After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung (review)

The subtitle of Eric Downing's latest study already hints at the complexity of his project, which traces the remarkable changes the nineteenth-century German ideal of classical Bildung underwent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Jensen, and Walter Benjamin, Downing illustrates how photography's and archaeology's impact on psychoanalysis affected modern notions of subjectivity, education, and the politics of increased nationalism. The volume effortlessly contributes to the interdisciplinary field of German Studies, and its elegant and persuasive prose ensures a joyous reading experience for Germanists, classicists, and comparatists alike. Downing successfully takes up the immense task of weaving the visual, classical, and psychoanalytical together in this exploration of how classical Bildung (and its singular image or Bild) shifts to Entwicklung (a development with multiple facets and linguistic valences).

The book consists of an introduction, three analytical chapters, and an epilogue that expands the scope of the book by linking its main themes to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The introduction summarizes the classical concept of Bildung and, in particular, the Bildungsroman and its affinity to the painted image. Downing argues that photography transforms the singular image into a fleeting and "almost immediately" out-of-date entity (6). He continues to dismantle the dilemma of the search for "the original" and the impossibility to find it either in the reproducibility of photography or in the ever-older artifacts dug up in Greece or Italy. Using both photography and archaeology as metaphors for the subject's memory, psychoanalysis around 1900 perceived subjectivity as a "digging site" that would not, however, immediately reveal the complete (original) image.

This tension between original and reproduction informs also the first chapter, in which Downing analyzes the photographic metaphors to trace the shifting notion of education in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Downing sees the move from Bildungs- to Entwicklungsroman completed in the many dualisms that this novel juxtaposes. The author is especially persuasive in his reading of the gendered doubleness the figures of the novel come to represent, always reminding his reader that the opposing dualisms of dark and light, black and white, male and female usually belong to a singular whole.

The second chapter delves further into the world of archaeology, analyzing Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva through a critical analysis of Freud's essay on this text. Downing detects in Jensen's nearly forgotten novella signs of a German nationalism that exceed the topic of subjectivity by linking the archaeological projects of the nineteenth century to notions of German "superior" culture. Because he regards it as similarly problematic as Jensen's text, Downing rejects Freud's reading of the story and reverses it, claiming that the issue of childhood, which Freud regards as the subtext of the story, emerges only as an effect (or after-image) of the main character's obsession with archaeology.

Walter Benjamin's Berlin Chronicle forms the center of the third chapter. Downing regards this collection of literary "snapshots" as a Bildungsgeschichte that combines the private development of the (male) individual with his initiation into the public through an official educative program. The fascinating aspect of this chapter lies in Downing's ability to show how Benjamin follows this Goetheian model of the Bildungsroman while seeking to "re-form its conditions from within" (190). Downing illustrates how Benjamin grapples with technology as the decomposer of cultural ideology, which simultaneously enables a new gaze, perception, and understanding of the surroundings (198ff.). Benjamin directs this new gaze at the (archaeological) debris rather than at the treasures beneath it, which Jensen had still emphasized (204). At times, however, Downing's close readings of Benjamin are a bit forced. For example, when Benjamin hears Mark-Halle rather than Markt-Halle while he is wandering through Berlin's famous indoor market hall, Downing claims that this deteriorated word "retain[s] nothing of the original concept of buying and selling" (210...