Table of Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Historical and Theoretical Coordinates of Museal and Literary Discourses

1. The Museum Function, Inventoried Consciousness, and German-Speaking Literature

2. Inventoried Consciousness Today: Durs Grünbein and W. G. Sebald

Part 2: The Rise of the Public Museum and Bildung

3. Ottilie Under Glass: Collecting as Disciplinary Regime in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften

4. The Museum of Bildung: Collecting in Stifter’s Nachsommer

Part 3: Acculturation, Commodification, and the Nation

5. Archaeology, Exhibition, and Tourism: Raabe’s “Keltische Knochen”

6. Flâneur Optical, Collector Tactile: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte as Imaginary Museum Landscape

Part 4: Narrative Interventions in the Museal Abuse of Culture

7. “Quiet Violence”: The Army Museum in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina

8. (Re)collecting the Twentieth Century: Siegfried Lenz’s Heimatmuseum

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Peter M. McIsaac is Assistant Professor of German at York University, Toronto. He is the author of numerous articles on German literature and culture and museum studies.

Reviews

“It is the principal merit of this study to have highlighted the connections that bind the process of internalisation of memory in German literature with the tangible nature of museums as both objective and imaginative structures.”—Daria Santini Oxford Art Journal