Precarious Times

Anne Fuchs is Professor and Director of the University College Dublin Humanities Institute. She is author of After the Dresden Bombing, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse, and Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Follow her on X, @AnneFuchsUCD.

Fuchs first documents the effect of speed on society and looks at how the rapid pace of change suppresses the past and clouds the future...In the final chapters, she rightly recognizes that in the last 30 years the most profound effect on German culture was the "overnight" fall of the Berlin Wall. Fuchs's treatment of German unification is the book's most important contribution.- R.C. Conard, University of Dayton (Choice) Masterfully achieved, this work instills in the reader the contingent precarity of existing in the present. Reading it, one is transported to a time before the global pandemic when the issue emanated more of a theoretical than literal nature. Located on the other side of the tipping point, scholars from cultural, media, and literary studies, along with their general reader counterparts, encounter the uncanniness and become flâneurs of the past.(Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature) Fuchs's study engages with a magnificent range of theoretical and cultural engagements with time to explore fundamental questions raised by the temporal shifts of the twenty-first century. The book stands out for its far-reaching and careful exploration of a diverse range of theory and art[.](Modern Language Review) In this extraordinary and timely book, Anne Fuchs examines the contingent precarity of living in the present, offering a clear and comprehensive analysis that interrupts prevalent deterministic interpretations of modern temporality. Fuchs delivers a rigorous, extensive, and elaborate re-examination of the modern discourse on time that includes works of literature, film, and photograpy.(Monatshefte) Anne Fuchs brilliant analysis shifts between careful close readings of texts and images and insightful linkages to key thinkers. The result is a highly readable and fiercely intelligent book.(Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies) Anne Fuchs provides a meticulous account of existential temporality in her study of post-modern pictorial and text artists, utilising sensitive readings of a wide range of literary works, films and photography reflecting on the profound cultural anxieties precipitated by experiences of atomisation, displacement and fragmentation which, she argues, 'brings about a loss of history and of time itself.(Journal of Contemporary European Studies) Stuck in an expanding present, we paradoxically seem never to manage to fit everything in. While this might feel particular to our current moment, there is a longer history of precarious times, which Anne Fuchs revealingly traces in a German cultural context. Her book offers a broad perspective on current debates in our digitalised present with added historical depth. Analysing works of fiction, photography and film from the modernist period to now, Fuchs shows how their subjective experiences of time overturn the imperative to be always connected.(Journal of Contemporary European Studies)

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Theoretical Perspectives: Temporal Anxieties in the Digital AgeTimeless TimeAccelerationResonanceAtomizationImmediacyThe Extended PresentTime-Space CompressionNetwork TimePrecarious Times2. Historical Perspectives: Modernism and Speed PoliticsTemporality and the Modern ImaginationTwo Visions of Late Culture: Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas MannAttention, Distraction, and the Modern Conditions of Perception: Georg Simmel and Franz KafkaModern Man and the Trouble with Time: Franz Kafka's Der ProceßSpeed Politics in Robert Walser's Short ProseFrom Lateness to Latency: Sigmund FreudConclusion3. Contemporary Perspectives: Precarious Time(s) in Photography and FilmSlow ArtThe Disruption of Linear Time: Michael Wesely's Time PhotographyThe Disruption of Historical Time: Ulrich Wüst's Photobook Später Sommer/Letzter HerbstIn the Acoustic Space of the GDR: Christian Petzold's BarbaraThe Longing for Transcendence: Ulrich Seidl's Paradies: GlaubeDisruptive Performances: Maren Ade's Toni ErdmannConclusion4. Narrating PrecariousnessDis/connectedness in Contemporary German LiteratureAcceleration and Point Time: Clemens Meyer's Als wir träumtenEmpty Time and the Extended Present: Julia Schoch's Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers and Karen Duve's TaxiThe Cult of Immediacy and the Search for Resonance: Wilhelm Genazino's Das Glück in glücksfernen ZeitenThe Search for Transcendence: Arnold Stadler's Sehnsucht: Versuch über das erste Mal and SalvatorePrecarious Times, Precarious Lives: Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangenConclusionEpilogue: Presentist Dystopias or the Case for Environmental HumanitiesBibliographyIndex