The Middle Rhine valley as an imaginary landscape. Imagination and creation of a landscape as a means of debating the social and political order in modern times, c 1750-2010

在史学中，景观通常被认为是掌握自然或某种空间容器，其中发生了特定的经济或社会历史。许多历史学家忽略了视觉上的转变，认为感知是主观的和扭曲的。另一方面，在文化研究中，景观的真实性有时不被考虑在内，它们几乎完全被考虑在其文化建构方面。为了既不根据现实来衡量感知，也不把现实仅仅看作是想象的演绎，因此，有必要将景观的物质现实与景观的感知过程和表征相互联系起来。该项目想要展示两件事：a)想象、图像和现实以复杂的方式交织在一起；b)通过调查景观政治化的问题，这与19世纪和20世纪的社会史有什么关联。为此，我们将引入“想象景观”一词。这个术语旨在作为一种手段，以想象的形式分析对景观的感知，并表明这些景观具有一定的图像特征，这些图像是在一个长期的、聚集的投影过程中发展起来的。这种形象反过来又可以在建筑、景观造型等材料中实现。这些（但不是全部）景观可以作为社会乌托邦发展的空间，作为一个国家过去的纪念，作为现代文明的替代草案，或者它们实际上可以使一种社会或政治秩序自然化。然而，这些关系是多方面的；一个想象的景观从来没有被景观、投影和设计之间的一种明显的关系所标记，并且在每种情况下（政治）都产生影响。在该项目中，将以中莱茵河为例，从纵向角度（大约1750年至今）进行调查。它属于德国的核心景观，与德国其他河流不同，它承载着神话和期望。虽然在18世纪末到1945年间，它被塑造成一个彻头彻尾的国家角色，但与此同时，一种文化景观也被塑造成一种模式，它越来越多地从一种艺术家式的浪漫情感景观转变为一种（引用）充满政治色彩的纪念景观（eoq）。除此之外，莱茵河中部成为了一个旅游区，在德国内外被认为是典型的德国景观，并于2002年被联合国教科文组织宣布为世界遗产。然而，在19世纪，在现代性的光照下，景观也充当了文化悲观主义的投影屏幕，即对完整和残缺景观的二元感知。因此，将有丰富的材料来举例说明该项目的论文。

In historiography, landscapes are frequently considered in terms of mastering nature or as some sort of spatial container, within which a specific Economic- or Social-History takes place. Disregarding the visual turn, many historians consider perceptions as subjective and distortive. In cultural studies, on the other hand, the reality of landscapes is sometimes not accounted for and they are almost exclusively considered in terms of their cultural construction. In order to neither measure perceptions according to a reality nor to consider this reality as a mere deduction of imaginations, it is, thus, necessary to relate the material reality of landscapes as well as processes of perception and representations of landscapes to each other. The project wants to show two things: a) that imagination, image and reality are interwoven in complex ways, and b) which relevance this has for a History of Society of the 19th and 20th century, by investigating the question of a politicization of landscapes. For this purpose, the term of imaginary landscapes will be introduced. This term is intended to serve as a means to analyze the perception of landscapes in the form of imaginations and to show that these landscapes are characterized by a certain image, which developed in a long, assembling process of projections. This image in turn could become, realized materially in buildings, landscape modeling etc. Such (but not all) landscapes could serve as spaces for the development of social utopias, as lieu de memoire of a nations past, as alternative drafts for modern civilization or they could virtually naturalize a social or political order. These relations, however, are manifold; an imaginary landscape is never marked by one distinct relation between landscape, projection and design and yields in each case (political) effects. In the project, this will be investigated in a longitudinal perspective (approximately 1750 to the present) following the example of the Middle Rhine. It belongs to the German core-landscapes and it is, like no other river in Germany, loaded with myths and expectations. While stylized as a downright national actor between the end of the 18th century and 1945, a cultural landscape was modeled at the same time, which increasingly transformed from an artist-modeled romantic landscape of feelings to a (quotation) politically charged landscape of remembrance (eoq). In addition to that, the Middle Rhine became a tourist region, which is considered in Germany and beyond as a typically German landscape and which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002. However, in the 19th century the landscape also served as a projection screen for cultural pessimism in the light of modernity, namely in the dualistic perception of an intact and maimed landscape. Thus, there will be a rich material to exemplify the projects thesis.