Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity PDF Download

Author: Dagmar Barnouw
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253364272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
" . . . the range, power, and archival resourcefulness of Barnouw's book will make it impossible for anyone working in the field to ignore this powerful and disturbing historical meditation on the societal function and responsibility of the intellecutual." —The German Quarterly " . . . a work of real value for patient readers." —American Journal of Sociology " . . . a forceful and compelling thesis that challenges our understanding of several seminal figures writing during the first half of the century." —Monatshefte In this challenging study of a complex period, Barnouw investigates the works of seven representative figures of the Weimar republic: Walter Rahtenau, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Hermann Broch, and Alfred Döblin.

Author: Katharina von Ankum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520917606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.

Author: Vibeke Rützou Petersen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571811547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book focuses on the popular fiction of Weimar Germany and explores the relationship between women, the texts they read, and the society in which they lived. A complex picture emerges that shows women talking center stage, not only in the fiction but also in the reality that shaped its fictional representations. One of the author's significant conclusions is that it was the growing strength of female subjectivity, its strong positioning, and its insistent claim to visibility that occupied the imaginations and fears of Weimar culture and contributed in an important way to the crisis that afflicted the Weimar Republic.

Author: Peter E. Gordon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691135118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918–33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.

Author: Axel Schildt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450090
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In the 1960s and 70s, a new youth consciousness emerged in Western Europe which gave this period its distinct character. This volume demonstrates how international developments fused with national traditions, producing specific youth cultures that became leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies.

Author: Beth Bjorklund
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571130822
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
New readings of a variety of works in German literature, taking as a theme the conflict between the aims of politics and literature. The essays presented here invite reflection on a considerable sweep of German literature, with representation from the medieval period to the present day. A common focus on politics (appropriately a subject of deep concern to Professor Ryder) unites the articles, written from the perspective of American Germanists. European wars and revolutions, political divisions and attempts at unification, and periods of emancipation or persecution are viewed through the illuminating lens of literature; the tension between aesthetic and ideological goals, between the aims of literature and politics, informs the works chosen for analysis, and the conflict between the certainties of politics andthe ambiguities of literature becomes evident in these new readings of both familiary and less well-known works. BETH BJORKLAND is Professor of German at the University of Virginia; MARK E. COREY is Professor of German at the University of Arkansas. Contributors: HORST LANGE, PAUL MICHAEL LÜTZELER, RICHARD T. GRAY, MARGARET E. WARD, RONALD HORWEGE, BETH BJORKLUND, DAVID CHISHOLM, MICHAEL W. JENNINGS, DAVID SCRASE, RAY WAKEFIELD, MARKE. CORY, MICHAEL MORTON

Author: James Martin Skidmore
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039107605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study to consider Ricarda Huch's historical-political thought and assess Huch's place within the lively historiographical discourses of the 1920s. One of the most famous writers of her day, Huch (1864-1947) was known for her poetry, fiction, and histories of German Romanticism and the Thirty Years' War. Like many of her generation Huch was shaken by Germany's defeat in the First World War, and this shock motivated her to use her historiography to address Germany's post-war situation. Convinced that the German nation possessed an identity best expressed by the ideals of Romanticism, Huch attributed Germany's decline to the westernization of German political culture; absolutism and centralization had replaced the theoretical perfection of the decentralized early Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Her Weimar histories of medieval and nineteenth-century Germany urged a defeated and traumatized nation to return to a path that had been abandoned during the Wilhelmine Empire. Topics explored include Huch's use of Nietzschean monumentalism, a comparison with popular historians of the period (e.g. E. Kantorowicz), the echoes of her political thought in her poetry and fiction, and her complex relationship to German nationalism.

Author: Robert Ellis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611476364
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
During the years of Weimar and the Third Reich, Toller was one of the more active of the "other Germany's" left-wing intellectuals. A leader of the Bavarian Soviet of 1919, he had in addition won the Kleist prize and was recognized as one of Germany's best playwrights. Indeed, during the years of the Weimar Republic, the popularity of his works was unquestioned. His first play, Die Wandlung, was soon sold out and required a second edition; his dramatic works and poems were translated into twenty-seven languages. During the 1920’s it was said that he "dominated the German and Russian theatre" and that he was the "most spectacular personality in modern German literature." It was common for contemporaries to classify him as one of the foremost German writers of the Weimar era. During the 1930s, as an exile, he popularized to foreign audiences the idea of “the other Germany”and became a leading spokesman against Hitler. However, it is Toller the social critic rather than Toller the dramatist with which thisbook is concerned, his ideas, his visions for Germany and Europe as transmitted in his works of fiction and prose. The book reflects on the responsibility an intellectual-critic has when writing about a democratic society (the Weimar Republic) that is unsuccessfully balancing between survival and annihilation. Toller was furthermore a Jewish intellectual. How did his religious traditions shape his views? He was also German and this raises a whole host of specifically Germanic patterns of looking at the world. He was also a left-wing intellectual and Toller is set in the broader context of left-wing intellectuals in Weimar and the Nazi era. A related reflection is to ask: so what? What difference did it make? How much of an influence do intellectuals have in the development of society? What is the relationship between intellectuals and their readers in a troubled society?

Author: Max Beckmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226041353
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
One of the most important German artists of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann was labeled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis and chose exile. His artistic production encompassed the realism and figural themes of his early works to the provocatively blunt portraiture, critical urban views, and richly layered symbolic works for which he is now universally recognized. Although he was a prolific writer, his written work has never before been collected and translated into English. Beckmann is known for the depth, pungency, and tremendous sensuous force of his works; only in the last twenty years have we come to learn more about his personal life. Self-Portrait in Words maps out Beckmann's life and draws attention to the occasions on or for which he produced his writings, to the importance writing had for him as a form of expression, and to both the contemporary and personal references of his ideas and images.

Author: Anthony Fothergill
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039102716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad's reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the 'dark times' of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad's works achieved near cult status in Germany. On the basis of diaries and letters, contemporary reviews and essays, unpublished archival material as well as novels and films, the author illuminates the range and importance of Conrad's presence as a powerful liberating imagination within twentieth-century German culture. Championed by Thomas Mann, lauded by Hermann Hesse, and decried as 'Conrad the Jew' by the Nazis, Conrad has remained an influential presence in post-war German culture. The study offers a completely fresh perspective on Conrad's works and speaks eloquently for the importance of recognizing the way trans-national literary cultural relations have helped to shape European cultural history.