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

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Etzemüller
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 242894361

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants