Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900–2015: Between Acceleration and Slowness ed. by Anne Fuchs and J.J. Long (review)

Against the cultural backdrop of speed as a guiding principle of neoliberal capitalism, Time in German Literature and Culture critically interrogates the notions of speed and slowness, thereby uncovering ambivalent impulses of conceptualizing life associated with moving fast or slower. The eleven essays in Time in German Literature and Culture offer critical analyses through mostly historical and socio-cultural approaches supported by close readings of literary, filmic, and visual texts. While all but one of the contributions are situated in the German-language context, the volume speaks to various disciplines such as literary studies, cultural studies, visual and media studies, art, and even architecture. Although the title suggests that the volume covers more than one hundred years of German literature and culture, it actually centers on two key time periods: the decades between 1900 and the 1930s and the post-Wall era. Part I considers theoretical and thematic questions, such as lateness as a temporal mode of resistance to modernity's progress narrative that is tied to an acceleration of life around the turn of the twentieth century. The contributions in Parts II and III address the topics of both slowness and acceleration, accentuating the importance of conceptualizing time and speed with respect to historical context. While the former set of essays emphasizes the ambivalent affective responses of ecstasy and anxiety as captured in artistic works of the Weimar republic, the latter concentrates on representations in contemporary culture.

Serving as the introductory essay of Part I, Anne Fuchs's piece examines the notions of lateness and slowness as emerging out of modernity's investment in changes and continuous progress through acceleration. She turns to a selection of works by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka that characterize lateness as a moral pathology of modern time and understand punctuality not only as a moral imperative, but a powerful technique for managing citizen-subjects. However, lateness and being out of sync with the rigid timetables of modern life permit a critique of the predominance of rationality, thus fostering an experience of detachment from the enslavement of the totalizing tempos created through acceleration in modernity.

In a similar vein that emphasizes the resistance to an increasingly normative regulation of time, Aleida Assmann identifies various ways in which humans can experience time that is not aligned with mechanical clock-time. According to her, the present can be experienced as: (1) the moment that is situated on the cusp of transition between past and future; (2) the time when an action takes place; (3) a period of "full time," that is, a time of heightened awareness of one's experiences that fill time; (4) encounters with art and aesthetic performances; (5) one's span of attention to objects or events; (6) the presence of a historical moment in the actual present; and (7) the indiscriminate synchronicity of present and past that results from the erasure and/or engulfment of the latter in the former.

Like Anne Fuchs in Part I, Dirk Göttsche in Part II interrogates the role of short prose as a response to the socio-cultural changes during modernity in one of the two modes: embracing the accelerated pace of life, but also slowing down or pausing to capture and critique an Augenblick, or a single moment in time. Due to its brevity, short prose is the aesthetic expression of the condensation and speed of modern life; the genre allows efficient and quick consumption. However, the intensity of the reading experience requires the reader to slow down to critically reflect upon the text and, by extension, the self.

If the above essays engage theoretically with broader thematics of time, others focus on close readings of artifacts. Elizabeth Boa investigates the depiction of time in relation to movement through space and contends that changes in the apprehension of time impact the conceptualization of...