“‘aber Sie können Ihren eigenen Augen doch nicht misstrauen’”: The Ghost as Optical Experiment in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter, Lecture with Paulina Choh

Why do ghosts proliferate in the literature and visuals of the nineteenth century, despite realist aesthetics and post-Enlightenment empiricist epistemologies? I argue that the emergence of photography establishes new standards of realism which evoke the supernatural and objective simultaneously. In this talk, I will focus on Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter (1888) as a case study for the modern ghost as optical experiment. I draw on contemporary meteorological debates that frame scientific veracity as a mode of seeing and aesthetic description, and Immanuel Kant’s analysis of superstition as a matter of perspective. In doing so, I offer a rereading of Storm’s ghost story that extends more widely to a reflection on the formation of modern Western subjectivity.

Paulina Choh is the Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow in Photography at the Yale University Art Gallery. She holds a BA from Middlebury College in Comparative Literature, an MA in German Studies through the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität of Mainz, and she is a PhD in German Studies at Stanford.

Her project Visualizing the Invisible: Spectrality in the Literature and Optical Media of Germany’s Long Nineteenth Century examines how literary realism conjured ghosts to probe new possibilities of representation in the age of photography. Bringing together literature, media theory, visual culture, and history of science, she considers how optical technologies transform our perception of reality and how this change is traceable in literary visions of specters. Her work has been published in American Art and The Germanic Review.