Fear

Abstract

This lecture provides a selective overview of recent scholarship on fear as it pertains to the history of emotions, and it suggests that a particularly fruitful way of conceptualising fear is to consider it instrumentally in relation to spaces of inclusion and exclusion. At the heart of this dynamic are often geopolitical anxieties. This lecture uses several case studies from the German-speaking world to illustrate this theme, and suggests that geopolitical anxieties can manifest in a number of ways: as cultural fears; fears of magic; and as strongly-rooted fears of societal implosion.