Afterword

On behalf of the editorial board at German Life and Letters, it is my great pleasure to celebrate Andrew Webber's many contributions to German Studies and beyond in this special issue. When digging through our own archives, I was delighted to find that one of his earliest publications appeared in German Life and Letters in 1988. In ‘Sense and Sensuality in Musil's Törleß’, as well as in his first monograph, Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil, published shortly after in 1990, Webber turns towards the theme of sexuality in the works of Musil and Trakl.1 Drawing on a psychoanalytic approach, he offers an intervention into scholarship on Austrian modernism that had marginalised the theme of bisexuality and sexual conflict as merely a pretext to introduce intellectual and ethical questions, by arguing that sexuality plays an essential role within the discursive fabric and aesthetic form of Musil's and Trakl's works. I highlight this early work, and its publication in the longest-running UK-based German Studies journal, because it introduces three key aspects that have significantly shaped the field of German Studies as it stands today and that continue to shape Webber's work. First, his practice of close reading links sexuality to form. From modernist literature to the psychoanalytic case study and contemporary German film, Webber's practice of close reading shows that sexuality and questions of form and genre are intricately linked. Much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis, homosexuality and modernism, for example, shows how the psychoanalytic case study and its Doppelgänger, the literary genre of the novella, can both reproduce and structure sexual knowledge, but also unsettle and reposition cultural norms about gender and sexuality.2 This doubling of case and novella is closely related to my second point. Webber's scholarship, here and elsewhere, explores the close connection between cultural production and psychoanalysis as method. His work argues persuasively for the value of a psychoanalytically driven textual and visual analysis of cultural production. Finally, Webber's dedication to centring matters of gender and sexuality, and his early adoption of queer theory through the works of key thinkers, such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, paved the way for a theory-informed German Studies that is open to interdisciplinary exchange. At the University of Cambridge, his research activities have provided a vital link between German Studies and interdisciplinary networks and collaborations. My own path to supervision with Andrew Webber came via the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge. When I mentioned to Jude Browne, then director of the Centre, that I was interested in pursuing a PhD project related to my MPhil dissertation on the sexological case study and life writing, she enthusiastically recommended him. For many years, he also co-organised the Cambridge Psychoanalysis Reading Group, together with the late John Forrester, a leading expert in the history and philosophy of science and psychoanalysis. Over the years, the group attracted novices and experts alike and provided a unique opportunity to explore the continued relevance of psychoanalytic theory. In 2014, for example, the group welcomed Judith Butler to discuss their book The Psychic Life of Power, and to reflect on the ambivalent effects of power on social and psychic subjectivity. Webber's interest in the formation of ideas about sexuality and subjectivity and their pervasive hold over literature, culture and theory drove these and other interdisciplinary initiatives at the University of Cambridge and no doubt set the foundation for today's thriving research culture in Queer German Studies in the UK and beyond. It has certainly influenced my own work, which has explored how queer autobiographical writing not only engages with sexual-scientific discourses, but how each text itself constitutes an act of becoming in the realm of gender and sexuality. Many other scholars whose works investigate the various intersections between modernism, cultural production and sexuality similarly build on Webber's important work in this area.3 Beyond modernist literature, Webber's scholarship has also paid close attention to the aesthetic and discursive form of film and visual media, and the interplay between image and language across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His publications have explored a huge range of German modernist cinema, as well as expressionist film beyond Germany and Austria, with a focus on psychoanalytic concepts including trauma, fantasy and fetishism.4 A major theme in Webber's scholarship has been the city of Berlin as a palimpsest marked by decadence, fascism, war, partition and reunification.5 His work reveals the visual signs and traces left by Berlin's urban space and architecture, drawing attention to the cultural and aesthetic role of the city in film, as well as to the political role of visual culture in post-reunification Germany.6 In focusing on themes of modernisation and globalisation, change, transition and crisis, as well as mobility and work, Webber's research in film and screen studies also gives important insight into the ways in which the modern subject navigates the unstable world of late capitalism. His book Screening Work: The Films of Christian Petzold, co-authored with Stephan Hilpert, for example, considers how the films of Berlin School filmmaker Christian Petzold engage with the theme of work and its entanglement with community, identity, resistance and precarity.7 Webber's scholarship on German film has made a significant impact on the development of the German Studies curriculum at the University of Cambridge and across the UK, while also making German culture and its study relevant to comparative and interdisciplinary studies. For the MPhil programme in Literature, Culture and Thought, he has taught the comparative module ‘The Modern City’, introducing postgraduate students to the comparative study of modern film across languages. Together with Emma Wilson, David Trotter and François Penz, he also developed the interdisciplinary MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures in 2007. This was followed by a wealth of events on film in the 2010s, for example the Picturing Austrian Cinema symposia co-hosted by Webber with Annie Ring and the late Fred Baker, bringing, among others, filmmaker Michael Haneke to Cambridge. These and many other events also made an important contribution to overcoming Cambridge's town/gown divide by bridging public and academic audiences. The success of the MPhil degree contributed to the founding of Cambridge Film & Screen in 2015 as a home for research and teaching in Film and Screen Studies. Webber has continued to be a core contributor to Film Studies at Cambridge, most recently in his role as Postgraduate Teaching and Examinations officer in Film and Screen Studies. Beyond the University of Cambridge, Webber has contributed his teaching and research expertise to many cross-institutional and international collaborations. To name just a few, in 2014 he was Distinguished International Visitor at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was hosted jointly by Roger Hillman with the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. The same year, he was a visiting researcher at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 2015, he held the Erich Auerbach Visiting Chair of Global Literary Studies at the University of Tübingen. From 2013 to 2019, he was Principal Investigator (with Robert Vilain and Judith Beniston as Co-Investigators) for the collaborative research project Digital Critical Edition of Middle-Period Works by Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In this role, he collaborated with international partners at the University of Wuppertal, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and the Arthur Schnitzler Archiv Freiburg, as well as with colleagues at UCL and Cambridge University Library, to produce a digital critical edition of the literary works of Arthur Schnitzler, with a particular focus on producing editions of works from the important middle period of Schnitzler's career (1904–14). Webber's contribution to international and interdisciplinary research, but also his commitment to collaboration, collegiality and service, has seen him in a wide set of leadership roles at the University of Cambridge. He has served terms as Head of the Department of German and Dutch, and later as Head of the German Section in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, and as Postgraduate Teaching and Examinations officer in German. From 2009 to 2010, he was acting director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. As Vice-Master for Churchill College from 2019 to 2022, his academic and administrative leadership was essential to the College's governance. As Principal Investigator and UK director for the Schnitzler digital edition project, he coordinated a complex network of partners, from archives across Europe to postdoctoral researchers training to use new digital skills. If these roles are testimony to Webber's academic standing and reputation, then they also represent an act of service and dedication, which he mastered with his trademark qualities: discretion, diplomacy and attention to detail. Webber's academic distinction was recognised through his election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019. Navigating the changing landscape of UK Higher Education and ever-increasing demands on academics’ time and workload over the past four decades has no doubt come with particular challenges. At a time when universities and funders alike ask academics to think bigger and bigger — to solve social injustice, to save the planet — the legacy of Webber's scholarship lies in its important reminder that we cannot have the global without the local, or the general without the specific. As Marie Kolkenbrock notes in her article in this special issue, when complexity is increasingly sidelined in favour of binary orders, we need the kind of scholarship Webber practices, which ‘draws attention to the slips, displacements and unstable thresholds that subtly unsettle the demarcation lines of cultural binaries in the past and present’. As such, Webber's practice of close reading might be considered as inherently queer, because its critical potential lies in thinking across or against prevailing norms and orientations. And it is in this way that his practice of close reading also opens up a space for critical approaches that similarly expose and unsettle socially constructed norms, as is seen, for example, in Catherine Smale's neuroqueer reading in her article in this special issue. This special issue pays homage to the critical practice of Webber's work and its wider implications for German Studies today by focusing on the various ‘Schauplätze’ of his work. And for many of us who have contributed to this special issue, Andrew's supervisions constituted a major ‘Schauplatz’. Supervisions with Webber felt important. They felt important because, for the duration of each meeting, he was singularly present and engaged with his students and the work that we shared. To be present in this way is an enormous feat of generosity and kindness. Rather than cutting short an argument that did not work or was not fully developed, Webber's feedback was always constructive, pointing out new directions yet to explore, more scholarship to discover. Webber shared so much of his intellectual energy and curiosity with the graduate students under his supervision. Many of us can recount moments of quiet generosity through sharing lecture notes, passing on invitations to give talks that he himself had been invited to give, or offering to co-host events together. When I began formulating a postdoctoral project about non-human animals in modern sexual knowledge production, Webber shared his own enthusiasm for thinking with the non-human and freely shared useful references that he had no doubt been keen to subject to his own scrutiny. Here, perhaps, is an opportunity to acknowledge the venerable menagerie of critters that also run through the articles in this special issue and which Webber's research helped to draw into the light: from a splendid falcon and an untameable goshawk (Michael Minden), to a chorus of crows (Elizabeth Boa), an abandoned fox cub (Katya Krylova), hard-working bees (Dora Osborne), Freud's Rat Man and Jordan Peterson's lobster (Kolkenbrock), a futile piece of writing ‘für die Katz’ (Anne Fuchs) and the gesture of a ‘nip’ made by a wolf cub in play (Polly Dickson). It is from Andrew that I learned the phrase ‘to have a lot of time for someone’ as an expression of admiration. To say that someone has a lot of time for a person means that they think of them favourably, but also that they are willing to give up their time for them, a precious resource in academia today. As UK Higher Education becomes an ever more competitive environment insistent on ‘winning’ funding and outdoing ‘competitors’, Webber's commitment to sharing opportunities and ideas and his kindness in doing so is nothing short of remarkable and represents the kind of ‘“good work” under difficult circumstances’ that Dora Osborne, in her contribution to the Introduction, also recognises in Webber's careful reading practice. If the articles in this special issue show the lasting impact that Webber's practice of close reading has had on German Studies today, then the enthusiastic contributions of former students and colleagues to this special issue also show how much time he had for us, and how many people will always have a lot of time for him.