Landvermessungen: Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns und Einar Schleefs Ortsinszenierungen auf der Bühne des 20. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

Pinpointing the significance of places in the works of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Einar Schleef is the objective of a close reading that seeks to contextualize their social, historical, economical, technological, and philosophical dimensions to emphasize how one can understand these works as mutations of experiencing spatial shifts that occurred throughout the 20th century. In addition, this first attempt to consider all literary works by Brinkmann and Schleef illustrates that the clash between modernism and anti-modernism, which arose from changing spatial paradigms that were byproducts of the first total mobilization, represents a not yet conscious prefiguration of the confrontational patterns that continue to shape the cultural and political discourses of the 21st century. Given the aforementioned framework, this modular writing project focuses on what is claimed to lie at the very core of mapping: the interdependency between hauntology and topography. This common theme exemplifies what is at stake when it comes to practices that strive to answer questions of how or where to dwell and how the history produced by means of cultural topographies is always already an uncanny affair in the sense of homelessness. It is the historicity of mapping understood as an ever-haunting uncanniness that is upheld as a modern loss in the artistic works of Brinkmann and Schleef both of whom are facing a post-war Germany in which the war lingers on in contemporary spaces of everyday life.