Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500

The Editors: Christian Emden studied comparative and European literature and philosophy at the Universities of Konstanz and Cambridge (Ph.D. 2000), and is now Assistant Professor of German at Rice University, Houston. He was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from 2000 to 2003. He is the author of Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body, forthcoming in 2004, and is now investigating notions of «classical antiquity» in 19th century German scholarship and literature and the emergence of historische Kulturwissenschaft in the early 20th century.
David Midgley grew up in London and studied at Oxford (DPhil 1975). He was a Humboldt Scholar in 1979, and has been a University Lecturer in German and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, since 1980. He has published widely on German literary modernism, and his latest book, Writing Weimar (2000), is a thorough study of the literature of the Weimar Republic in relation to its social and cultural context.

This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period.
This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.

Contents: David Midgley/Christian J. Emden: Introduction - Aleida Assmann: Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past - Christian J. Emden: History, Memory, and the Invention of Antiquity: Notes on the 'Classical Tradition' - Ortrud Gutjahr: Literary Modernism and the Tradition of Breaking Tradition - Marc Oliver Huber: Memoria in Zeiten des Zeitenbruchs: Nietzsches Zweite Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung als Indikator einer Gedächtniskrise - Susanne Rau: Reformation, Time, and History: The Construction of (Dis)Continuities in the Historiography of the Reformation in the Early Modern Period - Wilhelm Ribhegge: German or European Identity? Luther and Erasmus in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German Cultural History and Historiography - Stefan Busch: Ideals and Life in German Literature of the Late Enlightenment Period: The Grotesque as reductio ad absurdum of Providentialism - Laura Benzi: Die Entstehung der Lyrik in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und die spätaufklärerische Affektenlehre - Ritchie Robertson: Joseph II in Cultural Memory - Kristin Veel: Topographies of Memory: Walter Benjamin and Daniel Libeskind - Silke Arnold-de Simine: Theme Park GDR? The Aestheticization of Memory in post- Wende Museums, Literature and Film - Karen Leeder: 'rhythmische historia': Contemporary Poems of the First World War by Thomas Kling and Raoul Schrott.