Ehrhard Bahr - Böcker

In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals - including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg - who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions."Weimar on the Pacific" is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Doblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles' influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus", Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.

This book, originally published in 1992, traces the discourse on the French Revolution in Germany and its contributors investigate the processes and results of adopting or rejecting the values of the French Revolution in Germany and reinterprets its documents in terms of their internalization. One of the questions discussed is whether the French Revolution is part of Germany’s progressive tradition, that is, whether it has been repressed or whether it constitutes a viable counter-discourse within the political culture. The first successful revolution in Germany – the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of Autumn 1989 does not fit the definition of ‘classic revolutions, but it ended in a change of power in Germany and in that respect, this book is an anatomy of German political consciousness before 1989.

This book, originally published in 1992, traces the discourse on the French Revolution in Germany and its contributors investigate the processes and results of adopting or rejecting the values of the French Revolution in Germany and reinterprets its documents in terms of their internalization. One of the questions discussed is whether the French Revolution is part of Germany’s progressive tradition, that is, whether it has been repressed or whether it constitutes a viable counter-discourse within the political culture. The first successful revolution in Germany – the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of Autumn 1989 does not fit the definition of ‘classic revolutions, but it ended in a change of power in Germany and in that respect, this book is an anatomy of German political consciousness before 1989.