Annette Vowinckel

Current research projects (see below for abstracts)

Visual History. Institutions and Media of Visual Memory (SAW competition 2011) -> project description (German)

Images' Agents. Press Photographers, Picture Editors, Censors, and Collectors (ERC starting grant application)

Skyjacking 1931-2001. A Cultural History

History of Simulation/Simulation of History

Completed projects

Sport and Media in Cold War Olympics

The Age of Relation. Individuality, Normality and the Mediocre in Renaissance Culture (Habilitation/Second Doctorate)

Hannah Arendt: History and Historiography (Dissertation)

A Cultural History of Skyjacking (1931-2001)

The years 1968-1977 were not only a ‘red decade’ (as Gerd Koenen put it) but also a decade of air piracy. 412 cases of skyjacking world-wide were accounted for during this period, approximately half of all incidents of skyjacking before 1990. Though slowly, antiterrorist measures have proved to be effective, particularly the tightening of security measures and an agreement to combat piracy coming into effect in 1969. While until the mid 70ies many governments preferred to negotiate with terrorists, they subsequently changed their strategy towards military intervention – to the effect that terrorist assaults on civil aviation became less and less successful.
Since then the average number of hijackings per year has continuously decreased. However, the attacks of September 11 have shown that it is impossible to totally prevent air piracy.
In my book I do not focus on the political history of air piracy but rather on the cultural framework (espacially on mobility as one of the key elements of modernity) and on reflections on airborne violence in art, films and novels. It turns out that while we tend to think of skyjacking as a means of terrorism, there are various motives and aims that make people hijack planes and that many of them have been met with irony rather than military intervention. Thus, I do not focus on 9/11 as a result of 70 years of air piracy but rather as the negation of any motive for it in the history of the twentieth century.

From the History of Simulation towards the Simulation of History

Over the last decades, the term simulation has changed its meaning both culturally and semantically. It was derived from the Latin words similis (similar), simulacrum (image, copy, illusion, imitation), simulatio (hypocrisy, camouflage, feint) and simulare (to display, to disguise, to imitate, to mimic). All these terms have a negative connotation; however, in the context of contemporary science and media simulation has been used in a completely different manner. It indicates a process of prolonging the past and present into the future on the basis of data and by means of designing virtual visual worlds – like, for example, in computer games, in flight simulators or weathers forecasts.
Strikingly, history is one of very few academic disciplines that do not investigate simulation. This is probably due to the fact that historical reality cannot be changed retrospectively nor extended into the future. In a strict sense, the simulation of history is a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless several fields of application have emerged over the past decades: there are simulations of history in the pre-modern sense of mimesis; there are re-enactments (a performative way of ‘simulating’ history; there are digital simulations of history, mainly in computer games that allow the player to influence the course of events, and there are didactic applications intending to make history experienceable. In this project investigate different form of ›simulating‹ history, always taking into account that strictly speaking the simulation of history is a contradiction in terms

Sport and Media in Cold War Olympics

Sport is an integral part of postmodern everyday life—in form of daily exercise and even more so as a media phenomenon. However, sport is usually not reflected upon as a mere phenomenon; rather, it is conceived to indirectly inform us about politics, societies, and economic and media development. In both the sociology and history of sports, it has been common to speak of sports as an image or mirror of social reality, to charge sports with ideological meaning and to assume that it is influenced by various—and sometimes opposing—interests. The reality of sports in the twentieth century has in many ways abetted such projections, and few sports events are more apt to support this approach than the Olympics. In their context, sport has become a “universal metaphor” for anything but sport itself. It seems to be self-evident that teams represent nations, that athletes strive for medals in order to elate their compatriots, to serve their country, and to upgrade its standing in the world. In a concept of “Cold War sports,” there seems to be no place for athletes who refused to represent their countries—like, for example, Jürgen Sparwasser, a famous East German soccer player who relocated to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1988.
In my view the Cold War did provide a framework for the reception of sports and sports events, but there were also limits regarding the applicability of this framework. By analyzing the Olympics as a media event, which has been broadcast in real time since the early days, I show that the Games are not only a political and/or economic enterprise, but that, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has described it, they make a case for the “production of presence” as opposed to the “production of meaning.”

The Age of Relation. Individuality, Normality and the Mediocre in Renaissance Culture

In 1986 Jacob Burckhardt argued that the Renaissance gave rise to the modern individual. In my paper I would like to supplement Burckhardt's autonomous individual with the postulate of a relational individual, which is not only unique but also comparable to other individuals. In order to explore the conceptual contents of Renaissance "relationality," it is useful to turn to Cusanus who argued that everything finite—in contrast to divine infinity—is measurable and comparable. He subsequently made human beings the measure of all things that can be measured; it follows logically that the "average individual" was mediocre rather than a genius. However since a cult of genius emerged in the 1530ies, the term "mediocrity" was no longer a synonym for Aristotelian virtue; it became a synonym for a lack of will and talent, originality and authenticity. The "average" became a negative paradigm; things classical were now perceived as banal, as endless formal repetitions lacking genius. The "proper medium"—which, after all, Machiavelli’s idea of the republic was based on—was replaced by a concept of negative mediocrity and individuality was defined as its opposite: Any lack of it is a "symptom of mediocre or average (general) intellectual capacity" (Brockhaus 1908). I would like to argue that the sixteenth-century contempt for the average, for an intellectual paradigm that we could call relationality in a Cusanian sense, marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of an epoch that (unlike the Renaissance) enhanced a cult of individuality still en vogue in Burckhardt's days.

Hannah Arendt: History and Historiography (Dissertation)

While Hannah Arendt was not formally educated as a historian, almost everything she wrote focused on historical subjects. Two of her major works, Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, gave rise to controversies that left behind clear traces in the historiography of the postwar era. Nonetheless, Arendt always took a skeptical view of history as a science. Her criticism was predicated on the conviction that the object of historiography followed no laws, that it was hardly possible to research it systematically, and that it in addition had an essentially preservative function rendering it unsuited for describing the pathological side of modernity. The object of my thesis was an inquiry into the origin of these thoughts, into the formative influence they had on the total body of her work, and into Arendt's theoretical alternatives to both modern, academic or ideological historiography and 19th Century philosophical interpretations of history.
There is no doubt that Arendt's ambivalence towards historians was remarkable. On occasion she would term them eunuchs who abstained from any judgement on the world, at other times she saw them as judges rendering verdicts on the past, thereby paving the way for a reclamation of human dignity through modern faith in history. It is such ambivalence, and the synthesis of philosophical, political , and historical analysis, that lend Arendt's approach its dynamism; while we may concede the brilliance of many of her arguments, their methodological chaos is also highly evident. In general, it scarcely seems appropriate to talk of a „historical theory“ particular to Arendt; at best, one might refer to a concept of history--one that nevertheless is neither constant nor consistent. Starting from this basic assumption, the thesis traces the broader origins of the concept of history typical of Arendt, the biographical and historical factors influencing its emergence , and the various stages of its unfolding.
The thesis also considers the historical developments accompanying and in crucial ways shaping Arendt's life. Of central importance here is the concept of a break in tradition, and more specifically, the question of how it is possible to write about history in the wake of the Holocaust. In any event, Arendt's consistent aversion to scientific historiography, as well as her refusal to attach greater importance to historical arguments than political ones, did not simply crystalize in her depiction of National Socialism; rather, it was something distinguishing her thought in general--a thought that moved "with history against history." To Arendt, there was no single history, but a collection of innumerable individual (hi)stories--a kind of history-book of humanity. Similarly, there were many truths not disclosing themselves to the historian's eye involuntarily, but needing to be "prised out" of the firmly-ordained framework of the past. A great many facets of Arendt's historical thinking go back to a criticism of Hegel and Marx and can be reduced to a broad rejection of historical metaphysics, manifest in features such as the following: an adoption of the phenomenological method; a notion of "truth" as something intuitively grasped from the flow of random events; a critique of the manipulation of historical interpretation for political action; a rejection of historical causality and historical determinism; and a sense that the demonic evil associated with twentieth century's mass murder was intimately linked to the mediocrity of the historical protagonists. My appraisal of Arendt's critique of historiography leaves the question of its practical value open: ironically, the extent to which the critique points in a new direction can only be defined through the debates and controversies of empirical historiography.