Spatial turns : space, place, and mobility in German literary and visual culture

455 Pages·2010·11.843 MB·English

by  Fisher, Jaimey, Mennel, Barbara Caroline

Spatial Turns
Space, Place, and Mobility in
German Literary and Visual Culture
75
A B
M S T E RD A M E R E I T R Ä G E 0
1
Z U R N E U E RE N G E R M A N I S T I K 0
2
Herausgegeben von
Norbert Otto Eke
Martha B. Helfer
Gerd Labroisse
Spatial Turns
Space, Place, and Mobility in
German Literary and Visual Culture
Edited by
Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Die 1972 gegründete Reihe erscheint seit 1977 in zwangloser Folge in der
Form von Thema-Bänden mit jeweils verantwortlichem Herausgeber.
Reihen-Herausgeber:
Prof. Dr. Norbert Otto Eke
Universität Paderborn
Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, Warburger Str. 100, D - 33098 Paderborn,
Deutschland, E-Mail: [email protected]
Prof. Dr. Martha B. Helfer
Rutgers University
172 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel.: [phone], Fax: [phone], E-mail: [email protected]
Prof. Dr. Gerd Labroisse
Sylter Str. 13A, 14199 Berlin, Deutschland
Tel./Fax: [phone] E-Mail: [email protected]
Cover Image: J.W. Fisher
All titles in the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik
(from 1999 onwards) are available online: See www.rodopi.nl
Electronic access is included in print subscriptions.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3001-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3002-2
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel: Introduction 9
Section I: Mapping Spaces
Andrew Piper: Mapping Vision: Goethe, Cartography, and the Novel 27
Jill Suzanne Smith: Just How Naughty was Berlin?
The Geography of Prostitution and Female Sexuality in Curt
Moreck’s Erotic Travel Guide 53
Jennifer Marston William: Mapping a Human Geography:
Spatiality in Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob
[Speculations about Jakob, 1959] 79
Katharina Gerstenberger: Historical Space:
Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt
[Measuring the World, 2005] 103
Section II: Spaces of the Urban
Diana Spokiene: Gendered Urban Spaces: Cultural Mediations
on the City in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing 123
Amy Strahler Holzapfel: The Roots of German Theater’s
“Spatial Turn”: Gerhart Hauptmann’s Social-Spatial Dramas 141
Eric Jarosinski: Urban Mediations: The Theoretical Space of
Siegfried Kracauer’s Ginster 171
Bastian Heinsohn: Protesting the Globalized Metropolis:
The Local as Counterspace in Recent Berlin Literature 189
Jennifer Ruth Hosek: Transnational Cinema and the Ruins
of Berlin and Havana: Die neue Kunst, Ruinen zu bauen
[The New Art of Making Ruins, 2007] and Suite Habana (2003) 211
Section III: Spaces of Encounter
Kamaal Haque: From the Desert to the City and Back:
Nomads and the Spaces of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan
[West-Eastern Divan, 1819/1827] 233
6
June J. Hwang: Not All Who Wander Are Lost:
Alfred Döblin’s Reise in Polen [Journey to Poland, 1925] 255
Carola Daffner: The Feminine Topography of Zion:
Mapping Gertrud Kolmar’s Poetic Imagination 275
Will Lehman: Jewish Colonia as Heimat in the Pampas:
Robert Schopflocher’s Explorations of Thirdspace in Argentina 301
Silke Schade: Rewriting Home and Migration:
Spatiality in the Narratives of Emine Sevgi Özdamar 319
Barbara Kosta: Transcultural Space and Music:
Fatih Akın’s Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) 343
Section IV: Visualized Space
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey: The Cult of the Cold and the
Gendered Body in Mountain Films 363
Steven Jacobs: Panoptic Paranoia and Phantasmagoria:
Fritz Lang’s Nocturnal City 381
Miriam Paeslack: Subjective Topographies: Berlin in
Post-Wall Photography 397
Jaimey Fisher: Kreuzberg as Relational Place:
Respatializing the “Ghetto” in Bettina Blümner’s
Prinzessinnenbad [Pool of Princesses, 2007] 421
Todd Presner: Digital Geographies: Berlin in the Ages of New Media 447
Acknowledgements
Jaimey Fisher would like to express his gratitude to the Space and Spatiality
Research Cluster of the UC Davis Humanities Institute.
Barbara Mennel thanks the graduate students in her dissertation writing
group, Heather Bigley, Claudia Hoffmann, Yun Jo, and Emily McCann, for
reading an early draft of the Introduction. She also thanks Jeffrey S. Adler for
being a historian who cares about space (and dogs).
Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel
Introduction
Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Cul-
ture gathers essays that take up recent theories of space to expand our under-
standing of German culture.1 These essays thus contextualize the production
of culture in the context and history of technologies of space, such as maps,
atlases, guides, and the discipline of geography. Space and its related terms
place and mobility function both as analytical categories and as objects of
analysis in literature, film, and new media. This emphasis on space as theo-
retical and thematic focus allows authors to read canonical literary and cine-
matic texts anew and to interrogate formerly peripheral genres, such as maps,
guides, and travelogues.
German Studies seems particularly well suited to analyses of space, given
the long-term centrality of space and spatial imaginary to German culture (the
struggle for a German nation state, territorial wars of aggression, and con-
stantly changing borders); but recent developments also suggest the severe
limits of a traditionally spatial or territorial model for the German nation-state
itself. The vagaries of the politics of space, and spatial politics, have mani-
fested themselves conspicuously in recent German culture, for example, in
the recent bestseller Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt [Measuring
the World], whose hero is a geographer who travels abroad. Critically cele-
brated works like Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn
[The Bridge of the Golden Horn] and Berlin novels like Norman Ohler’s Mitte
[Middle] and Raul Zelik’s Berliner Verhältnisse [Berlin Conditions] similarly
foreground the city against and within a spatial context both hybrid and trans-
national. German cinema has likewise unfolded novel, even thoroughly refig-
ured notions of German space: films like Bettina Blümner’s P rinzessinnenbad
1 For an overview of the most important recent academic “turns”, see Doris
Bachmann-Medick: Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften.
Reinbek: Rowohlt 2006. For texts that have been foundational for the spatial turn,
see the collection of international essays, including by German authors: Spatial
Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Ed. by Jörg
Dörig and Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld: transcript 2008. For a more specific account
of the spatial turn in the context of German cultural studies and media theory, see
Thomas Schindl: Räume des Medialen: Zum spatial turn in Kulturwissenschaften
und Medientheorien. Boizenburg: Werner Hülsbuch 2007. For a recent overview
in English that covers the spatial turn in different disciplines, see The Spatial Turn:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. by Barney Warf. London: Routledge 2008.
10
[Pool of Princesses] portray the dynamic spaces of Europe’s internal contact
zones, while others like Fatih Akın’s Im Juli [In July], Crossing the Bridge,
and Auf der Anderen Seite [The Edge of Heaven] unfold a new European
imaginary marked by a hybridity that is articulated largely via space. In taking
up these diverse spaces of German culture, the essays observe how the spatial
imaginary has usually been constitutively linked to spaces of the nation state.
But, as the volume illustrates, there has been a shift away from a singular
focus on German territory to a discussion of German culture in global con-
texts, thereby foregrounding a dialectical relationship between the global and
local, and between space and place in contemporary globalization and trans-
nationalism.2 Thus, the volume also implies that the so-called spatial turn not
only reflects the recent turn to space as a theoretical category in the humani-
ties and the social sciences, but that it also represents a renewed interest in
space in the cultural production in local, national, and global contexts. The
fact that this interest is both intensely reflective of the current moment and
engages with its historical precursors in the sphere of literature and cinematic
production has led us to propose a plurality of spatial turns for the title of the
volume, a plurality spiraling out from the original scholarly turn to space cap-
tured in the phrase “spatial turn”.
While proposing the productivity of spatial analysis, the volume neverthe-
less also retains a critical posture toward the limits of theoretical approaches
imported from the social sciences. So, even as the contributions in this vol-
ume adopt wide-ranging notions from fields such as geography and urban
studies, they also brush against the grain of these theoretical paradigms. For
example, in engaging critically with the category of space, this volume inves-
tigates the conventional opposition of time and space as well as the disciplin-
ary boundaries between geography and history that characterize many of the
theories that engendered the spatial turn. In this way, the essays both reflect
the increasing importance and influence of spatiality while also problematiz-
ing its deployment.
Similar to its probing and problematizing of space as a transhistorical and
transnational category, the collection also queries the historical narrative that
asserts a progressive arc from pre-modern via modern to post-modern spaces.
Space as phenomenological and analytical category has been central to theo-
ries of modernity and postmodernity, but, as the volume aims to underscore,
in complex and revealing ways. It is here, we would suggest, that German
theorists like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer – both great skeptics
2 For an essay collection on the relationship of local and global under the conditions
of transnationalism, see Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational
Imaginary. Ed. by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University
Press 1996.