The First World War as Caesura? Continuities and Ruptures in German Architecture, Urban Planning and Open Space Development
University of Kassel, October 16th – 17th, 2014
Deadline for abstracts by April 25th, 2014
“Es ist wohl vielen Künstlern so gegangen, dass sie sich aus unbewussten Gründen nach dem Kriege künstlerisch anders ausdrückten wie vorher. (…) Ich merkte mit einer Art innerem Staunen, dass ich eine neue Sprache beherrschte, in der ich nur mit den Mitteln der Gruppierung, der Proportion, der Lichtführung und der Farbe alles auszusprechen vermochte, was mir am Herzen lag.”
~ Fritz Schumacher, Stufen des Lebens. Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters, 1935
In 2014, the topic of the First World War has already become a central focus among a host of international conferences, symposia and workshops. The conference “The First World War as Caesura? Continuities and Ruptures in German Architecture, Urban Planning and Open Space Development,” will examine the significance of the First World War specifically for the institutions and disciplines of German Architecture, Garden Architecture and Urban Planning.
Bringing together both historians and planners, we hope to generate a body of interdisciplinary research, illuminate the nascent planning and building practices of the early twentieth century, and explore this historical phenomena within their political and socio-cultural contexts. The conference aims to examine the most influential wartime events as well as consequences of the “Great War” in the field and discipline of German Planning History. For the sake of conference coherence and a possible publication we ask that all papers make a concerted effort in addressing the following central question: To what extent did the First World War form or determine the work of city-builders, architects, garden architects and urban planners through the War and beyond?
Proposed papers are encouraged – but are not required – to consider the following conference questions: Which continuities and ruptures of the pre-war and experience of world conflict were most influential in the development of planning disciplines? Which political, social and economic questions emerged in the aftermath of the War as central imperatives for the Weimar Republic? How did planning objectives change and radicalize? Which positions, strategies and tactics developed out of the experience of the technology-driven “la Grande Guerre”? How were military practices such as areal photography transmitted into public planning discourses? What or how did German planners, (garden)
architects and engineers give new expression to this new post-war lingua franca (Schumacher) within building forms and socio-spatial designs? The subsequent topical list offers a thematic framework for the conference and book publication:
German Planning Kultur:
- From feudalization to modern living – from imperial politics of Kultur to a culture of social engineering
- Industry, form and world markets – the German Werkbund in transition
- Reconstruction or starting from scratch – confronting the city in ruins
- Anatomy, economics and competition – large-scale building projects in the communal economy
Lebenswelten:
- Utopia and dystopia – the relationship between technology and nature
- Drafting lifestyles and models of living – reform approaches and conceptions of value
- Long beards, bob-cuts – planner biographies and the question of gender equality
- Regional, national, global – identity and Heimat, health and tradition
Politics of Planning:
- The State as architect – representations of German Empire and Weimar Republic
- Imperial and colonial metropoles – German colonial planning with and without empire
- The land of unbounded opportunity – Americanization and rationalization
- Associations, institutions and individuals – public and private in urban space
We are interested in bringing together an intellectually diverse and enthusiastic group of established scholars and academic newcomers in both Germany and abroad. We believe this interdisciplinary perspective is essential to a successful conference, and most importantly, to a subsequent book publication. Papers and presentations will be held in German, but exceptions during discussion sessions will be made. Presentations will be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes each.
We look forward to receiving your abstracts (written in German, max. 3,000 characters) and abridged C.V.s (max. 1 page) by April 25th, 2014. Please entitle all documents with “Continuities and Ruptures” and send them as duplicates in PDF and Word formats to hennecke@uni-kassel.de. Selection process and notifications by June 2014.
Conference organizers:
Stefanie Hennecke, Prof. for Open Space Development, University of Kassel, Germany
Thorsten Dame, DFG Alumni, Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU-Berlin, Germany
Patrick C. Hege, DFG Fellow, Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU-Berlin, Germany
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Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century:
Europe in transnational and global perspective
18-20 September 2014
Newnham College, Cambridge
Over the past decade the subject of looted art and the restitution of
cultural property have captured the attention of the media and the public
alike through a range of popular recollections that included novels,
exhibitions, documentaries and more recently even a blockbuster movie,
Monuments Men. In these narratives, the historical complexities that
characterized wartime looting or under duress sales and the ensuing efforts
to restore cultural artifacts to their pre-war conditions have often been
put aside in favour of vivid literary accounts that occasionally present a
tale of heroic sacrifice and the fulfillment of justice. Alongside, a
diverse and wide-ranging academic literature has developed, providing
insights from legal, historical and art historical perspectives. Based on a
rich plurality of case studies, a substantial part of the existing
literature focuses on the roles and actions of individual actors or groups
– in particular the crimes of the Nazi elites – and the legal aspects of
restitution. Other contributions approach the subject with an in-depth
analysis of the fate of specific collections or art works, either belonging
to individuals, families or museums.
The field remains, however, highly compartmentalized along institutional,
disciplinary and national boundaries. The geographical and chronological
spread of studies also still proves rather uneven. This conference aims to
overcome these fragmentations by establishing connections between the
public and private responses to art looting across institutional and
national borders over the course of the twentieth century. We seek
contributions investigating the nexus between private individuals, national
governments and international organizations in order to question the impact
on notions of national, international and regional identity in European
nation-states and gain a deeper understanding of the processes of
restitution of cultural property as a political and cultural practice in
transnational and global perspective.
We welcome papers on the following themes:
§ Changing definitions of looted and restituted art: criteria, motifs and
limitations
§ National policies, decision-making processes and the development of
international cooperation – including the work of both private and public
actors
§ Identity and restitution: cultural property,
international/national/local power structures and identity politics
§ Public debates and cultural representations of restitution claims: which
claims capture the public imagination, which remain only a concern for
experts and why?
§ The (trans)national art world and restitution: the impact on museums,
galleries, art dealing and collecting practices
§ Restitution and decolonization: connections and contrasts between
post-WWII and post-colonial claims and policies
§ Continuities and ruptures: is restitution history structured by
political history? Towards a periodization of restitution history
§ Memories of restitution: the use and legacy of institutional and
collective restitution debates, from the Napoleonic Wars to the present
The conference language is English. Papers will be pre-circulated in early
September. Accommodation for two nights and travel costs will be provided
for external participants. Please send a proposal of max 400 words,
accompanied by a short CV, to Bianca Gaudenzi (bg265@cam.ac.uk) by 13
April 2014.
Organisers:
Bianca Gaudenzi (University of Cambridge)
Mary-Ann Middelkoop (University of Cambridge)
Astrid Swenson (Brunel University, London)
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“Critical Time in Modern German Literature and Culture”
Symposium at the University of Nottingham
11-12 July 2014
The emergence of the modern sense of critical time that Reinhart Koselleck
defined as the “Verzeitlichung” (temporalization) of all areas of human
knowledge around 1800, of subjectivity, history and nature in the modern
experience and mind, has long been seen as a defining feature of modernity
and modernism. Hartmut Rosa, arguably the most prominent German critic of
temporality in our digital age, believes that acceleration defines the
temporality of modernity as well as modern society; echoing cultural
criticism around 1900 he views the renewed acceleration of life in late
modernity today as a threat to civilization. Literary and cultural
engagement with modern critical time, however, goes well beyond the theme
of acceleration: there is, to give just a few examples, the contrapuntal
fascination with deceleration and ecstatic moments (epiphanies), the
dialectic of speed and deliberate slowness, the notion polyphonous time and
simultaneity (“Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”), the distention of
time between the past, the present and the future in the human mind (Saint
Augustine), the intrinsic link between temporalization and a revalidation
of memory (both individual and collective), or the idea that complex
aesthetic temporalities (“ästhetische Eigenzeiten”) break with the modern
time-regime – a now prominent research focus which raises questions as to
the role of literature and the arts in the reflection, production, staging
and critique of modern time-regimes and the very conceptualisation of time
and temporality.
While the modern sense of critical time first emerged in political,
historical and anthropological discourse, it also transformed the
long-standing discourse about social time (Norbert Elias) and the ethics of
time (Emmanuel Lévinas). In literature it has produced its own genres –
such as the “Zeitromane” and “Zeitgedichte” of the long nineteenth century
– and helped to redefine the epistemology of writing and literary poetics
more widely. It is not coincidental that a recent collection of “Die
allerschnellsten Geschichten der Welt” (the very fastest stories of the
world) is entitled “Moment!”, hence highlighting the moment that oscillates
precariously between the fleeting moment of transience, the living moment
of multiple embeddedness, and the critical imperative to recalibrate our
attention. It is equally intrinsic to modern critical temporalities that
the rethinking of time goes along with the rethinking of space; the
nineteenth-century spatio-temporal revolution embodied by the railways is
only the most obvious instance of this dialectic, which recurrs prominently
in contemporary discourse about the digital revolution and the
paradoxically spatial temporality of the internet.
This symposium will combine theoretical and critical approaches to the
changing face of time and temporality since c. 1800 with case studies on
the engagement with the modern sense of critical time in German literature
and culture from 1800 to the present. Comparative and interdisciplinary
papers are as welcome as those focusing on German sources to explore the
politics of time, the ethics of time, the epistemology of time, the poetics
of time, and related themes.
Please email your proposals (300-500 word outline plus 200 word cv) to
Professor Dirk Göttsche, email: dirk.goettsche@nottingham.ac.uk by 15
March 2014.
Speakers will benefit from funding for travel and accommodation.
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Dreams of Germany:
Music and (Trans)national Imaginaries in the Modern Era
German Historical Institute, London
5.-7. February 2015
Keynote Speakers: Celia Applegate (Vanderbilt); Berthold Hoeckner (Chicago).
Convenors: Andreas Gestrich (GHIL) Neil Gregor (Southampton), Tom Irvine
(Southampton)
A little over a decade ago Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter’s
groundbreaking collection of essays on ‘Music and German National Identity’
sought to map both the historical terrain on which the notion of Germans as
‘the people of music’ was constituted and an intellectual terrain on which
that trope might be fruitfully historicised. Their emblematic
introduction registered both the constructed nature of the central
proposition – an idea called forth by writers, critics, pedagogues and
philosophers, cemented in literary genres such as journals, catalogues, and
critical editions, institutionalized in university departments,
conservatoires and concert associations, and monumentalized in statues and
commemorative culture – and, at the same time, its longevity, its power,
and its capacity to transcend the specific politics of time and place.
Animated by a critical spirit which drew not least on the then guiding
inspiration of Benedict Anderson, it placed music at the centre of an
ongoing process of imagining national community throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth century. In doing so, it simultaneously recognised the real
effects this invented tradition had on the wider culture of which it was
part and cautioned against overemphasizing its historical importance in
retrospect.
In the intervening decade, inspired not least by the questions Applegate
and Potter raised, a significant volume of work has been undertaken which
explores further the promise and the limits of thinking about musical
cultures in Germany within that national frame. Significant new
approaches have emerged within the discipline, which permit the exploration
of those same questions from different perspectives. Our understanding of
identity politics has moved further beyond the consideration of ideology as
inscribed in literary or material culture, and more in the direction of
exploring the emotional and the visceral qualities of German, as well as
other, subjectivities, and seeks to understand better the imaginaries which
lie anterior to discourse; our habits of thinking ‘nationally’ about the
histories we seek to explore have been challenged by the turn towards
transnational histories; at the same time, a considerable amount of work
has been done on the many regional varieties of national thinking and
feeling, emphasizing the existence of multiple, sometimes competing but
often co-existing, cultural imaginaries.
In this conference, we seek to revisit the questions asked by Applegate and
Potter, take stock of the scholarly literature as it now stands, and
explore the problem space further in the light of approaches which have
emerged in the meantime. In taking the modern era, broadly understood, as
the time-frame we not only wish to acknowledge the modern qualities of
national thinking and feeling, but also to explore the ways in which
particularly modern economic, social and political frames – institutional
exchanges, cultural diplomacy, tourism, international study visits,
experiences of exile – have served to co-constitute national imaginaries
from outside, and thus to insert an overtly transnational aspect to the
account. In working with the rubric of ‘dreams’, meanwhile, we seek to
acknowledge both the visceral qualities of a set of imaginaries that cannot
be reduced to a corresponding set of politics, but work as often as not
independently of them, and also the presence of a recognizably German set
of histories for which the vocabulary of dreams – of fantasies,
projections, recollections, nightmares – provides an equally recognizable
metaphorical language.
We invite papers on all aspects of modern musical culture which would sit
meaningfully inside the rubric ‘Dreams of Germany’, for example:
How does class function in relation to musical Germanness? Is the dream
of a musical Germany a dream of *Bürgerlichkeit*? How do national feeling
and *Bürgerlichkeit *interact with and inform each other? To what extent do
dreams of German music change when conceptions of *Bürgerlichkeit* do (for
instance in 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1968?)
How, similarly, might Germany as a musical construct be inflected
by gender? Where are women in the ‘Land of music’?
To what extent to declarations of musical Germanness exclude or
embrace registers other than ‘art’ or ‘E-Musik’ (operetta, Tanzmusik, jazz
diasporic and otherwise, Rock ‘n Roll and specifically German forms like
the *Neue Deutsche Welle *and Techno/House?)
How did young people (for example the *Jugendmusikbewegung*, the
generation of the ‘Stunde Null’ and the ‘1968ers’) imagine German music?
More broadly: How did the upheavals of 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1968
and their attendant aesthetic echoes (modernism, expressionism,
avant-gardes) inflect ideas of German national identity in music?
How did emigrants and other outsiders from Edward Dannreuther to
Theodor W Adorno to (the Austrian) Falco (‘Rock me Amadeus’) imagine German
music and musical culture?
How did music play into conceptions/dreams of the German colonial
mission How did music, and inscriptions of Germanness in discourses about
music play in specifically German colonial and post-colonial contexts (SW
Africa, China)?
How did the idea of Germany as a musical nation play in
non-colonial contexts such as Britain, Japan, Latin America, the United
States and Israel/Palestine? Did, for instance, musical emigrants in the
early twentieth century United States or dream ‘their’ Germany in music?
To what extent are signal developments in postwar German culture
such as the Darmstadt School and the Historical Performance movement
re-statements and/or challenges to German national feeling in music?
To what extent were cultural politics post-1989 inflected by
ideas of a specifically German national musical identity
(multiculturalism, *Leitkultur* debate etc)
For further details or queries please contact Neil Gregor or Tom
Irvine at dreamsofgermany@gmail.com.
Closing Deadline for Proposals: 30th April 2014.
UB Graduate Group for German & Austrian Studies 