German Studies Publications

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    “Cinematography of Devices”: Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine Trilogy
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) Blumenthal-Barby, Martin
    Harun Farocki’s 2001–2003 installation Eye/Machine tackles issues of surveillance surrounding the “intelligent” weapon systems deployed in the 1990/91 Gulf War. Farocki is especially interested in the image processing systems behind these weapons, their operational images that are both generated by machines and read by machines—images that require neither human creators nor human spectators. The article examines how Farocki turns these images into aesthetic artifacts even though they were never meant to be seen. Concomitantly, it interrogates our own status as spectators and explores how we can avoid complicity with the imagistic logic of war that Farocki confronts.
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    Land, Race, and Citizenship: The Political Spaces of Monumentalism in South Africa
    (De Gruyter, 2013) Emden, Christian J.
    This essay discusses the nature of (old and new) national monuments in post-apartheid South Africa which even now, twenty years after the first free elections, remains a democracy in transition. The discourse of monumentalism in transitional political systems is marked by concrete political interests that, in the case of South Africa, are centered on questions of race and citizenship as well as on territorial claims. Monumentalism in South Africa is inextricably linked to the spatial organization of political community, before and after apartheid, and as such it runs parallel to developments in public law and constitutionalism. On the one hand, officially sanctioned forms of monumentalism, such as the Voortrekker Monument, the Taal Monument, or Pretoriaﾒs Freedom Park, tend to camouflage the political and social tensions of post-apartheid South Africa. On the other hand, new forms of monumentalism create accidental and liminal spaces that expose the political paradoxes and historical ambiguities of the new South Africa as in the case of the spatial relationship between the Womenﾒs Monument and the cooling towers of the power station, painted with ANC motifs, in the urban landscape of Bloemfontein.