TY - JOUR
T1 - Public Memory Underground
T2 - Photographs of Protest in Uwe Johnson’s The Third Book About Achim (1967)
AU - Pinkert, Anke
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interrelation between literature, photography, and public memory under the conditions of authoritarian and neoliberal state control. Focusing on a fictionalized photograph of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany in Uwe Johnson’s novel The Third Book about Achim (1967), I explore the performative capacity of photo-literary spaces to open up, and disrupt, institutionalized productions of public memory. Whereas official memorial technologies tend to close down alternative interpretations of history, this essay shows how small-scale, clandestine, or itinerant photographs embedded in literary archives animate historical impasses and possibilities, which persist to be responded to by future readers. More specifically, drawing on affect theory and political philosophy, I aim to rehabilitate photography’s indexicality as a performative register that enables human proximities across the boundaries of time and space.
AB - This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interrelation between literature, photography, and public memory under the conditions of authoritarian and neoliberal state control. Focusing on a fictionalized photograph of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany in Uwe Johnson’s novel The Third Book about Achim (1967), I explore the performative capacity of photo-literary spaces to open up, and disrupt, institutionalized productions of public memory. Whereas official memorial technologies tend to close down alternative interpretations of history, this essay shows how small-scale, clandestine, or itinerant photographs embedded in literary archives animate historical impasses and possibilities, which persist to be responded to by future readers. More specifically, drawing on affect theory and political philosophy, I aim to rehabilitate photography’s indexicality as a performative register that enables human proximities across the boundaries of time and space.
KW - public memory
KW - performativity
KW - photo theory
KW - affect
KW - assembly
U2 - 10.13135/2281-6658/3100
DO - 10.13135/2281-6658/3100
M3 - Article
SN - 2281-6658
VL - 13
SP - 207
EP - 218
JO - CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism
JF - CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism
ER -