Leitmotif Siegfried

he NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Leitmotif Siegfried,” a lecture by Laurence A. Rickels.

In his lecture „Leitmotif Siegfried,“ Laurence A. Rickels reenters the exchange between Walter Benjamin and Alexander Mette, which led to Mette’s review of Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in Imago and brought Benjamin to consider the clinical picture of schizophrenia, the topic of Mette’s dissertation-book, which he in turn reviewed. While this contact underscores Benjamin’s interest in the clinical picture of psychosis (he attended at this time to Schreber’s Memoirs and to Freud’s analysis of the document), which Rickels sees as fundamental to Benjamin’s understanding of the melancholic mode of allegory, Rickels’ emphasis this time lies on the research Mette pursued as bona fide psychoanalyst in Nazi Berlin.

From Deutsches Haus NYU.