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This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of decolonization, taking into account Gary Wilder’s and Michael Rothberg’s reframing of the immediate postwar decades. More precisely, the introduction discusses Weiss’s and Enzensberger’s texts as engaging Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence,” published in Kursbuch, together with Enzensberger’s “Europäische Peripherie” (1965), the article to which Weiss responds with “Enzensberger’s Illusions.” Analyzing their present moment in global terms, the authors debate the role of European intellectuals. Although Weiss and Enzensberger do not address the relationship between politics and aesthetics directly, the introduction asks us to rethink postwar modernisms. Keeping in mind the connection between anticolonial politics and surrealism in the writings of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the introduction briefly traces the political and aesthetic significance of surrealism in Weiss’s thought and writing.

In this introduction the editors first trace the reception of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance in (West) Germany and the United States. Focusing on the relation between politics and aesthetics, some critics characterized this relation as fraught, arguing that the novel’s supposedly outdated politics ultimately rendered it obsolete. Others approached the novel as a writing experiment articulating politics and aesthetics in tense but productive ways. Proceeding and departing from these established views of Weiss’s text, the editors then propose a reading that understands the novel as deliberately opening itself up to future readings, a text conceived and structured to engage readers of not-yet-determined futures.

This paper argues that one key characteristic of the new American populism is its orientation toward global military confrontation with “Islam.” The paper focuses on texts by Michael Anton, Stephen K. Bannon, including Bannon’s film Torchbearer (2016). Comparing their ideological work to Alexander Dugin’s writings on the global order, the authors organize the comparison around the contextual similarity between American and Russian right-wing thinkers. There are substantive affinities, but more important is the similar relation between textual production and imperial context. We conclude by arguing that these new authoritarian movements and regimes combine coherent ideological projects with deliberately chaotic, even incoherent statements and interventions.

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of (post-)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect to works by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of the Soviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the author explores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks, drawing on Carl Schmitt's 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory and tracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, in the work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions or explode the object through a process of de-scription.

This essay foregrounds a dimension of Las Vegas that other authors only touch on inpassing: its connections to empire. The authors propose a post-imperial analysis of thecity based on a reconstruction of its history and a reading of the traces of this history inthe city’s architecture and its self-presentation in American popular culture. Thisanalysis of Las Vegas as ruinopolis draws attention to the ruin sites of the city and itshinterland, reading them through the lens of empire. We work out the imperialterritoriality of Las Vegas, including the derelict space of the Las Vegas Paiute IndianColony, the ‘Pentagon Desert’around the city with its so-called ‘national sacrifice zone’,and the Strip, with Caesars Palace. We conclude with a post-imperial reading of Venturi,Scott Brown and Izenour’s canonical Learning from Las Vegas and of the ruin signs ofthe Neon Boneyard.

The title of this special issue of Germanic Review is “Endings and New Beginnings: Ruins and Heritage.” Let me begin my introduction with a quotation from The Ruins of Detroit, the disturbing book ...

In this article, I offer a literary-critical reading of Modernity and the Holocaust, arguing that Bauman’s non-Hobbesian ethics is linked to a form of Orphic authorship. I contextualize this reading with a study of three literary authors: W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss and Janina Bauman, and their respective versions of this post-Holocaust authorship. At stake is the drama of the forbidden gaze, the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, killing her a second time. Using Levinas’ ethics and his scenario of recognition, Bauman re-writes this fateful gaze as a loving gaze, implicitly proposing a counter-model to the Schmittian gaze — always ready to recognize the enemy, always ready to kill.

Ein typischer Tanzhaus-Abend ist gepragt von einer ausgelassenen Stimmung unter jungen Menschen, Gemeinschaftsgefuhl und aktiver Teilnahme an der Reproduktion von Volksmusik und Volkstanz. Vor allem junge Intellektuelle setzten sich aus Unzufriedenheit mit der staatlich gelenkten „sozialistischen Folklore“ auf ihre eigene Art mit der ungarischen Volkskultur auseinander. Das ungarische Tanzhaus hat sich seit der ersten Veranstaltung im Jahre 1973 von einer teilweise politisch motivierten Bewegung zu einer Tanzhaus-Szene entwickelt, die heute ihren festen Platz in der ungarischen Unterhaltungskultur einnimmt. In der von Fortschrittsdenken und Schnelllebigkeit gepragten Moderne wird durch die Tanzhaus-Enthusiasten bewusst auf die Guter der ungarischen Volkskultur zuruckgegriffen. So wird eine neuartige, experimentelle Auseinandersetzung mit traditioneller Musik und den entsprechenden Tanzen gefordert. Das ungarische Tanzhaus als Retrokultur vereint Traditionsbehaftetes mit Neuartigem und stellt demnach eine ...

(2009). Briefly Noted: The Twin Towers of Anselm Kiefer and the Trope of Imperial Decline. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 84, No. 1, pp. 84-93.

(2005). Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 74-95.

Volker Weidermann, a journalist writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, seemed somewhat puzzled when he reviewed the spring 2002 literary season. After having just told his readers that for many years the GDR had been curiously absent from discussions in the Federal Republic, he exclaimed with a palpable sense of surprise: "But now it's back again, the GDR." (Dock jetzt ist sie wieder da, die DDR)} Weidermann is not the only journalist to have reacted this way to the sudden accumulation of books about life in the former GDR, which included the first postwall biography of Christa Wolf, written by Jorg Magenau; Christa Wolf's novel Leibhaftig, and sev eral autobiographical novels by the former GDR's most unsavory authors: Hermann Kant, the long-time president of the GDR's author's union and an active Stasi collaborator, Fritz Rudolf Fries, author and Stasi informer, and, finally, Sascha Anderson, the infa mous poet and cultural manager of the Prenzlauer Berg, who pre sented his autobiographical novel Sascha Anderson to a public eager to learn the details of his strange life as avant-garde artist in the ser vice of the Stasi. Finally, a group of younger authors entered the scene with stories about everyday life in the GDR of the 1980s.2 The reception of the younger authors was mixed. Their books about growing up under Honecker were often criticized as docu

(2002). Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 77, No. 4, pp. 279-303.

Dieser Aufsatz geht von der Beobachtung aus, dass Teile der deutsch-judischen Literatur auch nach 1989 von den Spuren der traumatischen Nachwirkungen des Nationalsozialismus gepragt bleiben. Hilbigs Roman Das Provisorium wird als Beispiel einer Krise mannlicher Autorschaft nach der Shoa gelesen. Provisorium thematisiert die Begegnung mit den Bildern des Massenmords und den Nexus von Scopophilie, Maskulinitat und Trauma. Der Aufsatz arbeitet mit einer Theorie des historischen Traumas (Eric Santner), das dessen Ursprung in einem Verstos gegen das Gesetz sieht. Dieser Verstos fuhrt zu einer Aufspaltung der traumatischen Nachwirkungen in eine symbolische und eine »spektrale« Geschichte, oder Geschichten. Phantasien uber Maskulinitat als Zeichen der Ubertretung, als vom Verbrechen der Vater »befleckt«, ist eine dieser spektralen Geschichten. Dieser Geschichte folgt der Aufsatz von Uwe Johnsons Jahrestagen uber Martin Walsers Friedenspreisrede zu Hilbigs Provisorium.

(1994). Dossier: Socialist Realism and East German Modernism—Another Historians' Debate. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 36-44.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction / Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle Part I. Catastrophe, Utopia, and the Architecture of Destruction 1. Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity / Andreas Huyssen 2. Air War and Architecture / Anthony Vidler 3. Modernism and Destruction in Architecture / Vladimir Paperny 4. Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to the Paper Architecture / Svetlana Boym Part II. Ruins and the Democratic Polity 5. Modernity as a "Destroyed Anthill": Tolstoy on History and the Aesthetics of Ruins / Andreas Schonle 6. Democratic Destruction: Ruins and Emancipation in the American Tradition / Russell A. Berman 7. The Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism after Munich, 1938-39 / Jonathan Bolton 8. Layered Time: Ruins as Shattered Post, Ruins as Hope in Israeli and German Landscapes and Literatures / Amir Eshel 9. Cities, Citizenship and Other Jo burg Stories / Lucia Saks Part III. Empires, Ruins, and Their Stories 10. Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why did Scipio Weep? / Julia Hell 11. Hegel's Philosophy of World History via Sebald's Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the "New Space" of Modernity / Todd Samuel Presner 12. Vilcashuaman: Telling Stories in Ruins / Jon Beasley-Murray 13. The Monument in Ruins / Daniel Herwitz 14. Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Resistances in Urban India / Rahul Mehrotra Part IV. (Post-)Ruinscapes 15. Ruins as Models: Displaying Destruction 16. "Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures": Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany / Kerstin Barndt 17. Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit / George Steinmetz 18. Dr. Strangelove's Cabinet of Wonder: Sifting through the Atomic Ruins at the Nevada Test Site / Jonathan Veitich 19. Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility / Gustavo Verdesio Part V. Ruin Gazing 20. Foundational Ruins: The Lisbon Earthquake and the Sublime / Alexander Regier 21. The Promise of a Ruin: Gavrila Derzhavin's Archaic Modernity / Tatiana Smoliarova 22. Ruin Cinema / Johannes von Moltke 23. The Place of Rubble in the Trummerfilm / Eric Rentschler 24. Lost in Time: Boris Mikhailov and his Study of the Soviet / Helen Petrovksy Bibliography Contributors Index

Die vorherrschende feministische Lesart der Asthetik des Widerstands setzt bei Weiss’ eigener Thematisierung weiblicher Unterdruckung an und verfolgt dieses Thema sowohl auf der diskursiv-reflektierenden Ebene der Notizbucher und des Romans als auch auf der Ebene der Frauenbilder des literarischen Textes. Dabei hat sich ein zweifacher Konsens herausgebildet. Erstens wird der Text als Kritik eines “patriarchalisch autoritaren Musters” gelesen, wie Weiss sich gelegentlich selbst ausdruckt.1 Diese fur Weiss neue kritische Perspektive wird oft auf den Einflus der neuen Frauenbewegungen zuruckgefuhrt,2 oder im Zusammenhang mit der fur den Roman so wichtigen Dialektik der Aufklarung und deren Thesen zur historischen Ausformung von Weiblichkeitskonzepten gelesen.3 Dabei werden Weiblichkeitskonzepte und deren Reprasentationen als historisch spezifisch, aber veranderbar verstanden, d.h. Weiss’ Gebrauch von typisch mannlichen bzw. weiblichen Eigenschaften wird als zugleich historisch akkurat und herrschaftskritisch gesehen, als “Formen des Gezeichnetseins”4. Frauen, so argumentieren die meisten Interpretinnen, sind in der Asthetik des Widerstands dargestellt als Opfer patriarchalisch organisierter Klassengesellschaften oder einer auf instrumenteller Vernunft basierenden Gesellschaftsordnung. In seiner affirmativen Lesart gilt dieser Ansatz als eine Art “feministischer Realismus”, d.h. als eine historisch adaquate Darstellung weiblicher Unterdruckung.5 In seiner kritischen Variante mundet er in eine Diskussion uber die Frage, ob Weiss die Frauen letztlich zu Opfern reduziere.6

When Durs Grtinbein received Germany's prestigious Biichner Prize in 1995, thirty-five years after Paul Celan, he entitled his acceptance speech "Den K6rper zerbrechen."l In their dialogue with Btichner, Celan and Grtinbein both touch on the topic of the artist's gaze. Celan draws attention to a passage in Lenz where Btichner's protagonist expresses his desire to be a "head of the Medusa." According to Celan, for Biichner art touched on something uncanny, because, by its very effort to "grasp the natural as natural, "aesthetic practice threatens nature."2 Btichner craves Gorgon's power to turn living matter into stone.3 Never able to truly capture nature, the artist kills life and petrifies it. Here, Celan is speaking about art before 1945, before Margarete, the blond German girl Celan will make infamous and Kiefer will turn into a fetish of straw