Department of Germanic Studies

The reception of Aby Warburg’s first published work, his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli, has overlooked layers of meaning implicit in Warburg’s word choice. His study of the afterlife of antiquity relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as Inspirator (“inspirer”), Stimmung (“mood,” “atmosphere”), and Milieu (“milieu”). Warburg brings out the reference to air in these words, invoking their philological nuances and physiological contexts. The air designated is not only the physical medium in which Botticelli’s windblown accessories move but also the quattrocento’s cultural atmosphere in which Botticelli’s creativity thrives. In addition, air implicitly functions as a disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend traditional art history. (MIC)

"Vor dem Hintergrund der Diskussion um Anthropozän und Klimawandel zeichnet der Band die historische Veränderung atmosphärischer Erscheinungen im Bezug auf sich wandelnde Erkenntnisverfahren nach. Die Beiträge des Bandes konfrontieren die wissenschaftliche Erforschung atmosphärischer Phänomene mit ihren ästhetischen Wahrnehmungsweisen und fragen dabei nach dem spezifischen Wissen der Literatur." (Büttner/Theilen)

In meinem Beitrag zum "Wind" untersuche ich die Konsequenzen der Figurierung von historischer Zeit als atmosphärisches Phänomen im Mann ohne Eigenschaften, um die Darstellungsverfahren, mit denen der Roman ringt, offen zu legen und dabei zentrale Momente einer Kulturgeschichte des Windes aufzuzeigen.

This article explores turn-of-the-twentieth-century occult photographic experiments by Louis Darget and Hippolyte Baraduc that eliminated the technological medium of the photographic equipment and worked with an altogether different kind of medium: namely, the so-called ‘vital fluid’. These experiments fit into their era’s aim for scientific objectivity; however, by striving to exclude the camera from the image-making process, they highlight the complex media-theoretical dynamics at work in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s ‘mechanical objectivity’. It is these media-theoretical implications that form the subject matter of this article. I explore the tension between Darget’s and Baraduc’s photographic practice, which stresses immediacy even as it continually enacts ‘medial tautologies’. Their attempts to capture the subtle media of effluvia reveal the presence of other media within the images: that of the technical apparatus (the emulsifying liquid) and that of the surrounding environment (the fluid of air). Thereby, their practice continually blurs the line between its object of representation and its medium of representation. This peculiar medial situation makes their experiments into sites for the analysis of the entwinement between objects of knowledge and their means of knowing as well as for the study of the attempt to grasp with the exact methods of science that which is beyond the purported limits of science.

From a linguistic perspective, the word Umwelt ('environment' in German) is an inherently arthistorical concept. Umwelt was first used by the Danish writer Jens Immanuel Baggesen in an ode written in German in 1800. However, the term goes back to the Danish word omegn, which Baggesen explicates by resorting to the loanword 'environs,' referring to the surroundings of cities depicted in paintings. 1 Thus, before Jakob von Uexküll's oft-cited biological employment of the term, Umwelt had an etymological and semantic antecedent in aesthetics where it referred to the painterly depiction of landscape and invoked the associated discourse of the picturesque. In this essay, I would like to take as a starting point this concept, spanning aesthetic origins and biological afterlives, in order to explore intersections between aesthetic and biological ecologies in art historiography at the turn of the twentieth century. 'Ecology' was first defined by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel in his General Morphology of Organisms (1866) as the "science that deals with the relationship between the organism and its * Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

This essay explores Kling’s poem as a particularly revealing example of his notion of Sprachkörper, which interweaves word history with cultural and natural history. Whereas the earth sciences, in their preoccupation with the large-scale time of the planet, can paradoxically illumine the historical present of the city, language sciences, such as paleography and philology, can reflect on the present historical condition of poetic language. These temporal stratifications are figured by semantic ones. Words bear a surplus of signification and point to Kling’s linguistic intemperance. This intemperance is the site of both semantic plenitude and impenetrability; it is where Kling’s scientific practice of language and his atavistic poetics intersect.

This essay argues that the Duineser Elegien articulate Rilke’s conception of air as a material expression of space. The Elegies present spaces pervaded by aerial substances such as breath, wind and ether; thereby, they transform space from a passive background or a mere void into an entity that can be perceived in its own right. I show that the Elegies’ recasting of vacuity into filled space engages the scientific rethinking of space and matter in the period, in particular, the idea of the ether in physics and the discourse of milieu in biology. When, in his Rodin texts, Rilke argues that sculptures engender their own ‘Umgebung’ and ‘Milieu’, he harnesses the biological idea of environment for aesthetic objects. Taking a cue from Rodin’s statues, which transform the empty spaces around themselves into atmospheric envelopes, the Elegies evoke spaces as instances of hollowness that revert into fullness. This ability of space to change from a negation into a determination makes it into an ideal poetic medium for Rilke who wants to show the reversibility of lament into affirmation.

This article examines a text by a lesser-known figure of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Camillo Sitte’s Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889), tracing the relationship between urban form and social structure in Sitte’s treatise. It identifies the key points of this relationship in terms of causality: the form of public spaces can determine the form of social life; surrogacy: the throngs of the places’ inanimate inhabitants, the statues and monuments, are placeholders for the missing human gatherings; and finally displacement: the thick sociality of community life is transferred onto a heightened relationality with urban forms. Sitte’s text sublimates the social; it diffuses abstract social structures—density, relationality, connection—onto the spatial morphologies of the city. Ultimately, this diffusion results in a capacious yet weakened model of sociality.

In this thought-provoking study, Alexandra Kaar assembles an impressive dossier of diplomatic and other archival sources mentioning economic activity between Hussites and non-Hussites (referred to throughout as Catholics) to understand better the political and cultural dynamics of trade restrictions in the later Middle Ages. Not a work of economic history in a traditional sense, her story spans some sixteen years, beginning in 1420 with Pope Martin V's call to crusade against the Bohemian dissidents and ending around 1436, when the compacts were reached in the Moravian city of Jihlava. Kaar's main argument is that the embargo practices of the papacy and the empire against the Hussites took many different forms. These corresponded in turn to a vast array of strategic ends, not all of which necessarily had anything to do with moveable goods. To be sure, wares of all types feature heavily in the sources. But those wares, the author argues, are better understood as part of a larger cultural and political discourse that drew on the language of economics and trade. To what degree and in what form could one interact with those identified as Hussites, and who was responsible for articulating and regulating those strictures? Undergirding the story of trade relations with the Hussites is a great deal of complicated legal history. Kaar shows how certain aspects of civil law in late antiquity were transformed in the canon law of the high Middle Ages, when popes and legal commentators began asking what the consequences of keeping the company of the heterodox should be. Here, Kaar draws on Stefan Stantchev's important work on the development of the papal embargo as a novel legal discourse extending beyond consumable goods to include, and even primarily be concerned with, pastoral care and salvation. This is followed by a substantial, nearly one-hundred-page overview of the history of research on the Hussite wars and the political economy of Bohemia in the fifteenth century, followed by a discussion of how the transmission of textual sources in the archives around Bohemia can, when used with great care, help us see regional conflicts and stories as part of a broader cultural phenomenon. The core of this study, however, consists of three thematic blocks. In the first, Kaar focuses on trade restrictions and the regulation of commerce as a strategy of warfare in and around the Kingdom of Bohemia. Specific 'things' seem to have been targeted by non-Hussites as products of concern. Salt, wine, and other consumable goods can be found throughout the diplomatic correspondence from the registers of King Sigismund, for example, where the items are often mentioned in connection with the regulation of transportation routes-that is, with street traffic. But there were also items of relative luxury, like textiles that seem to have caught the attention of non-Hussites, as did ironware, horses, and other strategic military objects. The extent to which these regulations were actually regulated is unclear, but the lack of judicial records concerning these blockades suggests that, as in the logic of the papal embargo, the mechanism of punishment would most likely play out in the economy of the soul. Kaar dedicates a second thematic strand to symbolic communication, a conceptual apparatus that has reached the status of canon among German-speaking scholars of the premodern. Various figures involved in the Hussite conflict not only invoked trade res

""»Bachelor« und »Master«, Studiengebühren und Exzellenzinitiativen: Ökonomisierung und Wettbewerb sind in der Hochschulpolitik zu Leitbildern geworden, die Wissenschaftsbetrieb, Studium und Universitäten radikal umgestalten. Der Bologna-Prozess, der einen einheitlichen europäischen Hochschulraum schaffen soll, bildet hierfür den Rahmen.


In diesem Band kommen 18 junge Expertinnen und Experten zu Wort, die ihre Studium gerade beendet haben oder kurz vor dem Abschluss stehen. Als Beteiligte und Betroffene analysieren, diskutieren und kritisieren sie die Chancen und Defizite dieser Reformvorhaben.

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