Recursiveness: Mnemopoetics of Journal Literature 1813 – 1863 – 1913

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This project revolves around acts of memory stimulated by and reflected as well as discussed in journal media. It is particularly interested in mnemopoietic, experimental forms of writing time that follow a commemorative logic. In this context the project explores the tension between the immediate documentation of events and historiographic narratives elaborated from a temporal distance. The premise of the study is that, due to their media-specific qualities such as topicality, periodicity, incompleteness/seriality and paratextuality, journals are preordained to select, recall, and model dates and events according to the recursive logic of anniversaries and jubilees, and thus to mark them as, in principle, historically significant and worthy of historiography.The project analyses this phenomenon via the concept of "recursiveness", which bringstogether the recurrence of journal periodicity and forms of periodic commemoration. On this basis, it examines written mnemopoietic accounts of the German Campaign of 1813–1815 in new types of journal-form, anthological, and commemorative form(at)s. These may take the form, for example, of "retrospective accounts" from the synchronous period of 1813 to 1818 or of diachronous longitudinal accounts from the 1863 and 1913 anniversaries of the Battle of Leipzig, which bring to light an increased activity or displacements in publication cycles.The aim is to acquire a nuanced understanding of the format-conditioned structures and rules governing the mnemopoietic processing of ›immediate‹ records of a time, and thus of second order forms of writing time. In doing so, the project broaches a field that has rarely been addressed in previous research. Historical studies, for example, tend to approach journal-based media formats primarily as sources and therefore focus on what they communicate. Literary studies, meanwhile, concentrate predominantly on book-form publications, and when they do consider journal-form works, address them at the level of the "text". What such approaches fail to take into account is the format-specific contribution made by the communicative medium to the commemorative logics applied to the German Campaign. The project aims to fill this lacuna on the basis of its medium- and material-centred approach. Through its analysis of second-order time writing, it contributes to the research unit’s research on cultural reception processes by showing how recursive structures illuminate the law-like nature of media constellations and transfer processes, and how the institutionalisation of memory serves to turn the ephemeral into the enduring.