There and Away

<p><b>Rainer Nägele's</b><b><i> There and Away </i></b><b>charts a series of autobiographical topographies or topobiographies that map a life beginning in a working-class village in Liechtenstein to the places he traveled as an émigré student and scholar (Innsbruck Göttingen Paris California Baltimore).</b> Located at the nexus of Freud's elaboration of the child's game of <i>fort</i> (away) and <i>da</i> (there) and Benjamin's thought-images of his Berlin childhood the eight placed-based vignettes of There and Away do not tell a life story but rather bring together momentary traces of encounters into a constellation in which aspects of Nägele's life became legible to him while illuminating wider historical configurations.</p><p>Nägele's topobiographies emerge from encounters and re-encounters with memories of specific places as they interact with significant texts by Friedrich Hölderlin Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin. <i>There and Away</i> thus meditates on what it means to return to the same places and the same texts at different points in time each encounter at once familiar and revealing something utterly unique.</p>