The writer and music producer Uwe Nettelbeck (1940 – 2007) developed a practice of autobiographic writing which he brought to perfection in the magazine "Die Republik" (1976 – 2008).
By quoting texts others had written about or in response to him, he practiced a technique of autobiography, which he did not write by himself and what led to an image of an independent writer.
I wrote my dissertation on "Die Republik". In my research I tried to follow the maxim of participant observation as I aimed to see the world through the eyes of the research subjects and to engage with them and their contemporaries in interviews. Thereby I attuned to the atmosphere of the 1970's in Western Germany to the point that it affected my reading and writing.
The artist Anna Zett who works and plays with dialogue as an embodied form of knowledge production invited me to share my findings by way of conversation. The video-essay "Writing the Self of Uwe Nettelbeck" interweaves this dialogue with musical and visual material, considering both Nettelbeck's writing practice and the affective conditions of my research process.
Philipp Goll (*1984) is lecturer for media studies at the Goethe-University Frankfurt a.M. He is co-editor of the journal "Kultur & Gespenster" (textem).
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keywords:
#1968, #affect, #autobiography, #counterculture, #feminism, #krautrock, #literature