An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture by Anna M. Parkinson, and: Männlichkeit zwischen Gefühl und Revolution. Eine Emotionsgeschichte der bundesdeutschen 68er-Bewegung by Stefanie Pilzweger (review)

Emotions and affects have become popular topics of study for scholars in the humanities and social sciences alike. For quite a while, debates have been characterized by a focus on how to conceptualize emotions and affects, not least by asking what natural sciences can offer for our understanding of, to use another term, feelings. Debates about the historical study of emotions thus sometimes felt a bit like a promise: what kind of insights such studies might offer. Drawing on different theoretical approaches, the volumes under review contribute to a now growing empirical body of research on emotions that may give an answer to such promises. They demonstrate how studying emotions in historical contexts can offer new insights, in this case to understanding post-1945 West German history. While Anna Parkinson turns, for the most part, to the immediate postwar period, seeking to rectify the image of a sober society lacking strong emotions, Stefanie Pilzweger turns to the revolts of 1968 that were—this much seems to be clear—a highly emotional moment.

Parkinson's An Emotional State sets out to explore emotions as "legible social signs in a larger affective structure, with multivalent symptoms, opportunities for creating community or subculture, and plural sites for political struggle" (1). To do this, Parkinson turns to three key "sites," which she calls Zeitdokumente, that allow her to analyze affective structures at a particular moment: Karl Jaspers's Die Schuldfrage (1946), Ernst von Salomon's Der Fragebogen (1951), and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (1967). Studying these scenes can help us, Parkinson claims, to "thaw" the image of an emotional coldness in the postwar years (Gefühlskälte, Adorno 1959). Above all, Parkinson, a literary scholar by training, is interested in affective structures that might remain hidden from open expression. Affect is, in Parkinson's definition, "a force that structures a subject without necessarily finding resolution in socially recognizable and linguistically legible emotion" (12). Affect, she argues, is characterized by "being in excess of the individual subject or situation; it is not this or that emotion, then, but a process or movement of fluctuating and undifferentiated emotion[s]" (12). Of course, this means that affects are difficult to describe; indeed, one might wonder whether they are not inherently impossible to describe, if we take the claim that they are beyond linguistic representation seriously. While her rhetoric is reminiscent of studies associated with affect theory, notably Brian Massumi's work, she emphasizes that her book takes a different path: while Massumi regards affects as "transsituational," Parkinson seeks to "examine the normative valence of particular emotions in their sociopolitical context" (14).

The book proceeds in three chapters, each focusing on one key text and situating it historically. In her chapter on Jaspers's Die Schuldfrage, which originated as a series of lectures given in Heidelberg in 1945–1946, Parkinson emphasizes the "imperturbable demeanor and coolly rational approach" that Jaspers displayed and demanded from his students, many of them returned soldiers (27). Showing feelings might have, she posits, endangered his audience's ability to critically engage with the question of moral guilt he discussed. Indeed, Jaspers's lectures were a plea to Germans to do away with feelings of pride, despair, outrage, and defiance; with the expression of contempt or the desire for revenge, and to trust the forces of reason and critical self-reflection (38). Emotions are thus by no means absent from Jaspers's writings, but treated as dangerous and problematic. Yet, concealed behind this appearance was, in Parkinson's reading, "an affective structure housing shame and grief, which remains...