Die Erfindung der Zukunft.: Vergangene und gegenwärtige Zukünfte ‚um‘ 1800 und 1900

Mercier’s L’An 2440, published in 1770, marks the beginning of a new Science-Fiction narrative which fundamentally altered the previous order of past, present and future as metaphysically determined temporal dimensions. Its novelty derives from a complex narrative superposition of space and time, forerunning the epistemological shift ‘around’ 1800 by temporalizing space and spatializing time simultaneously. In Mercier’s futuristic fiction past, present and future no longer evolve chronologically, but begin to merge into a relative order of time in which the future is no longer ahead of us but multiplies into a double-folded concept of past and present futures. Paralleled only much later by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895, Mercier’s novel thus provides a striking example for the conceptual faculties of literary fiction in general, as well as a special opportunity to reflect on the modern question of how to narrate time in times of temporal relativity

»Narrating Temporality: Futuristic Time Travel as New Literary Genre around 1800«

While the 17th century focused on restructuring the present, the 18th century invented the future as a new temporal dimension. Lang before H.G. Wells, late 18th century literature discovered the future as a new literary field by inventing futuristic time travel. Louis-Sebastien Mercier was the first to create the new, highly successful literary genre of modern science-fiction in his novel "L'an 2440" (1771), whose protagonist falls asleep in 1770 only to wake up in a post-revolutionary, idealistic Paris of 2440. The idea of using the fundamental temporal openness of literary narratives to design utopian (later increasingly dystopian) times instead of utopian spaces, as in Moore's "Utopia" (1517) or Campanella's "La citta del sole" (1602), reflects the paradigmatic change from a spatial to a temporal model of order that constitutes modernism. For the European literature of the late 18th/early 19th centuries, this had two consequences: On the one hand, the new genre of futuristic time travel radicalized the general ability of literature to sharpen its fictions into a poetic thought experiments on yet unknown, but nevertheless possible futures. On the other hand, from 1800 onwards literary time travels especially were attributed a prognostic potential that still is vivid today. My lecture will focus on this generic invention of futuristic time travel in European literature around 1800 on the basis of Mercier's "L'an 2440" and its immediate successors, such as Nicolas Edme Retif's "L'an deux mille" (1790) and Daniel Gottlieb Mehrings "Das Jahr 2500" (1794). In doing so, I will focus on the following questions: What kind of futures (open/closed, static/dynamic, utopian/dystopian, near/distant, one-dimensional/multidimensional) did literature around 1800 devise? How did the novels anticipate future knowledge in order to invent plausible knowledge of the future(s)? What new kind of temporal narrative(s) did they create

Research on bodies of the executed in German anatomy: An accepted method that changed during the Third Reich. Study of anatomical journals from 1924 to 1951

While it is known that bodies of the executed were used for anatomical research in Germany during the Third Reich, it is unclear whether this type of work was unique to the time period or more common in Germany than elsewhere. The dissected persons and the anatomists involved have not been fully investigated. This study of anatomical journals from 1924 to 1951 shows that 166 out of 7,438 [2.2%] German language articles mentioned the use of “material” from the bodies of executed persons. In comparison, only 2 out of 4,702 English language articles explicitly mentioned bodies of the executed. From 1924 to1932, 33 of a total of 3,734 [1%] German articles listed the use of the executed. From 1933 to 1938 the number rose to 46 out of 2,265 [2%], and increased again from 1939 to 1945 to 73 out of 984 [7%]. After the war 15 out of 455 [3%] still dealt with “material” from the executed. German anatomists' familiarity with the use of the executed as a standard for healthy tissues even before 1933 may have contributed to the ease with which they accepted the “opportunities” (large‐scale studies and research on women) presented to them by unlimited access to bodies of the executed provided by the abusive National Socialist (NS) legislation and continued using them for some years after the war. German postwar anatomy was built in part on the bodies of NS victims. Information given in some publications will help with further identification of these victims. Clin. Anat. 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97274/1/22107_ftp.pd

Introduction

Hania Siebenpfeiffer, Introduction to the discussion Querulanz: Über Recht, Paranoia und Bürokratie, ICI Berlin, 23 November 2012, video recording, mp4, 07:08 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e121123_1

... a little purple sky studded with gold. The Fascination of disembodied Images in the Early Modern Period

The article examines the close relation between early modern media of illusion and literary imagination in 17th century. The disembodied imagines of optical apparatuses like the camera obscura and laterna magica were met with great fascination by literary writers such as Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac as well as authors of compilations such as Athanasius Kircher and Georg Philipp Harsclorffer. Their reactions to the tense arrangement of projection, illusion and literary as well as technical imagination ranged from aesthetic enthusiasm to open rejection. Especially novelists like Grimmelshausen and Bergerac drew parallels between the ability to create disembodied images with the help of optical machines and their own power of literary imagination

Der neue BMW 7er

Available from TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Astrologie

Die Astrologie stellt bis heute die populärste und bekannteste Disziplin des Zukunftswissens dar, ist sie doch über Tages- und Wochenhoroskope unmittelbar mit der Prognose künftiger Ereignisse befasst und als solche im alltäglichen Mediengebrauch präsent. Und obwohl sie mit den okkulten Praktiken der Esoterik, Mantik, Alchemie oder dem Tarot assoziiert wird, erfreut sie sich im westlichen Kulturkreis wachsender Beliebtheit. Während populäre astrologische Weissagungen nicht zuletzt durch die Lehre der Tierkreiszeichen allgegenwärtig sind, ist meist unbekannt, dass die Anfänge der Astrologie weniger individualprognostischer als ökonomischer und politischer Natur waren