{"title":"Eva Kernbauer. Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions since 1990","authors":"Mechtild Widrich","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"19 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141048396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"For a Justice-to-Come: Milo Rau’s Utopian Realism","authors":"Steven Howe","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.2","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most prolific political theatre makers in Europe today, Milo Rau is known for his commitment to a realist art of possibility—a “Möglichkeitsrealismus,” as he defines it, devoted to opening space for envisioning possible alternatives to the status quo. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, this article argues for an understanding of Rau’s artistic practice as a kind of “concrete utopianism” that materially engages the world so as to imagine—and enact—new possibilities for improvement and transformation. Via a reading of Rau’s Kongo Tribunal (2015), an attempt is made to show how, by staging the tribunal in the here and now of performance, the artist seeks to disclose the real but not yet realized possibilities available in the present, giving form to an alternative institutionality—and an alternative practice of justice—that is made fully graspable in the imagination and in reality. As a material act of imagining otherwise, the Kongo Tribunal refuses the closure of the present, inviting spectators to step back and recognize the institutionalized forms of law and justice not as fixed but variable—and thus (still) open to change.","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"26 24","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141055037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Thinking the Future Today","authors":"Christina Kraenzle, Maria Mayr","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.0","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"33 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141029789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jennifer L. Allen. Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany","authors":"Karin Bauer","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"15 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141053458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Utopian Spaces and Their Everyday Traces in Thomas Stuber’s In den Gängen (2018)","authors":"Margaret McCarthy","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines utopian elements in Thomas Stuber’s 2018 film In den Gängen. Despite the neoliberal forces that constrain a group of supermarket shelf stackers in the former East Germany, the film’s characters exhibit congenial bonds in the face of alienated work. Strikingly, their encounters with machines also convey an other-directedness and improvised conviviality, or energy that enables them to devise bonds in fleeting moments. As much as the film presumes a foreclosed-on socialist utopia, it also depicts a range of contemporary challenges to neoliberalism, including practices of commoning, non-normative forms of relationality, and human-machine interactions that gesture towards a posthumanist selfhood. At the same time, the three main characters’ personal circumstances and histories necessarily impact their ability to benefit from these elements. Both age and gender play crucial roles in their individual fates, and not all of them thrive within their caring, other-directed community. Ultimately, In den Gängen suggests the possibility of mundane existences gesturing towards superlative futures.","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141051871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Kids Are All Right: Futurity and Black German Childhood in SchwarzRund’s Biskaya (2017)","authors":"Priscilla Layne","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.3","url":null,"abstract":"SchwarzRund’s Biskaya (2017) is an “Afroqueer” novel that follows the travails of Tue, a queer Black German woman whose life is marked by the quotidian struggles of queer Black folx in Germany. However, Biskaya is also a work of fantasy, since SchwarzRund created an island (Biskaya) in the Bay of Biscay along the southern coast of Spain and France. In the novel Biskaya is home to African-descended people who have both voluntarily and involuntarily migrated to Europe as part of the labour market for centuries. In this article I examine the role of children in the novel’s discussions about Black German futurity. I argue that in Biskaya, SchwarzRund combines Afrofuturist aesthetics, Black feminist thought, and queer futurity to present us with a utopia that is not perfect but is in a state of becoming thanks to people like Tue, who realize the importance of being hopeful and working towards a better future. I focus on the role that kinship plays in this Black, queer futurity, because Tue’s relationships, both biological and non-biological, both with peers and with elders and juniors, are a key part of her transformation into being more hopeful about the future. While it is the importance of non-biological kinship ties in the novel that helps make it so queer, it is the intergenerational relationships that make the novel Afrofuturist. I look at how children in the novel allow SchwarzRund to pose several questions about futurity that can help unite Black Germans across genders, sexualities, and generations and empower all Black German folx to see themselves as agents of change.","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"124 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141040493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lauren Berlant. On the Inconvenience of Other People","authors":"Simone Pfleger","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"1990 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141027576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Fliehen. Flüchten. Davon. Eilen. Stürmen”: Stumbling towards the Future in Marlene Streeruwitz’s Die Schmerzmacherin.","authors":"Alexander Draxl","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.1","url":null,"abstract":"The crises of recent years have engendered increasingly bleak visions of the future. This development challenges us to rethink our understanding of hope and futurity, and Marlene Streeruwitz’s 2011 novel Die Schmerzmacherin. takes an important step in this direction. Amy Schreiber, the novel’s young and existentially disoriented protagonist, trains at a security agency, learning to plan and control the future. But Amy keeps tripping over her own feet; her unsteady gait keeps throwing her off course. This article argues that Streeruwitz’s novel employs stumbling as an aesthetic device to expose the conceptual pitfalls of modern notions of the future. By discussing this poetics of stumbling, the article explores the double binds of modern security politics, the tensions between security and care, the unsustainability of societal expectations of success, and the subversive potential of errancy and failure. In Die Schmerzmacherin., stumbling represents an antidote to traditional utopian visions: a sober form of hopefulness that draws on the power of discord and disruption.","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"73 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141045785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Education (Documentaries) and Utopian Thinking","authors":"Gabriele Mueller","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.5","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines three films that comment on public education in Germany. Berlin Rebel High School (Alexander Kleider, 2016 ), Die Kinder der Utopie (Hubertus Siegert, 2019), and Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse (Maria Speth, 2021 ) are German documentaries that present a critique of the current educational system and, at the same time, allow glimpses into classrooms that offer alternative educational models. All three films align themselves with the educational theories of utopian, radical, or critical pedagogies and embrace an approach to education that rejects the definition of a static end goal and emphasizes the unfinished, continuous nature of pedagogical practice. In the films’ examples, education’s utopian dimension resides in the process of striving for positive change, in the critical analysis of the present and the purposeful and collaborative action of learners and educators to change it for the better. The analysis of the formal, narrative, and paratextual strategies of the documentaries shows that critical hope is generated by the films on two levels, first, through the portrayal of concrete examples of alternative pedagogical practices and, second, through the films’ participation in the educational process.","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141046555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Simon Spiegel. Utopias in Non-Fiction Film","authors":"Sebastian Heiduschke","doi":"10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.2.rev001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":513344,"journal":{"name":"Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies","volume":"81 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141050588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}