'Grobkörnige mnemosyne': picturing the First World War in the poetry of Thomas Kling

The First World War is a recurrent theme in the work of the contemporary poet Thomas Kling, whose texts engage with this harrowing period of European history through a wide range of personal and official, verbal and visual testimonies. Kling is particularly interested in the role of the Great War as the first modern 'media war' whose depiction in the photography and film has shaped its perception by historical witnesses and present-day viewers alike. However, Kling's primary interest is not in the media as a source of accurate historical evidence; rather, he is interested in the deeply precarious, even paradoxical relationship between the technical media and personal memory. Although film and photography provide tangible testimonies of the past, they also symbolize the irreducible gaps between past and present, between official war propaganda and personal experience. Kling's poems highlight the failure of film and photography to capture an accurate image of the War, its chaos and destruction. The technological limitations of the media, however, have their parallel in the failings of human memory where personal trauma and collective repression likewise prevent any wholly successful engagement with the past

Mörike's fossils: the poetics of palaeontology

Eduard Mörike's keen interest in palaeontology is reflected in two poems which both address changing conceptions of natural time and their impact on religion, memory and imagination in the nineteenth century. Within the guise of a light-hearted Gelegenheitsgedicht, Mörike's 'Der Petrefaktensammler' explores the gulf between geological theories and human experience; the speaker's enjoyment of nature is curtailed by fossils acting as reminders of the relative brevity of human life. This realisation is replayed within a more allegorical context in Mörike's poem 'Göttliche Reminiscenz'. Here a fossil features as the centrepiece of an imaginary painting of the young Christ which brings together the realms of religion and science not as conflicting paradigms but as two models of explanation which can still be harmonised. Despite their apparent differences, then, the article argues that 'Der Petrefaktensammler' and 'Göttliche Reminiscenz' provide complementary insights into Mörike's mobilisation of palaeontology as a tool of his poetic imagination

Visions of the new world: photography in Kafka's Der Verschollene

Photography plays a central role in Franz Kafka's fictional travelogue Der Verschollene (1912-14), where it features as both explicit motif and implicit source material. Having never visited the United States, Kafka drew on genuine travel photographs as inspiration for his novel, assimilating them into his depiction of an imaginary America. While some scenes maintain the photographic stasis of their originals, others are animated to express the dynamism of modern life and the disorientation this can produce in the viewer's mind. Alongside such public travel photographs, however, Kafka also makes use of private pictures taken from his own family album. These traditional studio portraits act as models for the photographs featured within the plot, which illustrate the protagonist's continued attachment to his European origins. The latent sense of oppression inherent in these bourgeois portraits finds more brutal expression in the photographic source material which underles the novel's unfinished conclusion. In the Oklahoma theatre episode photographic scenes of assassination and lynching invade the narrative, undermining its images of modernity and progress. In its diverse manifestations (both literal and intertextual) photography in Der Verschollene establishes a link between traditional and modern forms of visuality, thereby illustrating the circular, regressive character of the protagonist's journey