Manuela Achilles
Associate Director, Center for German Studies
Lecturer, Departments of German and History
Degrees
Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2005
M.A. University of Michigan, 1996
M.A. Free University of Berlin, 1996
Interests
Modern German history, literature and culture
Cultural studies, and critical theory
History of emotions
Transnational studies
Sustainability in transatlantic perspective
Business German
Recent Courses
- Germany after 1918
- Germany in the 20th Century
- Nazi Germany
- Democracy and Violence
- History and Fiction
- Neighbors and Enemies (cross-listed in German and History)
- Germans and Jews (cross-listed in History and Jewish Studies)
- Postwar German Literature and Culture (cross-listed in German and History)
- Generation Green: Germany and the Environment (cross-listed in German; and Science, Technology and Society)
- Umwelt und Energie (German-language course on the environment)
- German for Professionals
- German Crime Stories (Deutsche Krimis)
- German Conversation
- Western Civilization (1600 to the Present)
Books
German Environmentalism in Transatlantic Perspective: A Multidisciplinary Approach (edited volume, under review at Palgrave Macmillan)
Book Manuscripts in Progress
Invisible Fatherland: Democratic Culture in Weimar Germany
Articles
"With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany," Central European History, Volume 43, Number 4 (December 2010), pp. 666-689.
“Reforming the Reich: Democratic Symbols and Rituals in the Weimar Republic,” in Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, ed. Kerstin Barndt and Kathleen Canning, Berghahn Books, July 2010, pp. 175-191.
“Nationalist Violence and Republican Identity in Weimar Germany,” in German Literature, History and the Nation, ed. David Midgley and Christian Emden, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 305-328.
“‘Blutdurst’ und ‘Symbolhunger’: Zur Semantik von Blut und Erde,” in Spielräume des Einzelnen: Deutsche Literatur in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich, ed. Walter Delabar, Horst Denkler, Erhard Schütz, Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, 2000, pp. 185-315.
Book Reviews
"Reading Freud Today," book review of Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), H-German, H-Net Reviews, August, 2011.
"Placing Benjamin in the Tradition of German Kulturwissenschaft," book review of Christian Emden, Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft um 1930 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), H-Net German, September 2007.
Review of Pamela E. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin,1929- 1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Social History, November 2006.
"On Healing and Hailing," book review of Laurence A. Rickel’s Nazi Psychoanalysis, H-Net German (April 2004).
Current Research
My research combines the historical study of German culture with theoretical analyses. In 2010, I organized a thematic issue for Central European History on the politics of culture/culture of politics in Weimar Germany. The volume includes my essay, “With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany.” I am currently completing my manuscript, Invisible Fatherland: Democratic Culture in Weimar Germany. The book revisits a major paradigm of Weimar historiography: the assumption that Weimar democracy lacked the symbolic appeal necessary to win popular support and thus was doomed to collapse. My study challenges this assumption of doom – or “failure paradigm” – by reconsidering the symbolic politics and defining moments of the nascent Weimar democracy. The shift in perspective from failure to possibility allows me to recover a largely forgotten, legally coded civic mode of national identification that transcended homogenizing notions of class, religion or race, thus offering a pluralist alternative to the extremist politics the interwar years also engendered.
My second research interest revolves around the idiom and culture of sustainability or Nachhaltigkeit. In the United States we sometimes struggle to imagine what it takes to become a more sustainable society. Germany is widely regarded as a frontrunner in environmental policy and practice. I am in the process of putting together an edited volume that explores and contextualizes these policies and practices, with the aim to engender a fruitful transatlantic discussion as to which of these interventions are transferable to the United States. The initial lecture series that produced this body of work was connected to Generation Green, a pilot undergraduate course cross-listed in the Department of Science, Technology & Society (School of Engineering) and the German Department (College of Arts and Sciences). The resulting book targets a broad audience of interested, non-specialist readers, and could serve as undergrad textbook for classes in sustainability, as well as for German and European studies courses. The manuscript is scheduled to be submitted to Palgrave Macmillan by the end of 2011. My own contribution examines German representations and perceptions of nuclear energy. I expect to develop this exploratory essay into a book-length historical study of the German culture of sustainability.
Teaching Interests
Teaching is an enjoyable and rewarding component of my academic work. Neighbors and Enemies, one of my signature courses, explores the tension in Germany between a chauvinist belief in German racial or cultural superiority and moments of genuine openness to strangers. Drawing on a variety of different materials – from history and philosophy to film and literature – this course challenges students to consider the construction and deconstruction of images of the “enemy” from different angles. My seminars on German and Jews, History and Fiction, and Germany and the Environment also practice the careful interdisciplinarity that characterizes this course. My survey lecture courses include Modern German History, Nazi Germany, and Western Civilization.
Working within a multi-disciplinary environment is central to both my scholarship and pedagogy. I helped launch UVa’s Center for German Studies in Fall 2008, am serving on its Advisory Board, and was appointed its Program Director in Spring 2009 (since 2011 Associate Director). I have been involved in the Center’s activities both as organizer and presenter. Examples include the German Studies workshop Weimar and Beyond (Nov. 2008), the international conference Approaching Revolutions (March 2010), and the multi-disciplinary symposium The Future of the Car/The Car of the Future, which took place on Nov. 5-6 in conjunction with UVa’s Family weekend. Bringing together many UVa schools, programs and outside expertise, the symposium explored conceptions of a more sustainable society by focusing on one of its central everyday objects (the automobile). Speakers included bestselling authors Jeremy Rifkin, Daniel Sperling and Debbie Gordon, car company executives Chris Borroni-Bird (GM) and Burkhard Hunke (VW), battery expert Michelle Buchanan from the Oakridge National Laboratory, and German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch.