Open Collections

Abstract

The following study approaches the oeuvre of German writer, poet, artist, and performer Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) as a consistent aesthetic project, in which the subject works to gather multimedia records of her own lost self. I focus on the following texts by Hennings: Das Brandmal (Branded, 1920); Gefängnis (Prison, 1919), Blume und Flamme (Flowers and Flame, 1938), “Verloren” (“Lost,” unpublished, 1917), in addition to poems from the volume Helle Nacht (Bright Night, 1922), feuilleton sketches, and photographs of Hennings’s face. Based on close readings of the above texts, I argue that Hennings’s subjects are in a post-traumatic mode of psychological separation from themselves, which they document and narrate in an attempt to generate an external archive of the self that they cannot otherwise access. This mode results in chronic dissociation and depersonalization, as well as an equally chronic longing to find and reunite with a lost self, alternately referred to in Hennings’s works as a lost home (Heimat) or lost world (Welt). I work within three main theoretical frameworks: (queer) affect theory, media theory, and Freudian trauma theory. First, building on the work of queer affect theorists, I define the longing in Hennings’s project as a negative and yet anticipatory force, which both destabilises the subjects and propels them in their search for themselves. I next analyse examples of fantastical media as “assistive technologies” for Hennings’s subjects, objects such as stereoscopic viewers, peepholes, and seashells which the subjects use to stage uncanny encounters with doubles of themselves. The study concludes by arguing that the subject’s estrangement from herself can be traced back to early childhood, which is indicated to have been disturbed by cryptic interfamilial trauma(s).