The aesthetics of sacrifice in Heiner Mueller, Wolf Vostell, Anselm Kiefer, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

This dissertation traces aesthetic patterns and dispositions of sacrifice in theater, performance art, painting, and film amid the "crisis of sacrifice" in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. As a cultural analysis of sacrifice, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to explore interconnections between violence, collective obligation, individual interest, and aesthetic representation in a period of German history when the relationships between these values and practices were undergoing a thorough re-evaluation. The dissertation both complements and challenges scholarship which casts the postwar period as free of sacrificial idealism. Although there is a broad shift in both Germanys away from collective appeals to sacrifice (more so in the West than in the East), similar to ambivalent positions on violence held by critical intellectuals and student protestors at this time, I claim that even as these four German artists attempted to dismantle aesthetic traditions that herald sacrificial behaviors, they harnessed notions of transformative violence, personal sacrifice, and liminal aesthetic experiences to utopian, sociopolitical agendas. At the same time their works exposed the lethal consequences and dubious ethics of attaining societal well-being through suffering, violence, and death, they still relied on the logic of sacrifice: acts of negation (destruction, violence, and suffering) figured as modes for personal emancipation and as avenues to bring about historical change.