Publications
Books
To See Without Being Seen
Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare
Edited by Svea Bräunert and Meredith Malone
University of Chicago Press, 2016
As the ubiquitous vision and remote engagement of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are redefining contemporary life, their impact is filtering into art and visual culture, generating new investigations into issues of perception, visibility, technology, and fear. Considering an international array of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and web-based projects, To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare reveals the unique potential of art to further our understanding of—and give visual form to—drone warfare and digital surveillance in today’s world. While the drone is the specific point of departure for this investigation, the essays in this book illuminate the ways in which the drone embodies a much broader discussion about the rapidly shifting conditions of perception—of seeing, and of being seen—made possible by advanced technology.
Method
Talents 38
Svea Bräunert, Sasha Kurmaz
Kehrer, 2016
The nonconformist actions of Ukrainian artist Sasha Kurmaz take place in public spaces and casually break up the monotony of familiar modes of perception. The photographic situations and illegal interventions question habits and open new cultural and social spaces. His attitude is guerrilla or punk – autonomous, playful, disruptive, radical. For him, photography is not just an instrument for echoing and explaining life, but rather for exhausting art's potential and by doing so changing our understanding of society. It's not the neatly framed print on the wall at an exhibition that counts, but rather the artistic act itself. That places Kurmaz in the tradition of a conceptual approach to photography, as it has been implemented since the 1970s. Even at that time, the former understanding of photography was turned upside down and led to an expansion of the use, perception and definition of the photographic medium.
Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936
Edited by Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, Valerie Weinstein
Camden House, 2016
Hitler's Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, on January 30, 1933, marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich, and German film scholarship has generally accepted this date as the break between Weimar and Nazi-era film as well. This collection of essays interrogates the continuities and discontinuities in German cinema before and after January 1933 and their relationship to the various crises of the years 1928 to 1936 in seven areas: politics, the economy, concepts of race and ethnicity, the making of cinema stars, genre cinema, film technologies and aesthetics, and German-international film relations. Focusing both on canonical and lesser-known works, the essays analyze a representative sample of films and genres from the period. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Weimar and Third Reich cinema and of the sociopolitical, economic, racial, artistic, and technological spheres in both late Weimar and the early Third Reich, as well as to film scholars in general.
Gespenstergeschichten: Der linke Terrorismus der RAF und die Künste
Svea Bräunert
Kadmos, 2015
The book investigates 1970s leftwing terrorism as a prism that recasts West German cultural history after 1945. Looking at literature, film, and art from the late 1960s until the first decade of the 21st century, it explores connections between terrorism, media, and art in order to describe the history of the Red Army Faction as a different kind of trauma. It is a trauma not marked by absence but mediated presence, taking on the form of a specter. As a specter, leftwing terrorism interacts with other memories, making them visible for the first time and shifting their meaning in instances of deferred action for the past, present, and future.
Catastrophe and Catharsis
Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond
Edited by Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser
Camden House, 2015
Destroying human habitat and taking human lives, disasters, be they natural, man-made, or a combination, threaten large populations, even entire nations and societies. They also disrupt the existing order and cause discontinuity in our sense of self and our perceptions of the world. To restore order, not only must human beings be rescued and affected areas rebuilt, but the reality of the catastrophe must also be transformed into narrative. The essays in this collection examine representations of disaster in literature, film, and mass media in German and international contexts, exploring the nexus between disruption and recovery through narrative from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics include the Lisbon earthquake, the Paris Commune, the Hamburg and Dresden fire-bombings in the Second World War, nuclear disasters in Alexander Kluge's films, the filmic aesthetics of catastrophe, Yoko Tawada's lectures on the Fukushima disaster and Christa Wolf's novel Störfall in light of that same disaster, Joseph Haslinger and the tsunami of 2004, traditions regarding avalanche disaster in the Tyrol, and the problems and implications of defining disaster.counterpart.
Tatort Germany
The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction
Edited by Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog
Camden House, 2014
Although George Bernard Shaw quipped that "the Germans lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels," there is a long tradition of German crime fiction; it simply hasn't aligned itself with international trends. During the 1920s, German-language writers dispensed with the detective and focused instead on criminals, a trend that did not take hold in other countries until after 1945, by which time Germany had gone on to produce antidetective novels that were similarly ahead of their time. German crime fiction has thus always been a curious case; rather than follow the established rules of the genre, it has always been interested in examining, breaking, and ultimately rewriting those rules. This book assembles leading international scholars to examine today's German crime fiction. It features innovative scholarly work that matches the innovativeness of the genre, taking up the Regionalkrimi; crime fiction's reimagining and transforming of traditional identities; historical crime fiction that examines Germany's and Austria's conflicted twentieth-century past; and how the newly vibrant Austrian crime fiction ties in with and differentiates itself from its German counterpart.
East, West and Centre
Reframing post-1989 European Cinema
Edited by Michael Gott and Todd Herzog
Edinburgh University Press, 2014
Twenty-five years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, and ten years have passed since the first formerly communist states entered the EU. An entire post-Wall generation has now entered adulthood, yet scholarship on European cinema still tends to divide the continent along the old Cold War lines.
In East, West and Centre the world’s leading scholars in the field assemble to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema. Assessing the state of post-1989 European cinema, from (co)production and reception trends to filmic depictions of migration patterns, economic transformations and socio-political debates over the past and the present, they address increasingly intertwined cinema industries that are both central (France, Germany) and marginal (Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania) in Europe. This is a ground-breaking and essential read, not just for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies, but also for those interested in wider European Studies as well.
DEFA international: Grenzüberschreitende Filmbeziehungen vor und nach dem Mauerbau
Edited by Michael Wedel, Barton Byg, Andy Räder, Sky Arndt-Briggs, and Evan Torner
VS Springer, 2013
Das Buch untersucht die internationalen Filmbeziehungen der DEFA von ihrer Gründung 1946 bis zu ihrer Auflösung nach dem Ende der DDR. Im Rahmen einer komparatistischen Mediengeschichtsschreibung werden stilistische Einflüsse in verschiedenen Filmgattungen ebenso untersucht wie Wechselwirkungen in der Rezeption und öffentlichen Diskussion. Die Beiträge gehen institutionellen Verflechtungen, deutsch-deutschen Filmkontakten und gelungenen wie gescheiterten Kooperations- und Koproduktionsvorhaben nach. Ein zentraler Aspekt des interkulturellen Austauschs der DDR wird damit erstmals grundlegend aufgearbeitet.
Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing
Edited by Evan Torner and William J. White
McFarland, 2012
This collection of all-new essays approaches the topic of immersion as a product of social and media relations. Examining the premises and aesthetics of live-action and tabletop role-playing games, reality television, social media apps and first-person shooters, the essays take both game rules and the media discourse that games produce as serious objects of study.
Scholars of social psychology, sociology, role-playing theory, game studies, and television studies all examine games and game-like environments like reality shows as interdependent sites of social friction and power negotiation. The ten essays articulate the importance of game rules in analyses of media products, and demonstrate methods that allow game rules to be seen in action during the process of play.
Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe
Edited by Felix B. Chang and Sunnie T. Rucker-Chang
Routledge, 2011
Much of the former Soviet bloc has become a destination for new Chinese migrants. Throughout Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Chinese migrants are engaged in entrepreneurial activities, primarily as petty merchants of consumer goods in unsteady economies. This book situates these migrants within the broader context of Chinese globalization and China’s economic "rise." It traces the origins of Chinese migration into the region, as well as the conditions that have allowed migrants to thrive. Furthermore, it discusses the perception that Chinese globalization is purely economic and explores the relationship among petty merchants, labourers and institutional investors. Finally, by examining the movement of China’s minorities into Central Asia, this book challenges the ethnic construct of new "Chinese" migration.
After the Berlin Wall
Germany and Beyond
Edited by Katharina Gerstenberger and Jana Evans Braziel
Palgrave McMillan, 2011
After the Berlin Wall: Germany and Beyond explores historical, cultural, political, and literary dimensions of the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath both in Germany and internationally. Topics include German and Chinese approaches to urban planning and historical preservation, Japanese responses to German unification, discussions of walls and borders in Germany and in the West Bank, and contemporary German culture in a global world. Art historians, literary scholars, and sociologists offer perspectives on the continued importance of East German culture and the legacies of socialism. Drawing from interdisciplinary methods, the collection is of value to anthropologists, historians, political theorists, and cultural critics.
Wie sonst das Zeugen Mode war
Reproduktionstechnologien in Literatur und Film
Tanja Nusser
Rombach Litterae, 2011
The book explores the development of reproductive technologies and their depiction in literature and film from the early 19th century to the present.
Myth: German and Scandinavian Studies
Edited by Evan Torner and Victoria Lenshyn
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009
Myth presents the latest interdisciplinary research by graduate students in the fields of German and Scandinavian studies, compiling papers that were introduced at the eponymous 2008 graduate student conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Focusing on myths in and about German and Scandinavian societies, these essays provide exemplary analyses of how cultural and social practices mutually inform and influence each other.
This anthology is primarily intended for scholars across the disciplines looking at trends and narratives in northern Europe. From history to film studies, theater and philology, the contributions represent the teeming variety of approaches to German and Scandinavian studies now emergent in the Academy. Myth showcases not only new inquiries into diverse subject areas, but also new methods of inquiry for future interdisciplinary research.
Crime Stories
Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany
Todd Herzog
Berghahn Books, 2009
This study approaches the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) from a unique perspective - investigating the most notorious criminals of the time and the public's reaction to their crimes. The author argues that the development of a new type of crime fiction during this period - which turned literary tradition on its head by focusing on the criminal and abandoning faith in the powers of the rational detective - is intricately related to new ways of understanding criminality among professionals in the fields of law, criminology, and police science. Considering Weimar Germany not only as a culture in crisis, but also as a culture of crisis, the author explores the ways in which crime and crisis became the foundation of the Republic's self-definition. An interdisciplinary cultural studies project, this book insightfully combines history, sociology, literary studies, and film studies to investigate a topic that cuts across all of these disciplines.
Engineering Life
Narrationen vom Menschen in Biomedizin, Kultur und Literatur
Edited by Claudia Breger, Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Tanja Nusser
Kulturverlad Kadmos, 2008
Vor dem Hintergrund aktueller biomedizinischer Entwicklungen und biotechnologischer Eingriffsmöglichkeiten stellen sich die altbekannten Fragen nach der ›Natur‹ des Menschen, seiner Mach- oder Herstellbarkeit und den technischen sowie ethischen Grenzen eines solchen engineering mit neuer Schärfe. Imaginationen und Reflexionen dieser Prozesse finden in einer Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Diskurse und Medien statt. Ein verbindendes Moment ist dabei die Tatsache, dass nicht nur die Vorstellung zukünftiger Möglichkeiten, sondern auch die Etablierung gegenwärtigen Wissens auf Erzählstrategien und rhetorische Muster angewiesen ist. Das heißt, narrative Elemente werden ebenso in populärer Berichterstattung, Belletristik und Hollywoodfilm wie auch im Kontext natur- und biowissenschaftlicher Forschung verwendet, wo sie für den Erkenntnisprozess von grundlegender Bedeutung sind. Der Band fragt, auf welche Wissensformationen dieses Erzählen zurückgreift und welche spezifischen narrativen Strategien in Biomedizin, Kultur und Literatur verwendet werden, um Vorstellungen des Menschen festzuschreiben, umzuschreiben oder neu zu entwerfen.
In exemplarischen Einzelanalysen setzen sich Vertreterinnen und Vertreter aus Biologie, Medizin- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Technikanthropologie, Soziologie, Literaturwissenschaft und Kulturwissenschaft mit dem engineering life in Biomedizin und ›populärer‹ Kultur vor allem seit dem 19. Jahrhundert auseinander. Zur Sprache kommen u.a. biowissenschaftliche und literarische Narrationen im Kontext von Gewebezucht, Immunologie und reproduktivem Klonen, Anthropotechniken in Science Fiction-Literatur und -Film, Strategien der Wissensvermittlung in der Ausstellungsform Science Center und das Verhältnis von Poetik und Wissenschaft in Literatur und Film. Damit antwortet der Band auf aktuelle Debatten in Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Bioethik und Kulturwissenschaften und macht narratologische Perspektiven für die Analyse des spezifischen Feldes der Biomedizin fruchtbar.
Writing the New Berlin
The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature
Katharina Gerstenberger
Camden House, 2008
Berlin literature of the postunification decade is marked by ambiguity: change is linked to questions of historical continuity; postmodern simulation finds its counterpart in a quest for authenticity; and the assimilation of Germanness into European and global contexts is both liberation and loss. This book pursues a nuanced understanding of the search for new ways to tell the story of Germany's past and of its importance for the formation of a new German identity.
Rebirth of a Culture
Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria today
Edited by Hillary Hope Herzog, Todd Herzog and Benjamin Lapp
Berghahn Books, 2008
This volume focuses on the re-emergence of a lively Jewish cultural scene in the German-speaking countries and the various cultural forms of expression that have developed around it. Topics include current debates such as the emergence of a post-Waldheim Jewish discourse in Austria and Jewish responses to German unification and the Gulf wars. The volume pairs leading scholars of German Jewish studies with leading representatives of German-Jewish writing today such as Esther Dischereit, Barbara Honigmann, Jeanette Lander, and Doron Rabinovici.
German Literature in a New Century
Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations
Edited by Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse
Berghahn Books, 2008
The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany's "new normalcy" and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany's new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.
Askese
Geschlecht und Geschichte der Selbstdiziplinierung
Tanja Nusser and Irmela M. Krüger-Fürhoff
Aisthesis, 2005
Askese ruft heute zwiespältige Reaktionen hervor: Einerseits wird sie als historisch überkommene und potentiell heuchlerische Zwangsübung verurteilt, andererseits als angemessene Antwort auf aktuelle Probleme wie Reizüberflutung und Konsumterror gefeiert. Umgangssprachlich versteht man Askese als einen selbst gewählten Verzicht auf körperliche oder psychosoziale Grundbedürfnisse, der auf Höheres zielt. Typische Ausprägungen sind beispielsweise religiös motiviertes Zölibat, säkulare Formen der Enthaltsamkeit zur Produktivitäts- und Leistungssteigerung von Sportlern, Künstlern und Managern, aber auch medizinische Krankheitsbilder wie die Anorexia nervosa. Der Band zeigt aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive, wie vielfältig, historisch wandelbar und bis heute allgegenwärtig verschiedene Praktiken selbst gewählter Enthaltsamkeit sind. Die einzelnen Beiträge gehen davon aus, dass asketische Praktiken der geschlechtsspezifischen Konstitution von Subjekten dienen und dass sie als prozessual zu begreifen sind: Wo auf körperliche und seelische Grundbedürfnisse verzichtet wird, um höhere (transzendente oder innerweltliche) Ziele zu erreichen, lässt sich ein ambivalentes Wechselspiel zwischen Selbstaufgabe und Selbstermächtigung beobachten, also eine Dynamik von Mangel und Fülle, Enthaltsamkeit und Exzess. In diesem Sinne stellen Askese und Ekstase keine Gegensätze dar, sondern folgen einer ähnlichen Logik.
Rasterfahndungen
Darstellungstechniken – Normierungsverfahren – Wahrnehmungskonstitution
Edited by Tanja Nusser and Elisabeth Strowick
Transcript, 2003
Der Band untersucht die nach dem 11. September 2001 wieder stärker in die Diskussion geratene Methode der Rasterfahndung aus (wissenschafts-)historischer Perspektive. Fungieren Raster einerseits als Instrument von Identitätspolitik, Repression und Normierung, sind sie andererseits für Wahrnehmung und Darstellung, d.h. für gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit überhaupt konstitutiv. Indem die BeiträgerInnen gezielt die medial-normative Doppelfunktion des Rasters in den Blick nehmen, wird der Rahmen der politischen, kriminalistischen und juristischen Diskurse, die üblicherweise mit dem Begriff »Rasterfahndung« aufgerufen sind, um medien- und literaturwissenschaftliche, darstellungstechnische, kulturhistorische sowie gendertheoretische Fragestellungen erweitert.
Von und zu anderen Ufern
Ulrike Ottingers filmische Reiseerzählungen
Tanja Nusser
Boehlau, 2002
Die Berliner Filmemacherin Ulrike Ottinger hat sich mit provokanten Arbeiten seit den 70er Jahren einen Namen in der internationalen Szene gemacht. Ihre Filme wie z.B."Laokoon und Söhne" (1972/73), "Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin" (1977), "Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse" (1983/84), "Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia" (1989) oder "Exil Shanghai" (1997) thematisieren immer wieder unterschiedliche Formen und Erfahrungen des Reisens.#A>Tanja Nusser betrachtet Ottingers filmische Reiseerzählungen vor dem Hintergrund von Theorien des Reisens, des Fremden, des Anderen und der Grenze sowie im Rückbezug auf Aspekte der Psychoanalyse und der Gender Studies. Vor diesem Horizont scheinen Ulrike Ottingers geographische und kulturelle Grenzüberschreitungen wiederholt mit dem Versuch verknüpft zu sein, dichotomische Modelle von Ich/Anderer, weiblich/männlich oder heterosexuell/homosexuell zu hinterfragen und aufzulösen. Reisen wird zu einer Erfahrung des Anderen, die eine "Selbsterfahrung" in einer Reise nach innen bedingt.
A New Germany in a New Europe
Edited by Todd Herzog and Sander Gilman
Routledge, 2001
Writing on Berlin's new Jewish Museum and other memorials, the state of multiculturalism in Germany, or future of german culture in a unified Europe, the voices in this volume lay before us the questions that face not only Germany but anyone concerned with Germany's history and the future of Europe.
Journals Edited by UC German Faculty
