„FIGURES OF TRANS- GENERATIONAL HERITAGE BY HEINE, BENJAMIN, AND FREUD: THEORY OF HISTORY AND THE BIBLICAL ORIGINS OF THE IDEA OF HERITAGE”
Aus organisatorischen Gründen beginnt die Veranstaltung um 20.00 Uhr. Wir bitten um Entschuldigung.
The lecture will discuss the different but related figures of trans-generational heritage by Heinrich Heine, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. It explains the common ground of the three authors as an interpretative pattern based in a theory of history/ memory that refers back to the biblical origins of the idea of “heritage”. Both Heine and Benjamin hypothesize a secret agreement between the generations, which might be read as the origin of the idea of solidarity. Whereas Heine in his Memoirs (published posthumously) directly cites the Bible when alluding to the relation of Schuld and Schulden (guilt and debts), Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Concept of History (1940) talks of a “weak messianic power” with which “we” (the followers) have been expected. The complementary concept in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is the figure of an “archaic heritage” elaborated in Moses and Monotheism (1939), namely a trans-generational transferral of repressed memories of the ancestors to their offsprings.
Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Sigrid Weigel is a world-renowned scholar whose works have made a major contribution to a number of disciplines in the humanities. From 1999 to 2015, she was Director of the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung Berlin [Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin] and Professor at the Department of Literature at the Technical University of Berlin. Previously, she was Professor at the German Department in Zurich (1992–1988) and Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam from 1998 to 2000. She was also a member of the founding-board of directors of the Advanced Studies Institute for Cultural Sciences in Essen. Her research fields include: European literature and culture with special focus on the works of Heinrich Heine, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg; relationship between science and literature and the cultural history of science, generation, genealogy and ancestry; genealogy and the cultural history of life sciences; interdisciplinary history of the concept of “generation”; dialectics of secularization; cultural history of martyrdom; images and texts in art and science. The list of her publications includes: Generation. Zur Genealogie des Konzepts – Konzepte von Genealogie (2005) (with Ohad Parnes, Ulrike Vedder, Stefan Willer); Genea-Logik. Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (2006); Walter Benjamin. Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy (2013); Grammatologie der Bilder (2015). Since 2007, she has been the member of Academia Europaea, and since 2000, the honorary member of the MLA (Modern Languages Association USA). In 1997, she received Reimer Prize of the Warburg Foundation Hamburg, and in 2016, Aby Warburg Prize of the city of Hamburg.
The lecture is part of international conference “Gender, Generations, Communism in Central and South-Eastern Europe: Concepts, Discourses, Practices”.
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