Band 81, Heft 2

Benjamin’s approach to the history of the nineteenth century as a prehistory ( Vorgeschichte ) of modernity relies on his concept of the dialectical image. Starting from Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust’s narrative endeavor as the evocation of images that have not been seen before, this essay tries to situate Benjamin’s dialektisches Bild in new contexts. Examining Benjamin’s interest in Goethe’s Urphänomen as well as implicit references to Lessing’s concept of fruchtbarer Augenblick or Cassirer’s idea of symbolische Prägnanz , this essay stresses not so much the important but often considered aspects of discontinuity and destruction of chronological time, but tries to trace a hidden agenda: the affinity of Benjamin’s dialectical image to genetic processes.

This essay demonstrates how Baroque Catholic motifs of an aggressive and militant Virgin Mary are envisioned in Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans – motifs which seem to be anachronistic with regard to the late medieval setting of the Joan of Arc story as well as with regard to the date of origin of Schiller’s play (1800 –1801). But precisely this anachronism can be read as a symptom of the times around 1800: namely as a return of repressed stocks of images from the age of confessionalization which gained explosive force for different reasons in the first decade after the French Revolution. In the eighteenth century these visual and verbal images of the Virgin Mary had only been cultivated by late Baroque church art and within a popular religious longue durée , which had been criticized and neutralized by enlightened Catholicism and which had been attacked by revolutionary iconoclasm. At the turn of the century, they started a peculiar Nachleben and were – in the sense of Aby Warburg’s Revenants – remembered again, being reactivated and refreshed as Schlagbilder .

In the last thirty years, the concept of legibility has become a topos in the humanities, referring to the act of reading freed from its usual connection with the written text, and concerning also images, traces, and constellations. No one so deeply understood this ‘non-literal’ reading as Walter Benjamin, whose oeuvre is crossed by the topic of the compenetration and coappartenance of image and text. In his epistemology, mental and material images are intended as things that must be read. This paper offers an interpretation of his concept of legibility through its comparison with the one given by Aby Warburg in his Mnemosyne-Atlas . Both authors wanted to analyze the relationship between image and word to study the language of emotions and gestures. Through the comparison of the two methods emerges a privileged viewpoint to understand legibility as a fundamental epistemological paradigm of Kulturwissenschaft around 1900.

This article proposes to consider the Brazilian art movement Antropofagia in the context of transcultural global modernism. Strongly connected to Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, the modernist movement that came to define Brazilian art was situated among clichéd colonial exhibitions and international artistic movements. With its striking background, the movement proves to be a very interesting contrast to Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas . While both projects – from an emancipatory perspective – were formed as a ‘community of memory’, their different contexts of genesis did not make them equally susceptible to transregional experiences.

This text attempts a new genre: the aperçue – from the French verb apercevoir , seeing in passing by, voir en passant . From Baudelaire’s Passante , the aperçues inherit the rhythm of appearing and disappearing and the emotion of seeing, which only unfolds in the temporality of memory and imagination. They are related to figures of afterlife and actualization such as Warburg’s Ninfa and Freud’s Gradiva , capturing ephemeral moments in which the long and discontinuous temporality of memory – and thus also a dimension of lament for the dead – is at work. Lastly, the aperçues are a literary genre, since images – especially those we never saw before remembering them – are made visible particularly through words, as we see reading James Joyce, Henri Michaux, and Yoko Tawada.

The author suggests an attribution for two largely unknown Baroque sculptures inside the Church of St. Peter and Paul at Potsdam. The crucifixus, which has so far not been attributed to an artist, is shown to exhibit parallels to a 1716 work by Paul Egell. It remains unclear, however, whether the Potsdam crucifixus was also created by Egell himself or by Johann Peter Benckert, who congenially completed it in 1763 with a statue of the kneeling Maria Magdalena. The appealing depiction of the saint as an elegant sinner and penitent offers believers various possibilities for identification.