Caroline Adler, M.A.

Caroline Adler studied Cultural History and Theory and Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin and Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 2020 to 2023, she was a research assistant in the DFG Research Training Group “Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms” at Humboldt University Berlin, in the framework of which she took up a PhD project on Walter Benjamin's essay “Moscow” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Eva Geulen and Prof. Dr. Erdmut Wizisla.

Her research focuses on representation, method, and literarization in Walter Benjamin’s work, epistemologies of the aesthetic, and theory and critique of scientific exhibition practice. Besides her academic work, Caroline Adler worked at Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW Berlin from 2017 to 2020 and curates both discourse and exhibition programs, including most recently, with Eylem Sengezer, the exhibition project Porous City – Thresholds in Urbanity at Kunstraum Kreuzberg. She is part of the Berlin collective diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie.

Edited Volumes

• Kleinformate im Umbruch. Mobile Medien für Widerstand und Kooperation (1918–1933) (Series: minima, Vol. 8), ed. with Maddalena Casarini and Daphne Weber. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111003009
• Walter Benjamin in the European East (Series: Marx and Marxisms: New Horizons), hrsg. mit Sophia Buck. London: Routledge 2025 (in preparation).

Essays

• „Neu gesehene Menschenfiguren“. Walter Benjamins Russland-Artikel in der Literarischen Welt 1927, in: Lea Liese and Yashar Mohagheghi (eds.): Kleine Formen und Öffentlichkeit. Medialität des Politischen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zur digitalen Gegenwart (Series: minima, vol. 9). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2024. pp. 105–128. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110770971-006
• Kleinformate im Umbruch. Einleitung (together with Maddalena Casarini and Daphne Weber), in: Caroline Adler, Maddalena Casarini and Daphne Weber (eds.): Kleinformate im Umbruch. Mobile Medien für Widerstand und Kooperation (1918–1933) (Series: minima, Vol. 8). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2023, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111003009-001
• ‘Countless Constellations’ – Walter Benjamin's Moscow Literarization, in: Monica Bravo and Florian Grosser (eds.): Another Revolution. Building Modern Worlds, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2024. [forthcoming]
• „Anschaulich, nicht theoretisch bereichert“ Walter Benjamins Moskau-Aufsatz, in: Frank Voigt, Nikos Papadakis, Jan Loheit and Konstantin Baehrens (eds.): Material und Begriff. Arbeitsverfahren und theoretische Beziehungen Walter Benjamins. Hamburg: Argument 2019, p. 81–101.

Reviews and shorter Articles (selection)

• [conference report] Walter Benjamin in the East. Networks, Conflicts, and Reception (together with Sophia Buck), in: Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 5 December 2022. https://jhiblog.org/2022/12/05/walter-benjamin-in-the-east-networks-conflicts-and-reception/.
• [review] Walter Benjamin’s antifascist education: from riddles to radio. Contemporary Political Theory (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00507-8.
• [review] Dance of Values, in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, ZfM Online, Online Review, 30 May 2021, https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/besprechung/dance-values.
• [newspaper article] Poröse Stadt. Grenzgänge des Urbanen (together with Eylem Sengezer), in: taz Berlin [special print], 28. August 2020.
• [catalogue text] “Past in Each of its Moments be Citable” – an exhibition project on Walter Benjamin‘s Concept of History in the City of Istanbul [exhibition catalog]. Istanbul: DEPO 2016.

• 100 years of fascism theory: Epistemology, poetics and mediality of a heterodox genre, Panel, together with Patrick Eiden-Offe, Francesca Raimondi, Morten Paul, Elena Vogman, 21st Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS London, 08.11.2024.
• Walter Benjamin in the “Sphere of Life”, Panel, together with Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Lindsay Lerman, Julia Bosson, Alexander Wells, Léttretage Berlin, 26.10.2024.
• Faschistische Armaturen. Walter Benjamins Theorien des deutschen Faschismus, Workshop „Was war Faschismustheorie? Epistemologie, Poetik und Medialität einer heterodoxen Gattung“, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, 18.09.2024.
• ‘Abschüssige Straßen des Grams, aufsteigende Pfade der Revolte’ – Benjamin und Lukács um 1923, together with Sophia Buck, Conference of Helle Panke, RLS and ZfL „1923 – Sattelzeit der Revolution“, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research ZfL, Berlin, 20.10.2023.
• „…ehemals gesicherte Begriffe von Gerechtigkeit“. „Drei Bücher [des Heute]“ und die Krisis der europäischen Intelligenz, International Walter Benjamin Conference „Politics of Justice: Text, Image, and Practice“ within the section „Justice & Crisis“, SWPS University Warsaw, 29.09.2023.
• „Es gibt viele Arten neue Grenzen zu errichten“ – Steyerl/Benjamin und die leere Mitte, Workshop „Wohnen in der leeren Mitte, Baustelle Brecht/Müller“, Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin, 03.12.2021.
• „Neu gesehene Menschenfiguren“ – Walter Benjamins Russland-Berichte in der Literarischen Welt 1927, Conference „Von der Anekdote zum Hashtag. Perspektiven auf die politische Kommunikation kleiner (literarischer) Formen“, Deutsches Seminar der Universität Basel in Kooperation mit dem Institut für Germanistische und Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft der RWTH Aachen (digital), 26.06.2021.
• “A Turning Point in Historical Events” - Walter Benjamin's decisive Moscow Montage, 52nd and 1st Virtual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) in der Sektion “Writing in Crisis: The Literature of the 1920s”, 12.03.2021.
• „[…] daß jede prinzipielle allgemeine Untersuchung sofort wieder einen ihr eigenen Gegenstand findet“: Literarische Methode in Walter Benjamins Moskau-Aufsatz, International Walter Benjamin Conference ”Walter Benjamins Methoden. Das Vermächtnis der Frankfurter Schule im heutigen Kontext” within the section „Benjamins Schriften: Methodik, Archiv, Edition“, University of Oxford, 25.09.2017.
• „Das Kreatürliche gerade dadurch sprechen zu lassen“. Benjamins Moskau-Essay im Kontext der Zeitschrift „Die Kreatur“, Workshop „Material und Begriff. Arbeitsverfahren und theoretische Beziehungen Walter Benjamins“, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research ZfL, Berlin, 25.03.2017.
• Benjamins Figur des Sammlers und der Engel der Geschichte, Klee/Benjamin-Studientag on the occasion of the exhibition „L’Ironie à L’Ouevre“, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte / Centre Pompidou, Paris, 17.05.2016.

• Winter 2021/2022, Seminar (B.A.) Kritik des Ausstellens, Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory, https://www2.hu-berlin.de/ausstellungskritik/.
• Winter 2015/2016, Projekttutorium (B.A./M.A.) Raumgewordene Vergangenheit. Bilddenken und Denkbilder in Walter Benjamins „Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert”, together with Monique Ulrich (HGB Leipzig), Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory, https://www.hu-berlin.de/de/studium/reform/projekttutorien/adler_ulrich.
• Summer 2015, Projekttutorium (B.A./M.A.) Raumgewordene Vergangenheit. Erinnerungsräume, Texträume, Denkräume in Walter Benjamins “Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert”, together with Monique Ulrich (HGB Leipzig), Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory.
• Summer 2014, Tutorium (B.A.) Einführung in das Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory.
• Winter 2013/2014, Tutorium (B.A.) Einführung in das Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory.
• Summer 2013, Tutorium (B.A.) Einführung in das Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory.

Force Fields of History. Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Returns

This project situates Walter Benjamin’s essay Moscow – the result of his journey to post-revolutionary Moscow in the winter of 1926/27 – historically and conceptually within the framework of Benjamin’s own writing practice. My focus lies on the mode of representation as construction of Benjamin’s so-called Moscow Diary towards the form(ation) of the essay itself. Furthermore, the project highlights the role of this writing in relation to the “continual organizational changes” of the young Soviet Union.

Within the historical moment, described by Benjamin as a ‘force field’, the demand for vividness and intelligibility is brought, in Benjamin’s work and in this project, into tension with forms of abstraction, construction, and montage. Engaging with (for example) Goethe’s concept of ‘tender empiricism’, Friedlaender’s doctrine of ‘creative indifference’, as well as the Soviet ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) – such as the pictorial-statistical experiments of Soviet pedagogy – Benjamin investigates that conflictual relationship between reality and representation: “The integration of personal thoughts with a preexisting force field” was, according to Benjamin, what the new Soviet life committed itself to. Nonetheless, art and literature were brought into constructive techniques that were supposed to enable the emancipative release of ‘tremendous energies’ for the revolution.

Conceived as a study on Benjamin, this research project also aims to contribute to a revaluation of the synergies of modernity, which is not only to be found in the movement of the Soviet avant-garde, but directs its attention to the pragmatic factors of a literarization of lifeworld and the reformatting of force relations and knowledge systems within historical states of exception.

• International Conference Walter Benjamin in the East – Networks, Conflicts, and Reception, Co-Organizer together with Sophia Buck (Oxford/ZfL), Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research ZfL, Berlin, Co-funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research partnership, the ZfL Berlin, and the GRK 1956 ‘Cultural Transfer and “Cultural Identity”’, 07.–09.07.2022.
• Workshop Krise und Kleinformat. Von der Institutionskritik zur politischen Mobilisierung (1918—1933), Co-Organizer together with Maddalena Casarini and Daphne Weber (HU Berlin), Humboldt University Berlin, Department of German Literature, 16.–18.09.2021.