Claudia Clausius – författare

(Re)Centring the Weimar Republic explores how centrist German politicians and intellectuals sought to foster stability and cooperation during the interwar period.In contrast to the persistent image of a democracy “hollowed out” by divisiveness and political extremism, this book offers a new perspective on the Republic’s efforts to define and hold an ambitious and productive middle ground. Leading scholars and cultural practitioners from the fields of history, German studies, philosophy, literary studies, and music document the progressive activities of the Weimar Republic’s “centre” to answer the question: how can political centrism employ social, cultural, and democratic institutions to resist polarization and extremism? This book’s three sections reveal how key thinkers worked to balance pluralism and national identity, how politicians struggled to hold centrist positions across right-leaning, centrist, and left-leaning parties, and how contemporary culture today interprets those efforts for audiences in the press, the museum, and the concert hall.In today’s age of stumbling democratic institutions and increasing political polarization, (Re)Centring the Weimar Republic offers a historical touchstone for evaluating liberal democracy pushed to its limits and the multipartisan efforts to reinforce its principles.

Origins and Futures: Time Inflected and Reflected provokes an interdisciplinary dialogue about culture, politics, and science’s strategies to divert the relentless trajectory of time. Literature, socio-political policy, physics, among other subjects, demonstrate the human refusal to enlist in temporal determinism. Articles ranging from how detective fiction and international terrorism manipulate the narration of events, to the unlocking of political trauma through forgiveness, to the genetic archaeology of the Human Genome project and the lacunar amnesia of nuclear energy corporations, all argue that wherever human minds meet they wrestle to undo the irrevocable, the irreversible, the fixed. Although such efforts look to the future, they rarely look straight ahead. Whatever their enterprise, writers, philosophers, and scientists believe that origins are alacritous keys to future hopes and aspirations.Contributors include: Marcus Bullock, Michael Crawford, Patricia Engle, Carol Fischer, J. T. Fraser, Sabine Gross, Paul Harris, Rosemary Huisman, Karmen MacKendrick, Steven Ostovich, Walter Schweidler, Friedel Weinert, and Masae Yuasa.