Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 1/2025

When Hans Blumenberg’s Die Sorge geht über den Fluß, a first selection of short glossary reflections fromhis »Unerlaubte Fragmente« (»Illicit Fragments«), was published in 1987, it was soon compared to Walter Benjamin’s Denkbilder. But critical voices found the socio-critical potential of Benjamin’s miniatures to be missing. Today, the interventionist character of both authors is more readily recognised. Other readers of Blumenberg’s selection regretted the lack of contextual coherence of the reflections. However, this criticism raises the general question of whether ›small forms‹ do not always end up referring to the larger context in which they stand? If so, how does this come about? To answer this question, this article goes back to a model of these Denkbilder: the tableaux, impressions of the city, published in the 18th and 19th centuries. As it turns out, then, Benjamin and Blumenberg stand in a metaphorical connection with each other in which their respective characteristics and potentials can be better recognised.

This article takes Hans Blumenberg’s failure to mention Sigmund Freud in his 1980 Freud-Prize acceptance speech as an occasion to think through the importance of small forms in these two theorists’ work. The essay explores Blumenberg’s theory of »pensiveness« (Nachdenklichkeit) and what it may be missing by ignoring Freud and his notion of the joke (Witz). At stake are the ways Blumenberg and Freud mobilize small forms as modes and methods of thinking: from Nicht-Denken to Nachdenklichkeit to Nachdenken and back again. Ultimately, small forms in Blumenberg and Freud – in different ways and to different ends – can achieve or show what theory alone cannot.

The present article outlines a conception of the commonplace as a ›small form‹. Against the backdrop of its modernist critique, the article’s aim is to highlight the ambiguity and paradoxical character of the commonplace that are central to Jean Paulhan’s literary and theoretical oeuvre. After establishing the idea of the commonplace as a rhetorical device and linguistic unit witha high potential for creative and literary uses, the article traces Paulhan’s concept of the commonplace to its experiential roots in the hain-teny, a Madagascan form of oral poetry, and demonstrates that Paulhan’s reflections on the uses of proverbs and set phrases had a formative influence on Walter Benjamin, traces of which can be found notably in the Storyteller-essay.

The essay scrutinizes the question of a particular aesthetics hinging on the specific media embedding of small literary forms. What influence does the calendar exert on the short stories published in it? To what extent is the newspaper responsible for the peculiar poetics of the so-called ›fait divers‹? And what exactly turns a tweet into twitterature? Following the assumption that the aesthetic attraction of small forms is not limited to their shortness but also depending on material restrictions, writing and reception habits linked to the medium for which each piece was written and in which it is received, the essay looks at this interplaybetween the small formand its medial context. And picking up on the recently intensifying debate around the specific poetics of small forms in the digital age the historical perspective is used to illuminate contemporary developments.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is discussed as a future history that engages with three fundamental problems of Anthropocene literature: the relationship between fact and fiction; the representation of complex and multi-scalar processes; and the narrativization of agency. Robinson confronts these questions by adapting various small forms in his novel such as the eyewitness report, the protocol, the dictionary entry and the riddle. Analyses of the (fictional) dictionary entry and one riddle show how Robinson’s formal adaptations, inbreakingwith the conventions of these forms, provide a meta-commentary on the problems of Anthropocene literature. The narrativization of (historical) agency is further scrutinized as the dynamics of concealment and revealment intrinsic to the small form of the riddle also come into play with regard to the plot structure and the constellation of the central characters. Robinson’s history of the future attempts to intervene in the present by challenging the reader to consider the feasibility of the many ideas, models and technical solutions presented in the novel in order to avert an impending climate catastrophe.

In analogy to Harun Farocki’s definition of the ›operative image‹ and its relation to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, the article first develops the definition of the ›operative text‹ as a type of text that is not dependent on authorial functions or fictions but on purely technical circumstances of production. This definition is then examined and further elaborated using the example of the minutes or »Protokolle «, in particular by comparing Erika Runge’s Bottroper Protokolle and Kathrin Röggla’s novel wir schlafen nicht. The protocol and ›operating texts‹ thus becomerecognizable asanon-human small form in whichanon-literary alteritarian aesthetic and a technical regulation of its understanding are at work.

The article examines feuilletonistic and short prose texts about the incommensurability of death. These small pieces that appeared in scattered places are united by their exploration of the forms of symbolic behavior and thus the historically changing attitudes towards the dead and the past. The article discusses the memorial functions of these 1920s texts that are shaped by nationalistic and masculinist codes. The cult surrounding the death-mask plays a central role. The readings presented here show how the small modernist form, in its brevity, scarcity, and ephemerality, takes on an archival function which allows it, in the age of the masses, to go beyond commemorating the »individual spirit« (Hofmannsthal). In conclusion, the article contrasts the 1920s pieces with Helmar Lerski’s photographic project Metamorphosis through Light (1936). The series shows physiognomic studies of a single man, and, despite its ambivalent aesthetics, is read as a counterpoint to the interwar period’s heroic, masculinist death-mask cult.

Glasarchitektur (1914) by Paul Scheerbart has already been thoroughly contextualized with regard to architectural and avant-garde discourse; this article proposes the first in-depth reading along the lines of modernist short prose. Beyond an appraisal of the volume’s hybrid blend of genres or its ironically utopian vein, the »Textur« exemplifies several core problems in the field of small forms: 1) challenges of communicating in a compact, efficient manner; 2) the conceptual difference between creating small aesthetics by means of »Verkleinerung« and the textual event of having this kind of prose emerge, as demonstrated by the striking Veranda-piece of Glasarchitektur. Finally, Scheerbart’s futuristic writing prompts the question 3) whether some type of intervention takes place. A passage from Walter Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße (1928) helps to elucidate a version of »Geistesgegenwart« that shares those activating as well as visionary affinities on a more theoretical level.

This article examines the proletarian-revolutionary song as a small form of intervention situated between literature and music and dependent on physical performance. Around 1930, Hanns Eisler developed a new aesthetic of the proletarian song designed for class conflict, contributing to the current discussion about an operativeart whichalso engaged Bertolt Brecht und Walter Benjamin. A key concept of Eisler’s »Kampfmusik« is the medium of voice, which he both reflects on in lectures, essays and critiques and shapes in detailed instructions for vocal performance. The paper discusses two functions of voice in Eisler’s song aesthetics: 1.) its understanding as an artistic means of production (»Produktionsmittel«) available to the proletariat, and 2.) the engaging quality of vocal performance, opening up various opportunities for physical and political activation as explored by Brecht and Eisler in their cooperation with workers’ choirs in Die Maßnahme (1930).