Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Lisa Cerami and Matthew Handelman

The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures presents its Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

 

Menschen.

Lisa Cerami, University of Pennsylvania, Penn Humanities Forum

This paper explores how German Expressionist poetry employed the rhetoric of “Humanity” to inspire and shape a (unfortunately historically doomed) messianic or eschatological end. Paradigmatically described by Kurt Pinthus in his bestselling 1920 anthology of German expressionist poetry, the collective utopian figures Menschen or Menschheit symbolically establish a holy human community through the mystical sublation and union of man and God. New Testament mysticism, too, celebrates a mystical union of God and Man through Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The revelatory tenor of Expressionist poetry’s anthropomorphic messianism evinces rhetorical parallels to Pauline mysticism. Yet it makes no claim to lie within the boundaries of Christian teaching or theology per se. This forces one to at least flirt with the thorny and not particularly fruitful question of the relationship between seemingly secular modernist manifestations of religious symbolism and Christian eschatological belief. But even barring the question of a potential structural analogy, their comparison becomes even more prescient in regards to the chronological problems with beginnings and endings that both Christian Millennialism and Expressionism faced, especially in the wake of World War I: What happens when the day of atonement passes without anyone any the wiser?

 ~AND~

 

The Ethics of Modernity:

"Prinzip" and "Gott" in Siegfried Kracauer's Early Writings

Matt Handelman, University of Pennsylvania 

Germany's defeat in World War One, the fall of the German Empire, and the economic turmoil of the post-war years presented Siegfried Kracauer with cause for concern: amidst ever-increasing feelings and fears of "transcendental homelessness," what can the modern thinker ethically still believe? Which religious, aesthetic, or philosophical standpoints are still intellectually viable? In early writings such as Soziologie als Wissenschaft (1922) and in letters to other key Weimar-era figures such as Leo Löwenthal, Ernst Bloch, and Margarete Susman, Kracauer seeks not only to find possible solutions to these problems, but also to expose the potentially disastrous failure of his contemporaries to maintain intellectual rigor. In particular, my paper investigates the concepts of "Prinzip" and "Gott" in order to shed light on the ways in which a discourse on intellectual ethics underpinned Kracauer's early work as well as the thought of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals.