The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism

Collecting is usually conceived as an activity that bestows permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral objects. In The Redemption of Things, Samuel Frederick emphasizes that collecting things, however, necessarily involves displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the collector's task, is actually essential to the logic of gathering and preservation. Frederick locates this logic in German-language texts from the last two centuries, which witnessed a fundamental shift in our relationship to the world of things.

Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory moment. Through readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter, Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, as well an experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.