Negative Visuality: Picturing Postwar Germany

This dissertation poses a few simple questions about the post-1945 situation in Germany, questions that try to get at a "picture" of German culture, or more precisely it undertakes the task of investigating postwar picturing practices in literature, film, and philosophy. What complicates this question is a crucial moment of negativity that determines the structure of representation during this period in a number of ways. (1) German cities lay in ruin, literally negated in the unprecedented total destruction of the Allies' urban bombing campaign. (2) The events of the past, the horrors of National Socialism and the events of the war, seemed to present a non-representable challenge to the very limits of representation. (3) As a result of the Nazis' exploitation of the power of pictures and the aestheticization of a perverse politics, conventional modes of verbal and visual figuration were considered contaminated, resulting in a looming question of whether or how postwar forms could effectively break from continuity with, and figuratively negate, this unbearable past. (4) Common visual practice as well as theoretical critiques tended to look away from this unbearable past and the immediate present of the postwar situation, assuming an apotropaic stance (from Greek apo-, away + tropos, turn). (5) The consequence of this crisis in representation was an intensification of traditional tensions between the verbal and the visual, centering on this problematic of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of representing that which threatens the very structure of representation. I argue that postwar Germany mediates these questions and challenges by working through a set of negative images, which function as metapictures or hypericons—that is, the figures that organize and order figuration in a number of ways. My claim is that these negative images are disclosive of the fundamental structure of verbal and visual representation during this period. I proceed by looking at Borchert's Draussen vor der Tür, along with Liebeneiner's adaptation Liebe 47 . Then I turn to the poetry of Celan and Brecht, respectively. I conclude with a reading of Adorno's Bilderverbot.