The Cult of the Genius in the Humanities around 1900

This monograph focuses on the "genius" as a figure of knowledge and representation in two settings of discourse and media: firstly, in texts from the Humanities as well as in literature, in particular published between 1890 and 1920, and, secondly, in selected feature films since the mid-1980s that reflect the `cult of the genius`. The analysis incorporates multiple perspectives ranging from interdisciplinary humanities, cultural studies, literature, contemporary history, the history of knowledge, media and film studies, and gender studies. I In the present book, the "genius" around 1900 is considered to be a controversial figure through which newly constituted academic disciplines, like sociology, sexual science, and psychology, just as the academic scholars managed to construct their professional identity, legitimized their methodologies, and reassured themselves of their own intellectual and creative powers. This was achieved by projecting onto themselves qualities that had been attributed to so-called "great men of history", "eminences", "representatives of men", "superlatives of mankind", "exceptional men", "intellectual leaders", and to "men-heroes". The political function of the abstract figure of the "genius" lay in ist capacity to spirit away the limits, fragility, and therefore the condition of the possibility of knowledge and ist producers towards a longed-for `pure` academic objectivity and rationality, intellectuality and excellence, brilliance and expertise. The analytical focus of this book lies in the fervid `competition` of the disciplines of knowledge to define, interpret, conceptualize, and functionalize the `mysteriously-secret` theoretical figure of the "genius". Hereby, two positions can be identified: one group of theorists believed in the "genius" as a godlike saviour, redeemer of the society, and creator of culture (amongst others, Hans Blüher, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ernst Kretschmer, Ottokar Matura, and Otto Weininger). The other group gathered thinkers who described and criticized the strategic function of the "genius" in the context of wider modern socio-cultural problems, insecurities, or utopias (for example, Walter Benjamin, Julian Hirsch, Jakob Wassermann, or Edgar Zilsel). The latter also expounded the problems following the `genius- knowledge`, that, through the 1910s and 1920s merged more and more with ideologies of "Aryan" heredity, "racial hygiene" ("Rassenhygiene"), and phantasies of human breeding just as support programs for so- called "high fliers". II Male "ingenious" figures still populate cinema productions in ever-changing multi-faceted embodiments. The theoretical attributes projected onto the male "genius", in the first part of the book extracted from scientific texts around 1900, are in the second part on film aesthetic confronted with concrete imaginations of "ingenious" artists and masterminds as represented in selected movies since the mid-1980s. On the one hand, I analyze to what extent attributes of the "genius" in the turn-of-the-century texts are translated into filmic narrations, motifs, aesthetics, and imagery, some decades later. On the other hand, the question is followed up with an analysis of the specific filmic codes and modes of representation through which reputedly "ingenious" film characters get depicted in the movies.

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