensive. Yet the Japanese never persecuted the Jews as extremely and extensively as the Nazis did. The third section of the book focuses on the postwar affinity between Japan and Germany. David Crowe compares the trials of war criminals in Nuremberg and Tokyo and concludes that the Nuremberg trials were far more successful than those in Tokyo, which were plagued by controversy, dissent, and negligence under poor leadership. Franziska Seraphim’s chapter meticulously discusses the tensions between the implementation of punishment for war criminals and the clemency requested by German and Japanese governments with a view toward social reintegration and national rehabilitation. Even though the two processes were quite similar, the different roles the German and Japanese governments played in the negotiations with the Allies and the different contexts in Europe and Asia entailed diverging outcomes of dealing with war crimes. Rolf-Harald Wippich delineates the reluctant and reserved political, economic, and cultural reconnections between West Germany and Japan in the decades after the war. The subsequent chapter by Volker Stanzel informs us of the unusually intensive cultural exchange between Japan and East Germany until 1989, even though the political and economic relations were as insignificant as those between Japan and West Germany. The last chapter of this book deals with a wellknown figure in contemporary German-Japanese literature: Yoko Tawada. Birgit Maier-Katkin and Lee Roberts explore the in-between places in Tawada’s writing in both German and Japanese and demonstrate the transcultural and multifarious dimensions inherent in the unique style of literary representation in Tawada’s literary works. This volume surveys key moments in Japanese–German relations from the midnineteenth to the late twentieth century with richly informed materials from a variety of perspectives. This book relativizes the assumption of a close affinity between Japan and Germany during the Nazi period with interesting findings. The reviewer highly recommends this book to students and scholars interested in emerging fields of transnational studies and Asian German studies. The volume, along with other recently published edited volumes on Asian German Studies, paves the way and prepares a readership for more specialized studies that may eventually develop compelling methodologies and concepts for the booming field of global history based on the archive of Asian German Studies.

Silence and Absence in Literature and Music ed. by Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (review)

medical texts and three seldom-studied one-act plays published as Marionetten: Drei Einakter (1901–1906). Possibly the clearest statement of the book’s thrust opens Chapter Seven on the Wiener Gruppe, where it is argued that scholars’ failure to differentiate the Austrian type of public space from the German has confused analysis of how Austrian artists engaged with “their land’s cultural and political identities” (234). In contrast to West Germany’s rebuilding from a Zero Hour (Stunde Null), after 1945 Austrians never posited a historical Zero Hour but instead searched for “a more historically grounded cultural imagination and conscious cultural identity” (234). In my book Der österreichische Mensch (Vienna 2010) I expounded the arguments of five other participants in this post-1945 search for identity. To buttress her argument Arens could have cited any of my five essayists: Friedrich Heer, Alphons Lhotsky, Friedrich Torberg, Otto Basil, or Herbert Eisenreich. She excels at showing how for two-and-a-half centuries Austrian theater has reconfigured their sort of polyphonic cultural-political discourse. Whereas Arens focuses on how dramatists used the reservoir of behaviors and metaphors implicit in theater to characterize Austria’s distinctiveness, I focused on publicists’ discourse about how Austrian diplomats and provincial governors—a startling example of squandered human capital—labored to meld ethnicities, languages, and folk-cultures into a trans-national (“European”) vision of imperial harmony. Or so advocates of the theatricalized behavior of the “Austrian Human Type” long wished to believe. Their accounts of a supposed Austrian habitus of stylish gravitas echoes Norbert Elias’s account of how for centuries princely courts bred ingratiating behavior (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Basel 1939). Arens’s astute and often disconcerting new readings of Sonnenfels, Grillparzer, Bäuerle, Nestroy, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, and the Wiener Gruppe provide a theory-based argument that my reading of the habitus-publicists too often lacked. Her “alternative framings” inject a muchneeded cogency, not to say acerbity into debate about how Austrian writers have contrived across 250 years to differentiate their “lengthier historical provenance”— their “chain of Austrias”—from the cruder “cultural referents” of other Germanophone peoples.

Dekadenz. Oberfläche und Tiefe in der Kunst um 1900 von Martin Urmann (review)

is especially in this area that more powerful theoretical tools could have helped to bring the often insightful readings to stronger, less generalizing conclusions. All in all, White’s study adds a number of insights and interpretative nuances to important writings by Theodor Fontane. But considering that it was published in a series dedicated to “outstanding” doctoral theses, the reviewer expected a more ambitious theoretical foundation and more of a contribution to the ongoing discussion of space in literature. To this end, however, the study has little to offer that would be of interest to readers outside of Fontane scholarship.