Volker Langbehn
Associate Professor of German
(Ph.D, University of Minnesota)

Dr. Volker M. Langbehn is Associate Professor and undergraduate adviser. He studied at the University of Hamburg, University of California, Los Angeles, and Cornell University, where he received a Masters of Science degree in Education. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in German Literature with a minor concentration in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. His interests include German Literature from 1700-1820 and from 1890-present, theory of literature; the relationship between psychology and literature, history of aesthetic theory, German Colonialism, and cultural criticism.

Dr. Langbehn has published articles on Friedrich Nietzsche, Christa Wolf, Arno Schmidt, Fritz von Unruh, Novalis and Gert Heidenreich and German Colonialism. His first book Arno Schmidt's Zettels Traum: An Analysis was published by Camden House in September 2003. Dr. Langbehn's new book project, tentatively titled The Visual Representation of Cultural Identity in German Mass Culture Around 1900, focuses on visual representations of Africa in German mass culture. He shows how racism can develop in a modern society through subtle, everyday means, and it explores the negative consequences of race thinking upon the long term development of German identity. Dr. Langbehn's study will provide visual evidence of the impact of colonialism upon German culture by showing how images of Africa and Africans contained in four types of media - political caricatures in satirical magazines, picture postcards, black-and-white photographs, and illustrated children's literature - helped foster a racialized German national identity. Dr. Langbehn will argue that this process of racialization was of fundamental importance for historical trends in early twentieth-century Germany that contributed to the rise of racial politics in Weimar and Nazi-Germany. Dr. Langbehn is also the editor of German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (forthcoming with Routledge, 2009) and with Dr. Mohammad Salama of Colonial (Dis)-Continuities : Race, Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (forthcoming with Columbia University Press, 2010).

In addition to writing about Visuality and German Colonialism, Dr. Langbehn and his co-organizer Dr. Mohammad Salama, have organized "Germany's Colonialism in International Perspective" an International Interdisciplinary Conference on German Colonialism and Post - Colonialism that took place September 6-9, 2007, at SFSU. 

Prior to joining San Francisco State University, Dr. Langbehn was Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in German Language and Literatures.

Here are his most recent and upcoming conference presentations:

• "Visual Eroticism - The Male Gaze of German Colonialism." Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association, San Francisco, March, 2008.
  
• "Images of Alterity" - Postcards and German Identity around 1900." German Studies Association, San Diego, October, 2007.
• "Disciplining the Black Body: German Colonial Identity and Visual Violence." International Conference on Europe and Its Others, St. Andrews, Scotland, July 2007.