This study investigates the relationship between the history of
self-portraiture in German art and the historical question of a
collective identity. I propose that the turn to the image of the self
demonstrates a narcissistic position in which the subject attempts a
transformation of its selfobjects, or figures which mediate a sense of
identity. The book begins with the appearance of the autonomous
self-portrait with the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. It then looks
at the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich and his use of melancholy
as both a sense of his own self, and German identity at the moment when
a self-consciously collective identity was being posited in terms of a
nation state. This problem of integrating a sense of self in German
society is then examined in terms of trauma and the past following World
War II. Various contemporary artists working with the self-image are
presented, including: Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Katharina
Sieverding and Jörg Immendorff.