This paper will be available in the academic year 23-24.

This paper takes in some of the most turbulent decades in the history of the German-speaking world, marked by a sequence of revolutionary movements and events, the dramatic rise and fall of Imperial and Republican systems. It is also a period of revolutions in a broader sense: the Industrial Revolution re-shaped the landscape of towns and cities; revolutions in science and thought disrupted earlier narratives which helped make sense of people’s lives; and in the cultural sphere, there was an ongoing tension between experiment upheaval and established concerns and forms (and the counter-revolutionary tendencies attached to these). The central motif of revolution and disruption will be explored in its political and historical sense and will also inform the paper on a conceptual level: individual modules engage variously with notions of aesthetic transformation, upheaval and perturbation. There is also an opportunity to explore how contemporary conceptual revolutions, e.g. with regard to gender and race, allow us to revisit this period and see it in a new light.

At the heart of the paper is an examination of the ways in which various literary genres (the novel, the Novelle, lyrical poetry) as well as the visual arts (including cinema) and the performing arts were reshaped by – and in their turn shaped – the socio-economic and political transformations that defined the period 1830 to 1945. Literary texts and other forms of cultural production were both indicators of and agents in the great social and intellectual crises of the age: the decomposition, set in motion by Freudian psychoanalysis, of the bourgeois conception of the self as a rational, self-determined entity; the re-negotiation of gender and sexual relations; colonial ambitions and anxieties; nationalism, racism, and genocide. GE12 investigates these crises through the prism of some of the most iconic as well as some lesser-known works of modern German culture.