Photographic Imaginations

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

What Does Germany Look Like? Photographic Imagi/Nations in the Long 19th Century Photography precedes a united German state (the “Kaiserreich”) by over three dec-ades. Before and after 1871, the medium played a decisive role in shaping and imag-ining “Germanness” in general and the political process of nation-building in partic-ular. Taking Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” literally, it can form a springboard for an overview of photographic discourses that address a nation in the making. The course aims to observe how literary texts deal with visual media and photographic sources, especially those published in illustrated magazines and books, trying to answer what Germany looks like.