SFB 644:  Transformations of Antiquity

Final Report Abstract

The Berlin Collaborative Research Center 644 “Transformations of Antiquity” developed an analytical concept, a typology called ‘Transformation.’ It provides a model for a broad spectrum of humanities disciplines to subtly analyze the variegated processes by which ancient elements were appropriated in post-classical cultures, classified according to their degree of inclusion, exclusion, or recombination. In addition, the ‘Transformation’ concept proved itself a workable model for the analysis of cultural change more generally, applicable to synchronic and inter-cultural change. Scholars from fifteen humanities disciplines were involved in the project. Premises. In its ability to attract and to repulse, antiquity was doubtless the guiding culture of post-classical European societies, especially with regard to their sciences and arts. ‘Antiquity’ was never a fixed quantity, however, nor was it ever an original or ascertainable entity. It was always dynamic potential, often enough hidden from view, and was never available in ‘pure form’ but rather always mediated; in the various epochs of European history down to the present, it was continually modified, appropriated, rediscovered, and invented. Appropriations of this kind, on all levels of culture, we call ‘transformations.’ The various processes of partial appropriation are innumerable, and they comprise longue durée chains of transformation that can only be reconstructed in a limited way. One thinks, for example, of a complex text like Virgil’s Aeneid and the different ways it was appropriated in French and Middle High German epic, the appropriation and transcendence of ancient hydraulics in the Renaissance, the novel contextualization of statues exhibited in museums, and the (new) construction of the god Dionysus or non-classical Babylon as fancies of modern self-interpretation. Transformations generate dynamics of cultural change that cannot be reduced to one-sided appropriations on the part of a receiving culture; they are not instances of mere ‘reception.’ The decisive element is a fundamental relationality, reciprocity and mutual influence between an ancient reference culture and a post-classical reception culture. In the triadic process of selective appropriation, the ancient reference sphere changes along the common horizon of transformation just as the reception culture changes, indeed as the latter often enough constitutes itself anew as ‘ancient’ (cultural construction). This usually asymmetrical reciprocity is the innovative core of Transformation and is thus captured in the central term ‘Allelopoiesis,’ itself appropriately a new construction from ancient elements. The CRC therefore understands transformations as bipolar processes of cultural construction, in which both poles reciprocally constitute and give shape to one another. The analysis is therefore unconcerned, or is concerned only secondarily, with the ‘correctness’ and actual propriety of the resulting vision of antiquity. Put bluntly: Transformation is concerned with what is done with antiquity and created from its elements, for what motives and in which cultural contexts such change happens. ‘Antiquity’ is thus both the object and the effect of these transformations. As for transformation researchers, they are ascribed the role of the detached scholarly observer. The observer decides whether a transformation type is to be defined by the object, reference and reception sphere, or the agent of transformation. A different observer may very well arrive at a different diagnosis. Naturally, the term ‘observer’ obscures awareness of an important theoretical problem, namely that the scholarly engagement with transformations itself is of course a part of their chain, as is more easily recognizable with increasing chronological distance. “Transformation theory contains within itself the very thing it was designed to analyze” (Böhme). The CRC considers one of its greatest achievements to have developed, and now to provide to the community of scholars, a workable concept, an ‘organon,’ that lends itself well to use in actual research. The finely tuned toolbox of 3 modes and fourteen types of transformation (from assimilation to translation) makes it possible to go beyond merely describing allelopoietic appropriations of antiquity generally as ‘transformations’; instead it facilitates a substantially more nuanced diagnosis of what actually happens in such cultural change. In its final phase of funding, culminating in the concluding conference ‘Antiquity without End’ (3-5 June 2016), the CRC tested the applicability of the Transformation concept with international guests with regard to (a) non-European ‘antiquities,’ such as in China and the Pre-Columbian Americas, and (b) processes of (inter-)cultural change in general. The Berlin Collaborative Research Center »Transformations of Antiquity« united 15 social science and humanities disciplines, with a total of 28 projects and around 90 scholars. The 34 project leaders belonged to six different faculties of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Antikensammlung of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. By the end of 2018, the CRC will have published approximately 80 volumes (monographs, edited volumes, conference acts). The uniquely advantageous research conditions in Berlin, the city’s universities, museums, libraries, and other research institutes, greatly benefited this endeavor and its progress from the very beginning. The concept of Transformation is now accepted and used in many places in Germany and abroad. In this respect the CRC has fulfilled its mission.

Publications

• Neuplatonismus und Ästhetik. Zur Transformationsgeschichte des Schönen. Berlin/ New York, 2007
  Lobsien, Verena; Claudia Olk
  
• Übersetzung und Transformation. Berlin/ New York, 2007
  Böhme, Hartmut; Christof Rapp; Wolfgang Rösler
  
• Dionysos - Verwandlung und Ekstase. Berlin, 2008
  Schlesier, Renate; Agnes Schwarzmaier
  
• Manfred Fuhrmann als Vermittler der Antike. Ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Praxis des Übersetzens. Berlin/ New York 2008
  Mindt, Nina
  
• Wissensästhetik. Wissen über die Antike in ästhetischer Vermittlung. Berlin/ New York, 200
  Osterkamp, Ernst (Hg.)
  
• Übersetzung antiker Literatur. Funktionen und Konzeptionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin/ New York, 2008
  Harbsmeier, Martin S.; Josefine Kitzbichler; Katja Lubitz; Nina Mindt (Hg.)
  
• Die modernen Väter der Antike. Die Entwicklung der Altertumswissenschaften an Akademie und Universität im Berlin des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin/ New York, 2009
  Baertschi, Annette M.; Colin Guthrie King (Hg.)
  
• Medien und Sprachen humanistischer Geschichtsschreibung. Berlin/ New York, 2009
  Helmrath, Johannes; Albert Schirrmeister; Stefan Schlelein (Hg.)
  
• Askese und Identität in Spätantike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit Berlin/ New York, 2010
  Röcke, Werner, Julia Weitbrecht (Hg.)
  
• Chronisten, Räte, Professoren. Zum Einfluß des italienischen Humanismus in Kastilien am Vorabend der spanischen Hegemonie (ca. 1450 bis 1527). Berlin/ Münster, 2010
  Schlelein, Stefan
  
• Das Originale der Kopie. Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike. Berlin/ New York, 2010
  Bartsch, Tatjana; Marcus Becker; Horst Bredekamp; Charlotte Schreiter (Hg.)
  
• Galileo Engineer. Dordrecht/ Berlin, 2010
  Valleriani, Matteo
  
• Transformationen antiker Wissenschaften. Berlin/ New York, 2010
  Toepfer, Georg; Hartmut Böhme (Hg.)
  
• Transparency and Dissimulation. Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature. Berlin/ New York, 2010
  Lobsien, Verena
  
• A Different God? Dionysos and Ancient Polytheism. Berlin/ Boston, 2011
  Schlesier, Renate (Hg.)
  
• Aus der Welt. Reise und Heiligung in Legenden und Jenseitsreisen der Spätantike und des Mittelalters. Heidelberg, 2011
  Weitbrecht, Julia
  
• Freud und die Antike. Göttingen, 2011
  Böhme, Hartmut; Claudia Benthien; Inge Stephan (Hg.)
  
• Imagination und Evidenz. Transformationen der Antike im ästhetischen Historismus Berlin/ New York, 2011
  Osterkamp, Ernst; Thorsten Valk (Hg.)
  
• Klassische Antike in den Berliner Museen 1797-1930. Exemplar für Kunst, Kommerz, Wissenschaft und Weltgeschichtsbild. Frankfurt a.M. u.a., Wien, 2011
  Weitmann, Pascal
  
• Ludi Naturae. Spiele der Natur in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Paderborn/ München, 2011
  Adamowsky, Natascha; Hartmut Böhme, Robert Felfe (Hg.)
  
• Transformation. Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels. Paderborn/ München, 2011
  Böhme, Hartmut; Lutz Bergemann; Martin Dönike; Albert Schirrmeister; Georg Toepfer; Marco Walter; Julia Weitbrecht
  
• Friendship, Love, and Letters. Ideals and Practices of Seraphic Friendship in Seventeenth-Century England. Heidelberg, 2012
  Wilde, Cornelia
  
• Imitatio als Transformation. Theorie und Praxis der Antikenachahmung in der frühen Neuzeit Petersberg, 2012
  Rombach, Ursula; Peter Seiler (Hg.)
  
• Ralph Cudworth - System aus Transformation. Zur Naturphilosophie der Cambridge Platonists und ihrer Methode. Berlin/ New York, 2012
  Bergemann, Lutz
  
• Antikes erzählen. Narrative Transformationen von Antike in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Berlin/ New York, 2013
  Heinze, Anna; Albert Schirrmeister; Julia Weitbrecht
  
• Ergänzungsprozesse. Transformation antiker Skulptur durch Restauration. Berlin/ New York, 2013
  Kansteiner, Sascha
  
• Historiographie des Humanismus. Literarische Verfahren, soziale Praxis, geschichtliche Räume Berlin/ New York, 2013
  Helmrath, Johannes; Albert Schirrmeister; Stefan Schlelein (Hg.)
  
• Künstler-Signaturen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Petersberg, 2013
  Hegener, Nicole
  
• „Aufzeichnungen eines Vielfachen“. Zu Friedrich Nietzsches Poetologie des Selbst. Bielefeld, 2013
  Sanchiño Martínez, Roberto
  
• Antike um jeden Preis. Gipsabgüsse und Kopien antiker Plastik am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin/ New York, 2014
  Schreiter, Charlotte
  
• Das Geschlecht der Antike. Zur Interdependenz von Antike-und Geschlechterkonstruktionen von 1700 bis zur Gegenwart Paderborn/ München, 2014
  Heinze, Anna; Friederike Krippner (Hg.)
  
• Grenzen der Antike. Die Produktivität von Grenzen in Transformationsprozessen. Berlin/ Boston, 2014
  Heinze, Anna; Sebastian Möckel; Werner Röcke (Hg.)
  
• Imagination, Transformation und die Entstehung des Neuen. Berlin/ New York, 2014
  Brüllman, Philipp; Ursula Rombach; Cornelia Wilde (Hg.)
  
• Krisenimperialität. Romreferenz im US-amerikanischen Empire-Diskurs. Frankfurt a.M., 2014
  Huhnholz, Sebastian
  
• Poetische Vergegenwärtigung, historische Distanz. Johann Gustav Droysens Aristophanes-Übersetzung (1835/38) Berlin/ New York 2014
  Kitzbichler, Josefine
  
• Alles nur Kulisse?! Filmräume aus der Traumfabrik Babelsberg. Weimar, 2015
  Dorgerloh, Annette; Marcus Becker
  
• Contingentia. Transformationen des Zufalls - Zufälle der Transformation Berlin/ New York, 2015
  Stephan, Ulrike C.A., Hartmut Böhme; Werner Röcke (Hg.)
  
• Grab und Memoria im frühen Landschaftsgarten. Paderborn/ München, 2015
  Dorgerloh, Annette; Michael Niedermeier; Marcus Becker (Hg.)
  
• Greater than Rome. Neubestimmungen britischer Impe-rialität 1870-1914 Frankfurt a.M., 2015
  Hausteiner, Eva Marlene
  
• Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror. Cambridge, 2015
  Baker, Patrick
  
• Nützliche Feindschaft? Existenzbedingungen demokratischer Imperien - Rom und USA. Paderborn, 2015
  Walter, Marco
  
• Shakespeares Exzess. Sympathie und Ökonomie. Wiesbaden, 2015
  Lobsien, Verena
  
• Der Panbabylonismus. Die Faszination des himmlischen Buches im Zeitalter der Zivilisation. Berlin, 2016
  Weichenhan, Michael
  
• Inszenierung der Antike. Präsentationskonzepte in öffentlichen Antikenmuseen des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland. Wiesbaden, 2016
  Berger, Frederik
  
• Studien zur Praxis der Übersetzung antiker Literatur. Geschichte - Analysen - Kritik. Berlin/ Boston, 2016
  Kitzbichler, Josefine; Ulrike C.A. Stephan (Hg.)
  
• Vitruvianism. Origins and Transformations. Berlin/ New York, 2016
  Sanvito, Paolo (Hg.)
  
• Walter F. Ottos Studie „Dionysos. Mythos und Kultus“. Antike-Forschung und moderne Kultur. Würzburg, 2016
  Leege, Oliver
  
• Andere Ökologien. Transformationen. Paderborn/ München, 2017
  Därmann, Iris; Stephan Zandt (Hg.)
  
• Berlin-Babylon. Eine deutsche Faszination. Berlin, 2017
  Polaschegg, Andrea; Michael Weichenhan (Hg.)
  
• Ciriaco d’Ancona und die Wiederentdeckung Griechenlands im 15. Jahrhundert (Cyriacus 9). Petersberg, 2017
  Chatzidakis, Michael
  
• Spielräume der Alten Welt. Die Pluralität des Altertums in Dramentheorie, Theaterpraxis und Dramatik (1790-1870). Berlin / New York, 2017
  Krippner, Friederike
  

Completed projects