Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies
Funded with the generous support of Warwick's Humanities Research Centre.
This is an interdisciplinary workshop series dedicated to all areas of German cultural studies. Meeting two to three times during term in the Department of German Studies or online, the workshop hosts presentations on a Wednesday afternoon by senior national and international scholars, Warwick colleagues and doctoral students. Presentations can be delivered both as finished conference-style papers, or more informally as work-in-progress. Please contact the workshop convenor, thomas dot crew at warwick dot ac dot uk, if you wish to offer or attend a presentation.
WWIGS 2024-25
Please note: days and times vary, please see below
Term 1
Wednesday 20 November, 4:30-6 pm, FAB4.79
Katherine Stone (Warwick)
'Slaves and Objects of Amusement: West German Women under the Yoke of the American Colonizers': Sexual Violence, Moral Indignation and Propaganda in Cold-War East Germany
By now, it is well established that memories of Soviet violence against women sustained anti-Communist sentiment in the Federal Republic, while the crimes of the western Allies were downplayed. The fact that East German memories were similarly dualistic has received limited attention. Scholars have focused instead on the copious evidence that violence perpetrated by members of the Red Army was politically taboo. In this paper, I argue that there was nonetheless space in public discourse to remember German women as victims of wartime sexualized violence—as long as the perpetrators represented the Western Allies. In fact, I demonstrate that sexual violence was a particularly sticky sign in the affective economy of anti-imperialism. To begin, I will show how the topic of rape by US soldiers was harnessed in journalistic propaganda to induce moral indignation towards the western Allies as embodiments of a cruel, exploitative, and morally inferior political system. I then zoom in on Werner Steinberg’s Deutschland-Zyklus (1957-1965), which is unique in the literature of both Germanies for its extended exploration of conflict-related sexualized violence in all its forms. It remains one of the few works of post-war culture to give voice to the victim-survivor and continue her story beyond the moment of violence. Ultimately, however, I argue that there was no reception framework in which the individual story of sexual violence could accrue emotional and memorial capital. All that mattered in Cold War propaganda was the baseness of the perpetrator and the ideological system that he represented.
Term 2
Wednesday 29 January, 4:30-6 pm, FAB1.14
Thomas Crew (Warwick)
'The Abolition of Man: On the Ends of Progress in Carl Schmitt's Satire Die Buribunken'
Published in Franz Blei’s Catholic journal Summa in 1918, Carl Schmitt’s satire ‘The Buribunks’ remains largely overlooked in the scholarship. Nevertheless, as a literary text, the story bears examination for its playful, ironic style as well as the light it sheds on Schmitt’s little-known Expressionist background. In the digital age, moreover, it has gained a remarkable prescience. At the heart of the story are the eponymous Buribunks – a new kind of human characterised, one the one hand, by their “enlarged mouths” and, on the other, by their compulsive diary keeping: “Every male and female Buribunk is compelled to keep a diary for every second of their existence.” Those who refuse are ostracised – forced, that is, to ensure the “external conditions” that make “noble Buribunkdom” possible.
‘The Buribunks’ represents a unique contribution to anti-utopian or dystopian literature, which proliferated in contemporary Europe. One thinks of E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), Georg Kaiser’s Gas trilogy (1917–1920), or Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We (1921). In pompous tones, Schmitt’s narrator presents a highly bureaucratized and apparently perfect global society. Each diary entry, for example, is published in the international language Esperanto, first developed in the 1880s. The persistent Hegelian jargon and the story’s subtitle – “An Essay on the Philosophy of History” – make clear, however, that the central subject is the still prevailing nineteenth-century conception of history. In Reinhart Koselleck’s reading, ‘The Buribunks’ represents nothing less than “an extravagant parody of historicism and the belief in progress.”
Yet Schmitt’s satire offers more than insight into late Imperial Germany. First, the incessant publishing of all diary entries is reminiscent of today’s social media landscape. Second, the comprehensive surveillance implied by the systematic cataloguing of all diaries, as well as the merciless structure of Buribunk society, foreshadows the development of European totalitarianism. Third, the strained appeals to science that define Buribunk civilisation are reminiscent of crucial aspects of today’s society, in which ‘the science’ forms the last remaining authority that, following the death of God, retains credibility. In this way, Schmitt’s satire prompts us to consider our own relationship to the idea of progress as well as the sustaining myths of the twenty-first century.
Wednesday 26 February, 5-6:30 pm, FAB4.79
Denise Henschel (Warwick)
Title TBC
Term 3
Wednesday 7 May, 5-6:30 pm, FAB4.79
Ian Roberts (Warwick)
'Friedrichstraße, Paleokinematography and the Foundations of Weimar Germany's Film Industry'
Studies of Weimar cinema have been dominated by a relatively static canon of movies, featuring a small number of directors and their films, derived from (and reinforcing) this canon. The emphasis has been either on artistic movements (Expressionism, New Objectivity) or else an auterist approach to the major directors of the period. This tendency has been exacerbated by the disproportionate focus on films from a handful of studios, most notably Ufa. Whilst a primary cause of this phenomenon may be the pioneering studies of Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, it has not yet been entirely overturned despite excellent work by the likes of Klaus Kreimeier, Thomas Elsaesser and others in the years since.
This approach is flawed for a range of reasons, not least because of the sheer volume of films which have been lost in the years since their release some hundred years ago; whether through deliberate destruction, war damage, simple neglect or even the ravages of time. Some estimates suggest that 80-90% of the worldwide output of early silent film has been lost (e.g. Saccone, 2024), and in the case of the Weimar Republic this figure is little better.
This paper seeks to redress the balance somewhat, to expand our knowledge of these under-researched areas in two ways: first, it will examine the state of the German film industry in 1919, the year that the Weimar Republic was founded, considering in particular the central importance of Berlin’s Friedrichstraβe as an early focal point in German film production; second, it will introduce the concept of ‘Paleokinematography’ as a methodology for reconstructing lost films and apply this to director F. W. Murnau’s lost debut, Der Knabe in blau, which was filmed in the summer of 1919 and (most likely) released towards the end of that year – seemingly to little acclaim.
