Fellow 2022-2023 CHRISTIAN WEHR
Term: 10/2022 – 03/2023
Bordeaux and Guatemala. From 1989-2002 he was assistant and associate professor at the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Munich. He received his PhD in 1996 with a thesis on the fantastic narrative in Germany and France. His habilitation on Spanish baroque poetry was completed in 2002. Christian Wehr studied French and English literature, musicology and economics at the Universities of Munich (LMU), From 2005-2012 he held the chair of French, Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Eichstätt/Ingolstadt. Since 2013 he is Professor of Romance literatures at the University of Würzburg. Further appointments were offered at the universities of Bonn, Passau, Berlin (Humboldt) and Tübingen. Christian Wehr was a visiting professor at various European and Latin American universities.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW CHRISTIAN WEHR
Apocalypse, historical transition, and globalization in Latin America.
From the early modern period to the present day, key phases of Latin American history have been repeatedly mediated through apocalyptic images and narrative patterns. The representations of the conquista as the biblical end of the world have established a model of historical interpretation and construction that has varied countless times over the course of half a millennium. Ultimately, this striking persistence of imagining the end of the world suggests that the perception of historical processes in Latin America has never been able to completely detach itself from its original trauma; the foundation of post-Columbian history cannot be separated from the extinction of a formerly existing world and its cultures. In this perspective, the project will examine various apocalyptic constructions of history in Latin American literature and essay writing, as well as in film from Columbus to the present.