Workshop
23 Feb 2018 · 10.00 am

Zeitbeobachter. Beschreibungen der Gegenwart in der Moderne

Venue: ZfL, Schützenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin, 3. Et., Trajekte-Tagungsraum
Contact: Nicolas Berg (DI), Daniel Weidner (ZfL)

Joint workshop by the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow Leipzig (DI) and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL)

Ludwig Börne described newpaper publicists like himself as “writers of the times” (“Zeitschriftsteller”). After all, a newspaper was a “diary of the times” that should record the ephemeral, the changing public opinion. Though it could not provide the heavy gold of universal truths, it offered its readership a “curated knowledge” (“ausgemünztes Wissen”) that was necessary for the “exchange traffic” (“Wechselverkehr”) between life and science. For Börne, the newspaper was the medium for the urban and for the contemporary, “the telegraph of the past, the microscope of the present, the telescope to the future.”

The journalist as an observer of the times loses his contemplative role, no longer writing down history (“Geschichtsschreiber”) but driving it forward (“Geschichtstreiber”). This figure of the observer has a new, immediate, but also precarious relationship to time: He observes something he is engulfed in himself. He is a central figure for literature on the “functional transition between poetics and publicism” (Wolfgang Preisendanz). This remains relevant for the 20th century when the increasingly politicized experience of “acceleration” and “contraction of time” (Reinhart Koselleck) were addressed. The newspaper, with its collection mixed of reports, can be seen as a modernized version of the early modern chronicle. This format seeks to do justice to the speed of the political, societal, and cultural changes: in the gloss and the essay, the feuilleton and the commentary, in the photographic report and, finally, the open letter, which enables the public to intervene quickly and without respecting institutional barriers or hierarchies of power.

The problem of being a contemporary, the perspective of testimony and the embeddedness of the eyewitness within the context of the news—these issues sharpen our focus on theoretical categories, on the philosophy of history, and on contemporary history. As such, not only new text formats are established but the traditional ones of poetry and essay, novel and autobiography undergo changes. From a historical perspective, these expressions represent an important source and at the same time a challenge: After all, whereas they do show reactions to modernity in actu, they also require elaborate contextualization, they call for historicization, which in turn always risks ossifying the now.

The workshop is part of the series Jüdische Geschichte und Literaturforschung that the ZfL holds together with the Dubnow Institute.

In German and English.

Program

10.00–10.30
Welcome and Introduction

10.30–12.30


  • Enrico Lucca (DI): Out of Time, out of Place. Discussing Franz Rosenzweig’s Actuality in Mandatory Palestine (1936–1946)
  • Barbara Picht (ZfL): Zeitbeobachtung und Perspektivwechsel im 20. Jahrhundert. Czesław Miłosz

13.30–15.30

  • Inka Sauter (DI): Frühjahr 1940. Erfahrungsschichten in Walter Benjamins geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen
  • Falko Schmieder (ZfL): Zeitgemäß unzeitgemäß. Adornos historische Gegenwartsbestimmungen

16.00–18.00

  • Aurelia Kalisky (ZfL): Zeitverdichtung. Anekdoten- und Gedichtsammlungen aus den Ghettos während des Holocaust
  • Dagi Knellessen (DI): Paradoxien der Zeugenschaft. Jüdische Überlebende in deutschen Holocaustprozessen