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for Germanic Notes and Reviews

Whenever a scholar has written essays on diverse topics over a period of time and then collects them together for publication as a book, the difficulty arises of identifying a unifying thread. The essays in this particular collection were written over a seven year period (between 1987 and 1994), and ten of the twelve have been previously published. The topics range from German identity after unification, utopia, and the fluxus movement to authors, philosophers, and artists such as Rilke, Ernst Jünger, Alexander Kluge, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Sloterdijk (and Diogenes), and Baudrillard (and McLuhan). The title of the book, which according to the author, came to his wife while she was riding the subway, successfully encompasses the topic of the introduction (time and cultural memory) as well as the first and last chapters on museums and monuments, respectively. The two essays on German identity/ies before and after the wall really stand apart as political/cultural commentaries, it would seem, and a more revelatory (and unifying) theme for the remaining seven essays might be "modernism" or the "avant-garde." The slightly misleading title of the book notwithstanding, this is a well-written, thought-provoking, and engaging text. Huyssen writes with erudition and authority on any topic he takes to hand, and his interpretations are often challenging, both to previous critics with whom he often takes issue and to his readers, who will be familiar with most of the topics he treats.

Huyssen has grouped the first four essays under the title "Time and Memory," and the remaining eight under "Media and Culture," and explains these conceptual divisions in part by his personal history and interests: "all of the essays are marked by time, and I attribute their sometimes visible, sometimes more subterranean interconnectedness to two factors. For me as a member of the first post-world War II generation growing up in West Germany, born in the Third Reich, but too late to have any conscious remembrances, the politics of memory in the German context has been a formative issue since adolescence. . . . Secondly, I have been interested for a long time in the effects of media on modern culture. The world of both Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno on art in the age of mechanical reproduction and on the culture industry had been energized by issues of memory and temporality, while diverging in its respective assessments of culture in the age of modernism, fascism, and communism" (4).

Of particular interest in Huyssen’s first essay on the museum as mass medium is his tracing of the avant-garde’s opposition to the institution of the museum per se "by calling (in different ways) for the elimination of the past" (18). He notes the vast "museal project" of the Romantics that ended in nationalism, comments on "how close the museum has moved to the world of spectacle, of the popular fair and mass entertainment" (21), and concludes with a discussion of Habermas’ observation on how the "often hidden intimacy between culture and capital is becoming ever more visible, not to say blatant" (21). In this essay Huyssen also offers three models that explain the recent museum/exhibition mania: the "culture-as-compensation" model (neoconservatism), the "poststructuralist and secretly apocalyptic theory of musealization as terminal cancer of our fin-de-siecle," and the "Critical-Theory-oriented model that argues the emergence of a new stage of consumer capitalism (Kulturgesellschaft)" (25).

In another wide-ranging essay on German intellectuals after the wall, Huyssen posits a crisis in German culture which he sees as "cumulative phases with a shifting focus: domestic politics, culture, and war" (37). He compares the situations of intellectuals in the GDR and BRD and concludes his essay with a detailed presentation of the Christa Wolf controversy and an investigation of its ramifications, specifically in regard to the larger issues surrounding the reception of Was bleibt (1990). Both related thematically and equally interesting is Huyssen’s essay on German identities after unification, in which he identifies three blockages to the rethinking of German nation: "official Bonn discourse takes nation and national unity simply for granted as if Germany had just been returned to a natural state of things" (74), "the refusal to address the problematic of nation altogether (except in order to fight the right) and the conviction that the Germans are beyond nation" (76), and finally, "the rabidly nationalist discourse of the new right-wing organizations, the skinheads and other disenfranchised segments of the population, both in the Eastern and the Western Länder" (77-8). The author concludes with an interesting analysis of the East/West German identity problem that requires foreigners as part of an equation that results in what Huyssen terms the "xenophobic triangle" (80). Whereas the two Germanies needed each other as opposites, as Other, during the Cold War ("the other Germany was always inscribed as the other into one’s own sense of being either a West or an East German,"), the "new thieves of German identity—thieves of ‘our’ tax money, ‘our’ jobs, ‘our’ homes—are foreigners" (81).

In his essays on the avant-garde Huyssen particularly pursues the concept of utopia, noting that what died in the late 1960s was a utopia "in which art saw itself functioning both as an essential element of radical social transformation and as an agency of salvation and redemption" (94). He also identifies three different concepts of utopia in early twentieth-century art and literature: "the utopia of sublating art into life, the utopia of radical textuality, [and] the utopia of aesthetic transcendence" (98). The essays on the avant-garde fluxus movement and on Anselm Kiefer’s paintings are richly illustrated (black and white) and are written is such a way as to be accessible to non-specialists. I found both of them informative and highly readable, even fascinating. In short, this is a very eclectic and thought-provoking collection of essays that in the wide-ranging choice of topics alone seems almost to offer something for everyone. I also found the notes especially comprehensive, detailed and useful, although there is no bibliography.

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Dr. Elaine Martin, emartin@woodsquad.as.ua.edu