Zachau / Gansel / Korte Topography and Literature

Berlin and Modernism. E-BOOK
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-3-86234-059-0
Verlag: V&R unipress
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Deutsch, Band Band 004, 187 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 240 mm

Reihe: Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur und Medien

Die Beiträge der gleichnamigen Tagung an der University of the South in Tennessee, USA, untersuchen die Beziehung zwischen der Auswirkung des Berliner Stadtraums auf künstlerische Darstellungen. In einem ersten Teil werden die Wilhelminischen Stadtsymbole und die einsetzende moderne Stadtplanung in Beziehung zu Berliner Flaneuren wie Georg Hermann und Robert Walser gebracht. Der Schwerpunkt des Bandes liegt im zweiten Teil, wo die Auswirkungen der Stadtplanung auf Kunst und Literatur im Berlin der Weimarzeit im Mittelpunkt stehen. In diesem Teil zeigen eine Reihe von Einzeldarstellungen Aspekte der Wechselwirkung von Raum und Kunstprodukt u. a. bei Otto Dix, Walter Ruttmann, Hans Fallada und Alfred Döblin. Den Abschluss bilden Beiträge über das Fortwirken von Weimars Moderne in der heutigen Zeit.

Dr. Reinhard K. Zachau ist Professor für Deutsch und Film Studies an der University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. Er ist Autor einer Reihe von Werken, u. a. einer Monographie über Stefan Heym und einer Einführung zum deutschen Film, sowie Studien über Hans Fallada, Heinrich Böll und Stefan Heym. Dr. Reinhard Zachau is Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (USA). He is the author of a number of books, among them a volume on Stefan Heym's work, introductions to German film and to Berlin's culture, along with studies on Wolfgang Koeppen, Hans Fallada and Heinrich Böll.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zachau, Reinhard

Gansel, Carsten

Korte, Hermann

Weitere Mitwirkende

Gansel, Carsten

Korte, Hermann

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Geschichte der Architektur, Baugeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Table of Contents;7
2;Introduction;9
3;Matthew Lange, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Berlin’s » Cathedrals of Commercialism « : Cultural Confrontations with the Warenhaus Phenomenon;13
4;Marcel Rotter, University of St. Francis Berlin in Posters – Posters in Berlin: Mass Advertisement and Urban Space in Berlin 1900– 1933;29
5;Barry A. Jackisch, University of Saint Francis Green Germania?: Green Space and Urban Planning in Berlin, 1900–1945;53
6;Alan Lareau, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Bitte einsteigen! Josephine Baker’s 1928 Return to Berlin;71
7;David S. Johnson, University of Alabama in Huntsville Engaging Consumption: Subjection and Subjectivity on the Streets of Imperial Berlin;89
8;Godela Weiss-Sussex, University of London The Mental Life of a Metropolitan Dweller: Georg Hermann’s Novel Die Nacht des Doktor Herzfeld ( 1912);103
9;Rolf J. Goebel, University of Alabama in Huntsville Media Competition: Ruttmann’s Berlin: die Symphonie der Großstadt and Hessel’s Ein Flaneur in Berlin;113
10;Patrick Fortmann, University of Chicago Topographies of Transport: The Openings of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz;127
11;Todd Heidt, University of Cincinnati Erzähler and Information: Alfred Döblin’s Epic Realism;143
12;Jan Uelzmann, University of Texas Berlin is a Cabaret of the Nameless: The Cynical City in Erich Kästner’s Fabian;155
13;Geoff Wilkes, University of Queensland, Australia The Representation of Berlin in Hans Fallada’s Ein Mann will nach oben;169
14;Bernhard Heinrich, Schweinfurt, Germany René Trintzius’ Deutschland: Das Berlin der zwanziger Jahre aus einer französischen Perspektive;177
15;The Contributors;187

Leseproben

" (S. 125-126)

In a revealing introductory essay to a collection of Berlin photographs, originally written in 1928 – the year before the monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf was published – but significantly revised and expanded two years later, Alfred Döblin diagnoses the modernist inability to speak of, let alone to write Berlin.1 To illustrate his claim and to discredit the style of narrating urban space that Berlin had rendered obsolete, Döblin begins a familiar tale, only to interrupt himself in the second sentence, »The illuminated ads throw punches, the speakers rail nonstop, the goods pile up in heaps in displays, which used to be tactful and demure.

Gigantic autobuses from different continents speed through these strange streets, gleaming in international false luxury, while in the suburbs« (KS III 153).2 With the abandoned narrative (»while in the suburbs«), Döblin takes stock of the modernist repertory for perceiving, depicting, and representing the metropolis that had become the standard of the avant-garde of his time, the violent, almost physical assault on the senses that incorporates visual, audible, and tactile impulses, the all-pervasive commodification that dominates the publicsphere, the backward-looking lament that proliferation has replaced taste and restraint has given way to accumulation, and finally the omnipresent and dynamic traffic that cuts through rather than connects urban spaces.

Döblin does not denounce the techniques and the critiques of modernity that generate them as such. Rather, he dismisses a narrative that simply describes these techniques instead of harnessing them, and thus questions how suitable such a narrative is for capturing the reality of a Berlin that, according to the same essay, is »a poetic, not very colorful, but very genuine city« (KS III 153). Döblin then goes even further back in time and nostalgically quotes Balzac, whose portraiture of Paris is as irretrievably lost to later modernity as other nineteenth-century attempts to narrate the metropolis. Together with Balzac, Döblin also takes leave from, say, Dicken’s London or Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg, although he continues to admire at least the latter throughout his life.

But Berlin, he claims, is different. For the remainder of this essay, Döblin follows on the tracks of a typical tourist whom he imagines as leaving Berlin disenchanted, finding its historical monuments too eclectic, its distractions dull, and its architecture monotonous. The bored tourist on his sightseeing trip, Döblin finds, has gone astray for he has failed to ›see‹ Berlin. Döblin recommends that the visitor make a fresh start; that he take a different route, not leading right into the center but cutting through it from south to west, and that he, most importantly, change vehicles from tourist bus to express train.

Riding the train, the visitor might shake the fixation on certain buildings, images, or people. With his body in accelerated motion, his perception would float more freely, »But take eventually the express train into this sea of stone, perhaps late in the evening, and experience open-heartedly the staggering gaze of this city« (KS III 156). As the speed of the transport blurs the visitor’s visual field and as the train takes the tourist at once into the city and away from it, he may begin to take it in all at once, and thus be prepared to meet Döblin’s demand to see the whole rather than the parts,"

Über Autor(innen)

Korte, Hermann
Dr. Hermann Korte ist Professor am Fachbereich Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaften der Universität Siegen.

Gansel, Carsten
Prof. Dr. Carsten Gansel lehrt Neuere deutsche Literatur und Literatur- und Mediendidaktik an der Universität Gießen. Er ist zudem Vorsitzender der Jury zur Verleihung des Uwe-Johnson-Literaturpreises sowie des Uwe-Johnson-Förderpreises und Mitglied des P.E.N.-Zentrums Deutschland. 2012 wurde er für den Diefenbaker Award (Canada) nominiert.

Zachau, Reinhard
Dr. Reinhard K. Zachau ist Professor für Deutsch und Film Studies an der University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. Er ist Autor einer Reihe von Werken, u. a. einer Monographie über Stefan Heym und einer Einführung zum deutschen Film, sowie Studien über Hans Fallada, Heinrich Böll und Stefan Heym. Dr. Reinhard Zachau is Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (USA). He is the author of a number of books, among them a volume on Stefan Heym’s work, introductions to German film and to Berlin’s culture, along with studies on Wolfgang Koeppen, Hans Fallada and Heinrich Böll.

Dr. Reinhard K. Zachau ist Professor für Deutsch und Film Studies an der University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. Er ist Autor einer Reihe von Werken, u. a. einer Monographie über Stefan Heym und einer Einführung zum deutschen Film, sowie Studien über Hans Fallada, Heinrich Böll und Stefan Heym.

Dr. Reinhard Zachau is Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (USA). He is the author of a number of books, among them a volume on Stefan Heym’s work, introductions to German film and to Berlin’s culture, along with studies on Wolfgang Koeppen, Hans Fallada and Heinrich Böll.