Silke Arnold-de Simine

probes the political and aesthetic claims of the shifts in exhibiting practices associated with the transformation of traditional history and heritage museums into ‘spaces of memory’. The processes of memory transfer and their ethical, political and aesthetic implications are at the core of my research. I am especially interested in the role of different media and art forms in the transmission of memory and in questions of their gendering. The case studies have been chosen to allow for a comparative approach to concepts of ‘prosthetic’ memory, empathy, trauma and nostalgia with the aim of identifying transnational tendencies as well as culturally diverse responses.

The performance aspects of cross-dressing afford a spectacle well suited to film and, before that, popular theatre. Cross-dressing is only one aspect of a broader comedy concept based on disguise, role reversal, and mistaken identity in which all social variables used to define individuals—gender and sexual orientation, ‘race’, ethnicity, nationality, class, age—can be switched. The comedy stems from the accumulated and exaggerated discrepancies between appearance and behaviour, on the one hand, and allegedly authentic identity, on the other. By looking at German film comedies from 1912 to 2012, the volume reveals that stories centring on disguise and mistaken identity can be seen as playfully countering anxieties concerning the successful fulfilment of social roles and mobile identities. They can equally be geared to subvert or to provide symbolic reassurance, questioning or confirming the boundaries of social conformity.

This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the context of several debates on German literature during the 1990s the discussion revolved not only around the adequate aesthetic representation of the historical and cultural heritage but even more so around the role of literature itself in that process.
The contributions look at different discourses that were and still are concerned with reinterpreting and creating new collective symbols and narrative patterns in relation to Germany's past. The volume focuses on the effects of the characteristic discourses of the press, literature and its different genres, film, the internet and memorials on the depiction and performance of memories.

This book is based on an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to literature of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, posing questions from a socio- and psychohistorical perspective with a particular emphasis on gender studies.
My PhD research was motivated by the observation that women authored the majority of the gothic novels written in England during that period, and formed the main audience for these novels. This prompted a search for the lost history of the German Schauerroman, with a focus on those that were written by women. Most of the texts that I discovered and analysed were previously unknown. I showed that the Schauerroman written by female authors functions both as a parallel, and a counter discourse to the sentimental family novel: The Schauerroman’s literary staging of fear paints the family as the place of danger and horror, with the mother-daughter-relationship (as opposed to the father-son-relationship in the drama of Sturm and Drang) at the heart of it. Therefore these novels document an experience of difference which subverts the contemporary familial ideology. The conflict between ‘revealing’ and ‘covering’ fosters a narrative strategy which is compared to techniques used by male authors writing about the uncanny. Whereas the contemporary ideal of womanhood shows a picture of the harmonic, whole and pure ‘schöne Seele’ (beautiful soul), female authors in their texts draw the timorous and also the ‘terrifying woman’, without being able to separate them clearly and project them as ‘the Other’. Neither the eighteenth century treatises on the sublime, nor Freud’s influential theories about fear and anxiety address ‘the woman’ as a topic. In Freud’s case this is particularly poignant since he sees socialisation in the family as a major source of neurotic fear. His focus on the father-son-relationship and his exclusion of the female that points to the ‘woman as a riddle’ (Freud), both suggest that he is subject to his own theories of repression expounded in his essay about The Uncanny (1919).
It is not only ‘the woman’, however, who plays the role of ‘the Other’ in the world of the male, bourgeois subject. Studying the literary history of Germany and England makes it obvious that each culture identifies the uncanny, which is pushed to the margin of the respective culture, as pertaining to the other nation. Whereas England sees German literature as the initial and formative influence on the development of the Gothic Novel from Ann Radcliffe’s terror to M.G. Lewis’ horror, Germany considers the Schauerroman to be genuinely English. The result is that this highly influential genre, which had its impact on German authors including Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Droste-Hülshoff and many others, has been excluded from German literary history. It was one aim of this study to regain these texts for the collective memory and for research in German literature.

During my first visit to Mr Straw’s House, a National Trust Property in the North of England, I was intrigued by the discrepancies between the narrative framework provided by the National Trust – its exclusions, silences and invisibilities – and the far more complex stories the house seemed to tantalisingly hint at. As a scholar I am drawn to certain sites and affectively engage with them and yet I usually keep silent about my investment which informs not only my interest but also how I read these heritage sites. My aim here is not primarily to interrogate my own investment, but to ask how productive it is, what it enables me to see and to describe and where its limits are. This case study explores a particular tourist attraction from the perspective of storytelling and asks what narratives can be constructed around, and generated through, the spatial-emotional dimensions of this heritage site. I am interested in the hold sites have over people, why and how they provoke imaginative and empathic investment that generates a network of stories and triggers processes of unravelling which have the potential to transform silences and unmetabolized affect into empathy and emotional thought.

Das Attribut 'kurios' bezeichnete ursprünglich eine wissbegierige Geisteshaltung, bevor es auf den Gegenstand selbst übertragen wurde, auf den sich die Neugier richtete. Leicht wird vergessen, dass ein Gegenstand erst durch die Perspektive des Betrachters zur Kuriosität wird, ebenso wie durch den Kontext, in den er gestellt wird. Ein solcher Kontext ist die Sammlung oder das Kabinett, aber auch, nachdem die Kuriositäten im Laufe des achtzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhunderts zunehmend marginalisiert wurden und man das Interesse daran als dilettantisch oder kindlich-naiv abgetan hat, die Literatur und besonders die Novelle. Vorangetrieben durch die Dissoziation von Kuriosität und Einbildungskraft und durch die Vorstellung, dass einzig eine gelehrte und methodische Form der Neugier den wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt voranbringt, finden die Kuriositäten 'Zuflucht' in der Poesie. Sie überleben in den Texten von E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Clemens Brentano, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, aber auch Walter Benjamin oder W. G. Sebald. Das Fortleben der Kuriositäten in Gottfried Kellers Die drei gerechten Kammacher (1854) und dessen Signifikanz stehen im Mittelpunkt der nachfolgenden Überlegungen.

Migranten sind Menschen, die über die Grenze kommen oder gehen. Migration bedeutet sowohl Aus- als auch Zuwanderung, Zwang und Not auf der einen, Chance und
Abenteuerlust auf der anderen Seite. Dementsprechend kann sich ein Migrationsmuseum auf die Geschichte der Zuwanderung oder der Auswanderung konzentrieren, es kann aber auch verschiedene Migrationsbewegungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart unter einem Dach vereinen und dabei Parallelen oder Unterschiede hervorheben. Die Frage, der in diesem Beitrag nachgegangen wird, ist, welche Migrationsbewegungen in Deutschland in den letzten Jahren vor allem erinnert wurden und in welcher Form sie in verschiedenen Ausstellungs- und Museumsprojekten inszeniert wurden.

Remembrance of the bombings of European cities in WW II is often evoked through iconic images, be it Picasso’s famous painting Guernica (1937) or photographs such as St Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by flames and the view from the Dresdner town-hall over the ruins of the destroyed city. These images have proved influential in providing powerful and accessible interpretations of the events they came to depict as pars pro toto. Memorial culture’s current emphasize on visualization means that the public will regularly encounter these photographs not only in photo books, but also in exhibitions and museums, films and documentaries.
This talk does not only ask how these iconic images interpret the aerial warfare and invite people to remember it, comparing the British long standing myth which surrounds the Blitz with the recent German memory boom regarding the allied bombings of German cities. The second half of the talk will focus on the fact that the various perceptions of the events, which have entered the realm of cultural memory, act as a recallable foil for responses to current threats such as the London terrorist bombings in 7/7 2005. The ‘Blitz spirit’, which was evoked soon after the attacks, resulted in a very different attitude compared to the reactions to 9/11.
In Germany a very different conflict is addressed through the remembrance of the allied war bombings. By establishing the experience of the destroyed cities in public discourse a reunified Germany was able to integrate an important part of East German memorial culture. After the war West Germany had taken on the responsibility for the Nazi State by proclaiming to be its legal successor whereas East Germany had based its collective identity on anti-fascist victimhood. A reunified collective identity could rather be fashioned on the inclusive and engaging notion of victimhood than on the perpetrator model.