Bombenkrater. Das Bild der terroristischen Moderne

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gunnar Schmidt
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: Funded in 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 316246880

Beginning with First World War a new motif was created in the fields of photography and the arts: the motif of the bomb crater. Despite extensive research on war imagery in historiography, media studies and art history there has been no study that pays tribute to the crater image in its transformations, usage and semantics.The starting point for the study were the latest press photographs of attacks on places where mainly Islamist terrorist bombs had detonated. These pictures that exist since the late 1990s en masse, often show bomb craters as a central motif. The fact that modern terrorists created a clichéd motif incited further research in the historical field. This research led to the discovery that the 20th century had produced an immense amount of bomb crater images.The contexts, functions and aesthetics of the images are extremely diverse: private photographs of soldiers, photo journalists, and documentary filmmakers as well as military reconnaissance and propaganda photographs stand next to artistic works that are performed in different media: photography, drawing, painting, graphics and sculpture.In five chapters significant era conflicts are iconographically explored: World War I, World War II, nuclear weapons testing, the Vietnam war, Islamist terrorist. The various iconographic expressions and their respective time-bound contexts - places of war, warfare, production and reception of images - can be understood as messages that provide information on specific cultural affective situations: about trauma and existential experiences, about mourning, denial and megalomania. about landscape and energy experience, but also of hope and utopia fantasies.May the subtitle of the book may sound daring, its plausibility will be proved in the course of the investigation: A huge complex of images that has not been studied until now has left its effects in the consciousness and emotions of generations, is interpreted and analysed to reveal its meaning. Who ever exposes himself to the mass of iconographic artifacts, is confronted with an epochal stunned gazing into an abyss. Modern terror, that currently provides global unrest, can be experienced as a historical force that does not aim to dominate space but that designs a new space where living is made impossible because of an horrific atmosphere.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants