Otago German Studies (E-Journal)
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Surrealism in the Imperfect
Get PDFInspired by Walter Benjamin’s encounters with surrealism in Paris during the late 1920s and early 1930s, “Surrealism in the Imperfect” proceeds from a reflection on browsing for books as a formative period of research. The article focuses on the history of post-WWII surrealist publishing and the turn-of-the-millennium remainder market as terrain for reconsidering Benjamin’s notion of “profane illumination” as consistent with the surrealist movement’s project of revaluing the concept of value
Max Ernst in 1929: Collage and the Politics of the Outmoded
Get PDFIn 1929, Max Ernst returned to collage with La Femme 100 têtes, a cycle of 147 collages with brief captions. Although collage had been central to Ernst\u27s early work, he shifted to frottage after the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. This paper explores Ernst’s return to collage amid a critical moment of division within the surrealist movement, polarized by debates over surrealism\u27s revolutionary role, collective creativity, and its relationship to political action. In this context, La Femme 100 têtes exemplifies how collage, with its use of ambiguity and refashioning of outdated materials, navigated the cultural and political impasse surrealism faced. The work challenged the modernist avant-garde’s aesthetic project, adopting a position beyond art but before politics. However, collage’s subversive potential was ultimately absorbed into art history as a new cultural form
Surrealistische Spuren in Walter Serners Kriminalgeschichten. Beispiele aus dem Band “Zum blauen Affen (1921)”
Get PDFThis paper examines surrealist traces in selected stories from Walter Serner\u27s
Zum blauen Affen
(1921). The first section addresses humor as a core feature of Serner\u27s narrative strategy, while the second explores Eros as a central motif. The final section engages with the theoretical perspectives of Walter Benjamin and the French surrealists, probing whether Serner’s use of surrealist elements serves merely as a critique of dada or extends to challenge the avant-garde more broadly—including surrealism itself—by counterposing his own vision of the relationship between reality and fiction, a vision that Serner consistently grounds in parody.This paper examines surrealist traces in selected stories from Walter Serner\u27s Zum blauen Affen (1921). The first section addresses humor as a core feature of Serner\u27s narrative strategy, while the second explores Eros as a central motif. The final section engages with the theoretical perspectives of Walter Benjamin and the French surrealists, probing whether Serner’s use of surrealist elements serves merely as a critique of dada or extends to challenge the avant-garde more broadly—including surrealism itself—by counterposing his own vision of the relationship between reality and fiction, a vision that Serner consistently grounds in parody
Misunderstanding Kitsch: Walter Benjamin\u27s "Traumkitsch" (1925), Max Ernst\u27 Protosurrealist Collages, and Old-fashioned Children\u27s Illustrations
No full textThis essay establishes the centrality of Max Ernst’s untitled protosurrealist frontispiece collage for Paul Éluard’s Répétitions in Walter Benjamin’s thinking on surrealism, kitsch, and the outmoded. Benjamin wrote about Ernst’s frontispiece collage in his 1925 sketch, “Traumkitsch” (pub. 1927). I argue that Benjamin’s “dream kitsch” is a form of counter-kitsch meant to unravel capitalist bourgeois social control and conditioning, as influenced by André Breton’s discussion of unrestricted language and the process of relearning in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. The fact that a reproduction of Ernst’s collage was also included in the third and final installment of Benjamin’s 1929 essay in Die literarische Welt, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” demonstrates that Ernst’s frontispiece encapsulated his special interest for old-fashioned children’s book illustrations. As I show, Benjamin’s fixation on Ernst’s image results in an early formulation of redemptive modes of relationality in modern life inspired by childhood experience
Notes on André Breton, Novalis, and the Absolute
Get PDFSurrealism, like Romanticism, rejected a world disenchanted by reason, emphasizing dreams, feelings, and the irrational. Both movements shared an ethics focused on love, emancipation, and creativity. And both movements expressed a longing for the Infinite. This essay examines surrealist co-founder André Breton and his engagement with early German Romantic writer Novalis. Breton was familiar with Novalis’s ideas by 1925. Yet, Breton’s public acknowledgement of Novalis before 1938 was largely ambivalent, likely due to concerns about being labeled as mystical. Nevertheless, Novalis’s influence persisted, particularly in Breton’s poetics of the infinite, unknowable, totality: the Absolute. Beginning in 1938, Novalis became an increasingly visible source for Breton’s Surrealism. But the Romantic author’s imprint had been there all along
In the Palace of Polysaccharides
No full textOriginal Photographs and a Short Exegesis by Tom Denlinge