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 Durer. 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...