The Nomad Past: German Histories, Italian Journeys, and the Visible Texture of Time.

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between German historical thought and the travel cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it investigates how mobile forms of visuality (art tours, sightseeing, urban experience) conditioned the reception of historical traces and historically resonant spaces. Organized around the work and travel of Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, the dissertation focuses on mobile and visual receptions of the Italian past, at popular and elite levels, and how these challenged and complicated the landscapes of historical consciousness that had been shaped by nineteenth-century German historicism. By examining Burckhardt’s Cicerone and his journeys to Rome, Warburg’s reconstructions of the Italian Renaissance, Freud’s Pompeian “archive”, and Benjamin’s Neapolitan Denkbild, this study reveals how Italian travel became an opportunity for exploration of alternative set of historical reconstructions. Furthermore, by simultaneously reading these phenomena alongside popular accounts of travel and visual culture – such as Baedeker guidebooks and literary magazines – the dissertation brings into relief an experience of history emerging through encounters with material culture, through visual experience and various forms of mobility and displacement. Thus, where conventional approaches of the German historicist tradition – extending from Leopold von Ranke to Friedrich Meinecke - tended to produce historical landscapes organized around linear narrative forms and national geographies, the study reveals forms of historical representation that emerged at the margins of these historicist practices/territories. In terms of theory, the dissertation borrows the concept of “nomadism” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a concept that captures a form of mobile alterity in both conceptual and physical spaces, and shows how the work of Burckhardt, Warburg Freud and Benjamin represented “nomadic” detours from the historiographical territories defined by German historicism. Furthermore, the dissertation shows how these mobile, visually-oriented and historical “nomadisms” manifested what Gilles Deleuze and Christine Buci-Glucksmann have described as baroque representational forms. Ultimately, the dissertation describes approaches that pursued historical experience not from within the methodological and conceptual territories of classical German historicism, but instead embraced modes of baroque historical experience whose representations were characterized by categories like theatricality, visuality, allegory, simultaneity, and historical rupture.