Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
9 - About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
This essay considers the return of the gothic through two historical periods in which it might appear to be out of place in cultural ideological terms. The first is the Biedermeierzeit, an epoch that overlapped with the culture of late romanticism but was fundamentally resistant to its more fantastic and darkly sensational aspects. The second is the Weimar Republic, a period under the sway of technological modernity and not, at face value, fertile ground for gothic haunting. In fact, the restoration culture of the Biedermeierzeit played host to some extraordinarily potent and subversive gothic fantasies, and a century later, in the first years of the Weimar Republic, these apparently anachronistic fantasies came back to life at a further historical remove from their origins. In the retro-fantasies of early Weimar film, we can see the face of late romantic literary fantasy as popular revenant, inhabiting the reconstructed world of the Biedermeierzeit through the projective (and also retrospective) possibilities of the new medium. Looking back toward the gothic fantasies of E. T. A. Hoffmann in particular, it is a face that carried the features, at once uncannily strange and familiar, of the doppelgänger.
In my 1996 study of the doppelgänger I followed a track from writing and visual art around the era of romanticism to modernism and early cinema in an argument that saw this paradigmatic figure of the gothic imagination as a compelling, serial revenant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Popular RevenantsThe German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000, pp. 161 - 180Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012