Figurations and materiality of the wound

The research project is a guest contribution to the Research Training Group 1662/1 "Religious Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe (800-1800). Transfers and Transformations - Paths to the Modern Knowledge Society", which is based at the University of Tübingen. The project is part of the section "Passion - Sacrifice - Blood" and examines exemplarily the contribution of art to the passion discourse of modernity. It provides an art-historical analysis of the work of Joseph Beuys and links this to the figural semantics and imaginative techniques of 15th-century devotional paintings in the context of devotio moderna. At the same time, it examines the significance of the historical experiences of World War II and the Holocaust for the emergence and creative appropriation of this pictorial work, which invokes the system of meaning of the discourses and representations of the Passion in the religious knowledge of Christianity, but at the same time transforms and transcends it. The analysis of this transgression makes use of the results of trauma research and understands the work as an examination of the German "inability to mourn" (Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich). The result of the research project is an essay in the anthology "Religiöses Wissen im vormodernen Europa. Creation - Motherhood - Passion," published by Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh in 2019.