Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism - Böcker

A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. "The Weimar Republic Sourcebook" represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestos, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of 'reactionary modernism', the rise of the 'New Woman', Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and, cultural, film, German, and women's studies.

The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century.At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.

Countless attempts have been made to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany. Aschheim offers a magisterial chronicle of the philosopher's presence in German life and politics.

"Cool Conduct" is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible.

Margaret Cohen's encounter with Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's most influential cultural and literary critics, has produced a radically new reading of surrealist thought and practice. Cohen analyzes the links between Breton's surrealist fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism and Benjamin's post-Enlightenment challenge to Marxist theory. She argues that Breton's surrealist Marxism played a formative role in shaping postwar French intellectual life and is of continued relevance to the contemporary intellectual scene.

In the pathbreaking essays collected here, Neumann and Kirchheimer demonstrate that the death of democracy and the rise of fascism during the first half of the twentieth century suggest crucial lessons for contemporary political and legal scholars. The volume includes writings on constitutionalism, political freedom, Nazism, sovereignty, and both Nazi and liberal law. Most important, the Frankfurt authors point to the continuing efficacy of the rule of law as an instrument for regulating and restraining state authority, as well as ominous evidence of the rule of law's fragility in modern liberal democracy.

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal--the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

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.

"Empire of Ecstasy" offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars - nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of 'modern identity.' The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious 'inner' conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an 'empire' of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy. Toepfer presents the work of such well-known figures as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with less-known but equally fascinating body culture practitioners.His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism.

No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance" promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror - World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With "The Third Reich Sourcebook", editors Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman present a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents drawn from wide-ranging primary sources, documenting both the official and unofficial cultures of National Socialist Germany from its inception to its defeat and collapse in 1945. Framed with introductions and annotations by the editors, the documents presented here include official government and party pronouncements, texts produced within Nazi structures, such as the official Jewish Cultural League, as well as documents detailing the impact of the horrors of National Socialism on those who fell prey to the regime, especially Jews and the handicapped.With thirty chapters on ideology, politics, law, society, cultural policy, the fine arts, high and popular culture, science and medicine, sexuality, education, and other topics, "The Third Reich Sourcebook" is the ultimate collection of primary sources on Nazi Germany.

The major essays of Dan Diner, who is widely read and quoted in Germany and Israel, are finally collected in an English edition. They reflect the author's belief that the Holocaust transcends traditional patterns of historical understanding and requires an epistemologically distinct approach. One can no longer assume that actors as well as historians are operating in the same conceptual universe, sharing the same criteria of rational discourse. This is particularly true of victims and perpetrators, whose memories shape the distortions of historical narrative in ways often diametrically opposed. The essays are divided into three groups. The first group talks about anti-Semitism in the context of the 1930s and the ideologies that drove the Nazi regime. The second group concentrates on the almost unbelievably different perceptions of the 'Final Solution', with particularly illuminating discussions of the Judenrat, or Jewish council. The third group considers the Holocaust as the subject of narrative and historical memory. Diner focuses above all on perspectives: the very notions of rationality and irrationality are seen to be changeable, depending on who is applying them.And because neither rational nor irrational motives can be universally assigned to participants in the Holocaust, Diner proposes, from the perspective of the victims, the idea of the counter rational. His work is directed toward developing a theory of Holocaust historiography and offers, clearly and coherently, the highest level of reflection on these problems.

"A Dubious Past" examines from a new perspective the legacy of Ernst Junger (1895-1998), one of the most fascinating figures in twentieth-century German intellectual life. From the time he burst onto the literary scene with "The Storms of Steel" in the early 1920s until he reached Olympian age in a reunited Germany, Junger's writings on a vast range of topics generated scores of controversies. In old age he became a cultural celebrity whose long life mirrored the tragic twists and turns of Germany's most difficult century. Elliot Neaman's study reflects an impressive investigation of published and unpublished material, including letters, interviews, and other media. Through his analysis of Junger's work and its reception over the years, he addresses central questions of German intellectual life, such as the postwar radical conservative interpretation of the Holocaust, divided memory, German identity, left and right critiques of civilization, and the political allegiances of the German and European political right."A Dubious Past" reconceptualizes intellectual fascism as a sophisticated critique of liberal humanism and Marxism, one that should be seen as coherent and - for a surprising number of contemporary intellectuals - all too attractive.

Rudy Koshar constructs a powerful framework in which to examine the subject of German collective memory, which for more than a half century has been shaped by the experience of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Finding the assumptions of many writers and scholars shortsighted, Koshar surveys the evidence of postwar German memory in the context of previous traditions. "From Monuments to Traces" follows the evolution of German 'memory landscapes' all the way from national unification in 1870-71 through the world wars and political division to reunification in 1990. The memory landscapes of any society may incorporate monuments, historical buildings, memorials and cemeteries, battlefields, streets, or natural environments that foster shared memories of important events or personalities. They may also be designed to divert public attention from embarrassing or traumatic histories. Koshar argues that in Germany, memory landscapes have taken shape according to four separate paradigms - the national monument, the ruin, the reconstruction, and the trace - which he analyzes in relation to the changing political agendas that have guided them over time.Despite the massive ruptures of Germany's history, we see that significant continuities have served to counterbalance the traumas of the German past.

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, the Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of "theory" not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity's most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Bela Balazs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, the Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, the Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of "theory" not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity's most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Bela Balazs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.

Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship. In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience.Munich's postwar development was the subject of constant controversy, pitting representatives of contending aesthetic and mnemonic positions against one another in the heated battle to shape the city's urban form. Examining the debates between traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and critical preservationists, Rosenfeld shows that the memory of Nazism in Munich has never been 'repressed' but has rather been defined by constant dissension and evolution. On balance, however, he concludes that Munich came to embody in its urban form a conservative view of the past that was inclined to diminish local responsibility for the Third Reich.

For many Germans the hyperinflation of 1922 to 1923 was one of the most decisive experiences of the twentieth century. In his original and authoritative study, Bernd Widdig investigates the effects of that inflation on German culture during the Weimar Republic. He argues that inflation, with its dynamics of massification, devaluation, and the rapid circulation of money, is an integral part of modern culture and intensifies and condenses the experience of modernity in a traumatic way.

Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.

Long considered to be an impenetrable, hermetic treatise, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama has rarely received the attention it deserves as a key text, central to a full understanding of his work. In this critically acclaimed study, distinguished Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of his thought with great clarity and sophisitication.

These essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time. Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia, Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.

Lutz Koepnick analyzes the complicated relationship between two cinemas--Hollywood's and Nazi Germany's--in this theoretically and politically incisive study. The Dark Mirror examines the split course of German popular film from the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, showing how Nazi filmmakers appropriated Hollywood conventions and how German film exiles reworked German cultural material in their efforts to find a working base in the Hollywood studio system. Through detailed readings of specific films, Koepnick provides a vivid sense of the give and take between German and American cinema.

Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German emigre directors--Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak. Despite early work with Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau, his auspicious debut with Siodmak on their celebrated Weimar classic People on Sunday, and the success of films like Detour and Ruthless, Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating and well-researched account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg provides the little-known details of Ulmer's personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging, eclectic films--features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg shows that Ulmer's unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more famous colleagues.As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer's fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.

Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the 'territories' carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called 'Prague circle' and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague's bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the 'postliberal' Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers.Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle's political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man's-land in which translation and mediation took the place of 'territory'. Spector's investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, "Prague Territories" illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.

Berlin Electropolis ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin's transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on three key groups--railway personnel, soldiers, and telephone operators--Andreas Killen traces the emergence in the 1880s and then later decline of the belief that modernity caused nervous illness. During this period, Killen explains, Berlin became arguably the most advanced metropolis in Europe. A host of changes, many associated with breakthroughs in technologies of transportation, communication, and leisure, combined to radically alter the shape and tempo of everyday life in Berlin. The resulting consciousness of accelerated social change and the shocks and afflictions that accompanied it found their consummate expression in the discourse about nervousness. Wonderfully researched and clearly written, this book offers a wealth of new insights into the nature of the modern metropolis, the psychological aftermath of World War I, and the operations of the German welfare state.Killen also explores cultural attitudes toward electricity, the evolution of psychiatric thought and practice, and the status of women workers in Germany's rapidly industrializing economy. Ultimately, he argues that the backlash against the welfare state that occurred during the late Weimar Republic brought about the final decoupling of modernity and nervous illness.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence upon such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a 'Jewish thinker', often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig's thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore Rosenzweig's enduring debt to Hegel's political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig's major work, "The Star of Redemption". Most of all, the book sets out to explore a surprising but deep affinity between Rosenzweig's thought and that of his contemporary, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.Resisting both apologetics and condemnation, Gordon suggests that Heidegger's engagement with Nazism should not obscure the profound and intellectually compelling bond in the once-shared tradition of modern German and Jewish thought. A remarkably lucid discussion of two notably difficult thinkers, this book represents an eloquent attempt to bridge the forced distinction between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy - and to show that such a distinction cannot be sustained without doing violence to both.

The life of Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the famous Anglo-German art patron, writer, and activist, offers a vivid and engrossing perspective on the tumultuous transformation of art and politics that took place in modern Europe between 1890 and 1930. In the first half of his career Kessler was one of the most ardent and well-known champions of aesthetic modernism in Imperial Germany, becoming a friend and patron to pioneering artists and writers of his day, most notably French sculptor Aristide Maillol, Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, English theater designer Gordon Craig, and Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal and, in his capacity as director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Weimar and vice-president of the German Artists League, served as a spokesman and lightning rod for embattled modern art. In the aftermath of the First World War, in which he served as a soldier, propagandist, and secret agent, Kessler embarked on a public career as a committed internationalist and pacifist, a stance that led ultimately to his exile from Germany upon the Nazi seizure of power.Making use of the recently discovered portions of Kessler's extensive diaries, one of the most remarkable journals ever written, Laird Easton explains the reasons for this startling metamorphosis, showing for the first time the continuities between Kessler's prewar aestheticism and his postwar politics and highlighting his importance within the larger history of the rise of modern art and politics. This lively narrative, the first English-language biography of Harry Kessler, provides a rich and fascinating portrait of the man whom W. H. Auden called 'a crown witness of our times.'

How does migration change a nation? "Germany in Transit" is the first sourcebook to illuminate the country's transition into a multiethnic society - from the arrival of the first guest workers in the mid-1950s to the most recent reforms in immigration and citizenship law. The book charts the highly contentious debates about migrant labor, human rights, multiculturalism, and globalization that have unfolded in Germany over the past fifty years - debates that resonate far beyond national borders. This cultural history in documents offers a rich archive for the comparative study of modern Germany against the backdrop of European integration, transnational migration, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Divided into eleven thematic chapters, "Germany in Transit" includes 200 original texts in English translation, as well as a historical introduction, chronology, glossary, bibliography, and filmography.

This well-illustrated, highly accessible book at last gives general readers and students a compact, yet comprehensive and authoritative history of the twelve years of the Third Reich - from political takeover of January 30, 1933 to the German capitulation of May 1945. Originally published to rave reviews in Germany, "A Concise History of the Third Reich" describes the establishment of the totalitarian dictatorship, the domestic and foreign politics of the regime, everyday life and terror in National Socialist Germany, the events leading to World War II and the war itself, various forms of resistance against Hitler, and the Holocaust. The book's extensive illustrations are thoroughly treated as documents that illuminate the visual power of Nazi ideology.