Fritz Breithaupt

Fritz Breithaupt (* 1967 in Meersburg ) is a German literary, cultural and cognitive scientist and journalist.

Life

Breithaupt received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1997 .

He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at Indiana University Bloomington (USA). His awards include scholarships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation .

He writes regularly for Die Zeit and the Philosophy magazine . Since 2006 he has designed the column "Professors and their neuroses" for Zeit Campus .

Research priorities

• Empathy : Breithaupt is interested in the triggers and blocks of empathy. Too much empathy, according to Breithaupt, can lead to self-loss, as in the so-called Stockholm Syndrome . Breithaupt sees an empathy trigger in social threesome scenes: someone observes a conflict and mentally takes the side of one of the opponents. In order to legitimize his decision, the observer begins to take on the perspective of one person, to narrate his or her previous history - and in the process develops empathy. Breithaupt also deals with the "dark sides" of empathy. This includes empathic sadism, in which someone tortures another in order to better understand their feelings.

• Narration : In more recent works, Breithaupt developed a concept of narration based on the act of narrative thinking. Narrative thinking consists in developing variations and alternatives to a given representation. When applied to the open future, this means tension, and to the past doubt. In evolutionary terms, Breithaupt sees the origin of the “multi-versioning” of storytelling in the act of making excuses: If you want to pull your head out of the loop, you would do well to tell differently the contexts perceived by others. Building on this definition of narrative thinking, Breithaupt analyzes cultural practices of law, conscience and identity (Alfred Adler).

• Goethe time : A third focus of his work is the literature and philosophy of the Goethe time. Among other things, Breithaupt has published on imagery, money, conscience and the history of the self.

• Experimental humanities: Breithaupt heads the Experimental Humanities Lab. One of the lab's projects is to create a catalog of simple narratives through the serial reproduction of narratives. Simply put, thousands of volunteers create simple forms of narratives with the help of silent post games.

Publications

Monographs

• The dark side of empathy . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-29796-4 .
• Culture of the excuse: a narrative theory . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-29601-1 .
• Cultures of Empathy , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-29506-9 .
  • Trad. esp .: Culturas de la empatía . Katz editores, Buenos Aires / Madrid 2011, ISBN 978-84-92946-36-5 .
• The I-Effect of Money: On the Story of a Legitimate Figure . Fischer, Frankfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-18059-2 .
• Beyond the Pictures: Goethe's Politics of Perception . Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000, ISBN 978-3-7930-9228-5 .

Articles (selection)

• A three-person model of empathy . In: Emotion Review 4 (January 2012), pp. 84-91.
• Childhood of someone who doesn't believe in birds. In: Aris Fioretos (ed.): Babel. For Werner Hamacher. Urs Engeler, Basel 2009, ISBN 3-938767-55-3 , pp. 55–62.
• The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism . In: Critical Inquiry , 2005, pp. 77-101.
• Rituals of Trauma: How the Media Fabricated 9/11 . In: Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey and Michelle Brown, Ed .: Media Representations of September 11 . Praeger Publishing, Westport, Connecticut, 2003, pp. 67-81.

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Breithaupt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Fritz Breithaupt on the Indiana University website (English)
• Experimental Humanities Lab.
• Dieter Thomä : Mirrored Perspectives , review in the FAZ, June 28, 2009.