Shoshana Schwebel successfully defended her thesis titled In Search of Lost Selves: Emmy Hennings’s Media of Longing and completed her Ph.D. in Germanic Studies.
The thesis approaches the oeuvre of German writer, poet, artist, and performer Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) as a consistent aesthetic project, in which the subject works to gather multimedia records of her own lost self. Schwebel focuses on the following texts by Hennings: Das Brandmal (Branded, 1920); Gefängnis (Prison, 1919), Blume und Flamme (Flowers and Flame, 1938), “Verloren” (“Lost,” unpublished, 1917), in addition to poems from the volume Helle Nacht (Bright Night, 1922), feuilleton sketches, and photographs of Hennings’s face. Based on close readings of the above texts, Schwebel argues that Hennings’s subjects are in a post-traumatic mode of psychological separation from themselves, which they document and narrate in an attempt to generate an external archive of the self that they cannot otherwise access.
This mode results in chronic dissociation and depersonalization, as well as an equally chronic longing to find and reunite with a lost self, alternately referred to in Hennings’s works as a lost home (Heimat) or lost world (Welt). Schwebel works within three main theoretical frameworks: (queer) affect theory, media theory, and Freudian trauma theory. First, building on the work of queer affect theorists, she defines the longing in Hennings’s project as a negative and yet anticipatory force, which both destabilises the subjects and propels them in their search for themselves.
Schwebel next analyses examples of fantastical media as “assistive technologies” for Hennings’s subjects, objects such as stereoscopic viewers, peepholes, and seashells which the subjects use to stage uncanny encounters with doubles of themselves. The study concludes by arguing that the subject’s estrangement from herself can be traced back to early childhood, which is indicated to have been disturbed by cryptic interfamilial trauma(s).
Schwebel’s thesis was published in April 2026, and is accessible via UBC cIRcle.
