Andreas Hofele – författare

No Hamlets is the first critical account of the role of Shakespeare in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the Empire in 1871 to the ''Bonn Republic'' of the Cold War era. In this sustained study, Andreas Höfele begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and follows the rightist engagement with Shakespeare to the poet Stefan George and his circle, including Ernst Kantorowicz, and the literary efforts ofthe young Joseph Goebbels during the Weimar Republic, continuing with the Shakespeare debate in the Third Reich and its aftermath in the controversy over ''inner emigration'' and concluding with Carl Schmitt''s Shakespeare writings of the 1950s. Central to this enquiry is the identification of Germany and, more specifically, Germanintellectuals with Hamlet. The special relationship of Germany with Shakespeare found highly personal and at the same time highIy political expression in this recurring identification, and in its denial. But Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character with strong appeal: Carl Schmitt''s largely still unpublished diaries of the 1920s reveal an obsessive engagement with Othello which has never before been examined. Interest in German philosophy and political thought has increased in recentShakespeare studies. No Hamlets brings historical depth to this international discussion. Illuminating the constellations that shaped and were shaped by specific appropriations of Shakespeare, Höfele shows how individual engagements with Shakespeare and a whole strand of Shakespeare reception wereembedded in German history from the 1870s to the 1950s and eventually 1989, the year of German reunification.

Anthropology is a notoriously polysemous term. Within a continental European academic context, it is usually employed in the sense of philosophical anthropology, and mainly concerned with exploring concepts of a universal human nature. By contrast, Anglo-American scholarship almost exclusively associates anthropology with the investigation of cultural and ethnic differences (cultural anthropology). How these two main traditions (and their ‘derivations’ such as literary anthropology, historical anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, intercultural studies) relate to each other is a matter of debate. Both, however, have their roots in the path-breaking changes that occurred within sixteenth and early seventeenth-century culture and scientific discourse. It was in fact during this period that the term anthropology first acquired the meanings on which its current usage is based. The Renaissance did not ‘invent’ the human. But the period that gave rise to ‘humanism’ witnessed an unprecedented diversification of the concept that was at its very core. The question of what defines the human became increasingly contested as new developments like the emergence of the natural sciences, religious pluralisation, as well as colonial expansion, were undermining old certainties. The proliferation of doctrines of the human in the early modern age bears out the assumption that anthropology is a discipline of crisis, seeking to establish sets of common values and discursive norms in situations when authority finds itself under pressure.

Revisionen des Epochenprofils durch einen historisch trennscharfen Konzept-rahmen zu ermöglichen - mit diesem Ziel hat der Münchner Sonderforschungsbereich 573 eine Heuristik erarbeitet, die sich von den Teleologien vorgängiger Forschungsparadigmen abhebt. Anders als Konzepte wie ‚Modernisierung‘, ‚Säkularisierung‘ oder ‚Rationalisierung‘ zielt diese Heuristik darauf ab, richtungsoffene und widersprüchliche Entwicklungen auf allen Ebenen der frühneuzeitlichen Kultur zu erkennen und zu beschreiben. Für die Frühe Neuzeit ist typisch, dass Autoritäten auf Gegenautoritäten treffen, Institutionen miteinander konkurrieren, Traditionen in Frage gestellt werden, unterschiedliche Modelle der Praxis entwickelt werden und die Ordnung der Disziplinen durch epistemische und mediale Umbrüche transformiert wird. Die Dynamik der Pluralisierung erfasst somit auch deren - vermeintlich statisches - Pendant, die Autorität, die sich in Prozessen der Autorisierung stets neu behaupten muss. Die Aufsätze des Bandes - zehn von Münchner, fünf von auswärtigen Beiträgern - entstammen größtenteils der Abschlusstagung, mit der der SFB Ergebnisse und Perspektiven seiner elfjährigen Forschungsarbeit zur Diskussion stellte.

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both.

From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar ''formations of the formless''.

Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern ''chaos theories'' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both.

From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar ''formations of the formless''.

Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern ''chaos theories'' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

The volume analyses some of the travelling and bridge-building activities that went on in Renaissance Europe, mainly but not exclusively across the Channel, true to Montaigne's epoch-making program of describing 'the passage'. Its emphasis on Anglo-Continental relations ensures a firm basis in English literature, but its particular appeal lies in its European point of view, and in the perspectives it opens up into other areas of early modern culture, such as pictorial art, philosophy, and economics. The multiple implications of the go-between concept make for structured diversity. The chapters of this book are arranged in three stages. Part 1 ('Mediators') focuses on influential go-betweens, both as groups, like the translators, and as individual mediators. The second part of this book ('Mediations') is concerned with individual acts of mediation, and with the 'mental topographies' they presuppose, reflect and redraw in their turn. Part 3 ('Representations') looks at the role of exemplary intermediaries and the workings of mediation represented on the early modern English stage. Key features High quality anthology on phenomena of cultural exchange in the Renaissance era With contributions by outstanding international experts