Books
Von der Wahlenthaltung über den Konsumboykott bis hin zur Schweigeminute: Oft ist es nicht das Ha... more Von der Wahlenthaltung über den Konsumboykott bis hin zur Schweigeminute: Oft ist es nicht das Handeln, sondern gerade sein Fehlen, durch das Konflikte ausgetragen und Wandel hervorgerufen werden. Dieser Band setzt sich erstmals systematisch mit diesem Phänomen auseinander, in dem sich Aktivität und Inaktivität überschneiden. Anhand von Fallstudien aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert untersuchen die Beiträge die besondere Eigenlogik und Bedeutung von Unterlassungspraktiken in Europa. Ihre Thematisierung verspricht neue Einsichten in die Konstitution und Dynamik moderner Gesellschaften. Denn gerade im Umgang mit dem Nichthandeln - ob aus Lethargie, zur Vermeidung oder als Widerstand - treten die Ambivalenzen der Partizipationschancen und -erwartungen hervor, durch die sich die Moderne auszeichnet.
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"Today, cultural criticism (Kulturkritik) does not have the best reputation. At the very least, g... more "Today, cultural criticism (Kulturkritik) does not have the best reputation. At the very least, general laments about the decline of civilization as a whole seem a bit lofty and antiquated . Often, they are denounced as reactionary and politically suspect. At the same time, we instantly recognize it's mode of speaking as a particular voice that is still, despite the ridicule and indignation it is subjected to, omnipresent in our daily life.
Against this background, the question of the historical conditions of its emergence and development gains new relevance. Against the traditional understanding of cultural criticism as a theoretical system to be either refuted or supported, this study approaches the subject as a discourse that arose in a very specific historical constellation. On the basis of French, German, and English sources, it analyzes its changing linguistic form and sociopolitical effects in various fields and contexts, thus giving an account of a discursive form that - precisely in its reaction against modernity - is distinctly modern."
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Journal Forum
History and Theory, 2021
Co-edited with Anna Karla (Cologne), with contributions by Britta Hochkirchen (Bielefeld), Fernan... more Co-edited with Anna Karla (Cologne), with contributions by Britta Hochkirchen (Bielefeld), Fernando Esposito (Konstanz), Anna Karla and myself.
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Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Susanne Kitschun et al. (eds): Die Revolution 1848/49. Ambivalenzen der Demokratiegeschichte, 2024
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Sebastian Glassner, Eva Rieger and Bernhard Stahl (eds): 10 Minuten Soziologie: Schweigen, 2024
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Karolin Wetjen et al. (eds): Schweigen machen. Zugänge zur Geschichte der Moderne, 2024
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Frauke Höntzsch (ed.): Mill-Handbuch. Leben - Werk - Wirkung, 2024
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Parliaments, Estates & Representation, 2024
The ideal of parliamentary debate is often construed in terms of a disimpassioned exchange of arg... more The ideal of parliamentary debate is often construed in terms of a disimpassioned exchange of arguments. Yet in actual practice, emotions play a key role. As recent studies of French, British, and other parliaments have shown, a closer look at the uses of laughter in the plenary debates can provide a useful entry point for a better understanding of the atmospheric dimension of debates. Focusing on the early decades of the German Imperial Reichstag, this article considers the varying modes of parliamentary humour, laughter and ridicule and their significance in the context of rhetorical struggles and processes of political in- and exclusion. In comparative dialogue with research on other parliaments, it contributes to a more precise characterization of the internal dynamics of an institution still very much in flux. While contemporaries made a sharp distinction between exclusionary laughter and inclusionary mirth (Heiterkeit), a closer look at the plenary interactions shows that while parliamentary laughter performed many different functions, on the whole, it primarily constituted a mechanism of de-escalation. As such, parliamentary humour did not stand in opposition to (rational) debate, but played a key role in the management of difference and conflict that the parliament was created to facilitate.
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Language & Communication, 2024
As a metaphor for political power, participation, and legitimacy, the concept of ‘voice’ is centr... more As a metaphor for political power, participation, and legitimacy, the concept of ‘voice’ is central to considerations of representative politics during the modern era. Little is known about how political actors themselves understood and referred to their own voices, those of others, and their respective significance for representative politics. This article focuses on the British Parliament, which was since the eighteenth century regarded as a paradigmatic incarnation of political voice and as the pinnacle of modern representative government. Based on a corpus of Hansard debates from 1800 to 2005, we analyse MPs' explicit references to ‘voice’ in parliamentary debates. We aim to explore the salience of ‘voice’ for MPs and of different aspects of voice as a vehicle for expressing political will. We also shed light on how metadiscursive references to ‘voice’ change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung, 2023
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Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 2023
A short survey of the development of German historiography on the Revolution of 1848/49 since the... more A short survey of the development of German historiography on the Revolution of 1848/49 since the 19th century.
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Wolfram Pyta/Rüdiger Voigt (eds): Zugang zum Machthaber , 2022
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Jens Elberfeld et al. (eds: Erträumte Geschichte(n). Zur Historizität von Träumen, Visionen und Utopien, 2022
The chapter considers recent developments in the field of historical dream research against the b... more The chapter considers recent developments in the field of historical dream research against the background of the new tools emerging from the field of digital humanities. As very extensive databases of dream reports have become available (some including more than 50.000 reports), the question of their analysis has come to the fore in new ways. In a first step, I sketch the historical development of the quantitative historical dream research that has been booming in recent years. Second, I critically examine the field’s methods, which have increasingly moved into areas of sophisticated data mining on the basis of self-learning algorhithms.
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Diego Palacios Cerezales/Oriol Luján (eds): Popular Agency and Politicisation in Ninenteenth-Century Europe: Beyond the Vote, 2022
While acclamations remain a familiar phenomenon today, they tend to be understood as an atmospher... more While acclamations remain a familiar phenomenon today, they tend to be understood as an atmospheric, rather than a functional, element of political life. In consequence, the historical variability of their practice and impact remains understudied. Building on a survey of current research, this contribution addresses the forms, functions and situations of acclamation in Europe during the Age of Revolutions. Focusing on the tensions between the practice’s symbolic holism – suggesting a direct expression of the communities’ undivided will – and its underlying complexities as a mode of collective action, it argues that acclamations gained a historically unique impact during the (post-)revolutionary period. While other opportunities for political articulation and participation remained sharply constrained, these public vocalizations presented one of the very few available modes of regular political engagement. At the same time, public interactions between rulers and ‘the people’ gained new performative significance against the background of experiences of political upheaval and regime change. A consideration of a wide range of case studies from across the continent shows how practices of acclamation and their reception became part of a transnationally entangled contestation of political legitimacy, constituting an ephemeral, but momentous mode of popular politics.
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Mahshid Mayar / Marion Schulte (eds): Silence and its Derivatives. Conversations Across Disciplines, 2022
We often tend to think of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in terms of ‘silence’, while parl... more We often tend to think of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in terms of ‘silence’, while parliamentary and democratic politics are linked to the category of ‘voice’. Retracing the historical emergence of such conceptualizations during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this chapter aims at a reconsideration of these familiar, but reductive binaries. Exploring French, German, and British discourses on the question why some nations are more talkative than others brings to light a fundamental shift in the understanding of communication around the turn of the nineteenth century, when explanations in terms of national character were gradually superseded by a point of view linking taciturnity and talkativeness to specific political regimes. This gradual reorientation from a spatio-cultural to a temporal framing coincided with a distinct politicization of the question of communication (and its absence) which still resonates today. Placing our current understanding of the significance of voice and silence into a wider historical perspective thus contributes to a reconsideration of the meanings of communication in the modern world.
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Susanne Kitschun / Elisabeth Thalhofer (eds): Die Revolution 1848/49. Wie nach 175 Jahren an den Meilenstein der Demokratiegeschichte erinnern?, 2022
A short survey of some new trends in current research on the European revolutions of 1848/49
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Andreas Braune et al (eds): Einigkeit und Recht, doch Freiheit? Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Demokratiegeschichte und Erinnerungskultur, 2021
In älteren Darstellungen galt das Kaiserreich oft als Gesellschaft, die komplett auf den Befehlst... more In älteren Darstellungen galt das Kaiserreich oft als Gesellschaft, die komplett auf den Befehlston ausgerichtet gewesen sei. Das Pendant zum Bild eines repressiven Obrigkeitsstaats war die Vorstellung einer diskussionsunfähigen Untertanengesellschaft. In jüngerer Zeit ist dagegen auf die vitale Diskussionskultur der Ära hingewiesen worden, die nicht zuletzt in den politischen Versammlungen zum Ausdruck kam. Mit Blick auf die Interaktionsformen dieser Arena hebt der Beitrag die Ambivalenzen der politischen Streitkultur des Kaiserreichs hervor. Während in den ersten Jahrzehnten des Regimes eine deliberative Versammlungsform vorherrschte, bei der Vertreter verschiedener Lager vor einem heterogenen Publikum miteinander ins Gespräch kamen, verschob sich der Schwerpunkt ab den 1890er Jahren zunehmend zur reinen Parteiversammlung, deren Funktion vor allem darin lag, die Geschlossenheit und Begeisterung des eigenen Lagers zu demonstrieren. Ruhiger wurden die auch zuvor schon sehr tumultuösen Versammlungen dadurch allerdings nicht. Vielmehr etablierte sich eine Parallelpraxis gegenseitiger Versammlungsstörungen und -sprengungen, die als physischer Revierkampf Teil der politischen Auseinandersetzung wurden.
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Floris Meens (ed.), Ten strijde tegen het verval. Cultuurkritiek in diachroon en internationaal perspectief, 2021
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History and Theory, 2021
Whereas most theoretical and historiographical accounts of the event have focused on its present ... more Whereas most theoretical and historiographical accounts of the event have focused on its present and past dimensions, this article addresses the relatively underexplored phenomenon of the future event. As temporal junctures, events often already elicit effects before they come to pass, and even if they never do. Building on foundational work on the relation between experience and expectation by Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck as well as on current historiographical debates on “past futures,” I develop a threefold typology of the future event, distinguishing between the assumption of the routine event, the expectation of the relative event, and the adumbration of the radical event. Engaging with case studies like the year 2000, the ambivalent character of so‐called media events, and ongoing debates about a possible climate collapse and the COVID‐19 pandemic, I show how reconsidering the complex temporalities of the future event can shed new light on the ways in which past societies made their futures present.
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History and Theory, 2021
(co-written with Anna Karla (Cologne)) This introduction sets the stage for the following contrib... more (co-written with Anna Karla (Cologne)) This introduction sets the stage for the following contributions by outlining the current state of research on the two fundamental categories that this forum brings together: the event and time. In a brief survey, we discuss the ways in which the temporality of events has been theorized across disciplines. We also present our core argument for understanding the event as a temporal focal point. In dialogue with existing approaches, we seek to develop a theoretically enriched and empirically fruitful conceptualization of the event, thus offering new perspectives to the academic historiography of events as well as to historical culture at large.
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Against this background, the question of the historical conditions of its emergence and development gains new relevance. Against the traditional understanding of cultural criticism as a theoretical system to be either refuted or supported, this study approaches the subject as a discourse that arose in a very specific historical constellation. On the basis of French, German, and English sources, it analyzes its changing linguistic form and sociopolitical effects in various fields and contexts, thus giving an account of a discursive form that - precisely in its reaction against modernity - is distinctly modern."
Journal Forum
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Against this background, the question of the historical conditions of its emergence and development gains new relevance. Against the traditional understanding of cultural criticism as a theoretical system to be either refuted or supported, this study approaches the subject as a discourse that arose in a very specific historical constellation. On the basis of French, German, and English sources, it analyzes its changing linguistic form and sociopolitical effects in various fields and contexts, thus giving an account of a discursive form that - precisely in its reaction against modernity - is distinctly modern."
Predicated on a one-sided focus on political ‘voice’, analyses of political silences traditionally focused almost exclusively on their negative role as the harmful absence of participation or responsibility. More recently, a new appreciation for the wide spectrum of political functions of silence has gained ground, including forms of willful renitence and even active resistance. Yet this thematic expansion has also resulted in a loss of focus. Lacking a common analytical framework, research on political silences risks limiting itself to the purely additive: finding and filling in ever more minute ‘blank spots’ on the periphery of the map of political research. Building on the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, this paper proposes a solution to this dilemma by means of a reconsideration of the political role of expectations. In political discourse, the expected distribution of moments of silence and articulation expresses established power structures, while unexpected silences and the breaking of expected silences conversely present a powerful means of calling these into question. Focusing on this ambivalence paves the way to a new systematic typology of political silences as a distinct mode of political communication. But above all, it points to the value of silence as an analytical probe, an instrument to fathom the expectations and constraints structuring political discourse in various contexts and spaces. Besides providing the study of silence with an overarching research focus, such an approach would thus build a bridge between the issue of political silence and wider debates on the structures of the political field as a whole.
Auf der Basis von Fallstudien aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert untersucht die Tagung die besondere Eigenlogik und historische Bedeutung von Unterlassungs-praktiken. Stellt das Nicht/Handeln einerseits eine besondere Herausforderung für eine Theorie historischer Praktiken dar, verspricht seine Thematisierung andererseits auch einen neuen Blick auf die spezifische Natur moderner Gesellschaften. Denn gerade in den kontroversen Auseinandersetzungen mit Unterlassungen treten die Konturen der neuen Partizipationschancen, -erwartungen und -zwänge hervor, die in diesem Zeitraum auf vielen Gebieten etabliert wurden.
Auf der Basis von Fallstudien aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert untersucht die Tagung die besondere Eigenlogik und historische Bedeutung von Unterlassungs-praktiken. Stellt das Nicht/Handeln einerseits eine besondere Herausforderung für eine Theorie historischer Praktiken dar, verspricht seine Thematisierung andererseits auch einen neuen Blick auf die spezifische Natur moderner Gesellschaften. Denn gerade in den kontroversen Auseinandersetzungen mit Unterlassungen treten die Konturen der neuen Partizipationschancen, -erwartungen und -zwänge hervor, die in diesem Zeitraum auf vielen Gebieten etabliert wurden.