Narcissistic moments in German ar

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the history of self-portraiture in German art and the historical identity problem within German society. I propose that the turn inward reflected in German art demonstrates a melancholic position in which the subject narcissistically attempts a transformation of its selfobjects, or figures which mediate a sense of identity. The dissertation begins with the birth of self-portraiture with the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer and shows an early relation between Durer's identity, melancholy and a German sense of German self. It then looks at the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich and his use of melancholy as both a sense of his own self and German identity at the moment when German identity was being posited in terms of a nation state. I examine the problems specific to the formation of German identity in the nineteenth century and relate them to the space of melancholy as a spiritual one which was taken up as self-concept and is depicted in the paintings of Friedrich. This problem of integrating a sense of self in German society is then examined in terms of Germany's identity problem following World War II. I present various contemporary artists working with the self, including Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Katharina Sieverding and Jorg Immendorff, and argue that the Romantic problem of integration of the self is seen in their works. Baselitz and Sieverding demonstrate two divergent but related position in their self-representations in which a German sense of self is posited (Baselitz) and negated (Sieverding). I conclude that their representations of the self visually depict the poles of melancholy as it exists in the dialogue of the self in contemporary Germany.