Blick in die Zeit

This work takes a phenomenological approach to the intersection between literature and visual media as it bears on the concept of time in the novels Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, Abfall für alle by Rainald Goetz, UC by Helmut Krausser, and 42 by Thomas Lehr. These novels redefine time in an effort to uphold a notion of historicity, which many media theorists see as threatened by the prevalence of visual media. By turning the literary focus to the human interface between perception and cognition, the novels can incorporate the perception of media representations into their notions of reality and simultaneously reflect on the cognitive schemata which develop along with it. Thus, a practice emerges whereby the perceiving subject realizes its potential to appropriate and transform conceptual notions. While the texts promote historicity, they counteract historicism. In recourse to theoretical physics, the novels deploy the notion that time ought to be thought of as plurality and always dependent upon space. This gives rise to individual concepts that include the simultaneity of present, past, and future, breaking radically with the notion of a synchronous universal flow of time. The denial of chronological principles, such as linearity and causality, takes place against the background of the ongoing discourse on the remembrance of the Holocaust and of the atrocities committed during the Second World War. In an attempt to acknowledge the lasting significance of this historical caesura, the novels turn away from the notion of temporal progression, and instead establish concepts of time that testify to the presence of the past and its interconnections with the future as well as with other possible worlds.