The German monument, 1790-1914: Subjectivity, memory, and national identity.

摘要

The dissertation examines within a specifically German context the processes of memorialization and ruin, of the ma(r)king of history and the effacement of memory. I investigate the concept of the monument in Germany, beginning with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement of 1790 and concluding with the 1907 Bismarck national monument competition for Bingerbruck on the Rhine. I focus particularly on the connection between monument making and the formation of a German national identity. The primary issues of monument making, monumentality and national identity are laid out, while a particularly German aesthetic context is provided in which to consider the secondary, conceptual coordinates of subjectivity, memory, and the role of the beholder.; In part one, "Aesthetic Considerations," I examine the absence of the ruin--as emblem and as idea--from Kant's philosophical system. Investigating this omission, I inquire into the constitution and foundational premises of an idealized Kantian subject. The implications of the idealized Kantian subject for the historical construction of a German subjectivity, for the discipline of art history, as well as the corresponding location of the ruin at the underside of both subjectivity and art history, become apparent in this chapter. Chapter two of this section investigates what role monuments play in a dialectic of memory and forgetting. Using the writings of Alois Riegl and Walter Benjamin, this chapter considers the role of the beholder and complicates an understanding of the monument as simply an historical, ideological marker.; Part two, "Historical Interpretations," focuses on the role of monuments in the construction of German national identity. The nineteenth century was often described at the time as the age of the monument in Germany. I inquire into this description, examining the ways in which "the age of the monument" intersected historically and politically with the efforts of German unification. By tracing multiple patterns of meaning within official discourses on the nation and its representation in monumental form, my study has revealed a marked unease within a political and cultural terrain which was nonetheless continually memorialized, and exuberantly celebrated, as unified.