Title: Cool conduct: the culture of distance in Weimar Germany 
Author: Lethen, Helmut
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Sociology | German  Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: 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 o . . . [more]
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Title: Empire of ecstasy: nudity and movement in German body culture, 1910-1935 
Author: Toepfer, Karl Eric 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German  Studies | Gender Studies | Dance
Publisher's Description: 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 With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an "empire" of appropriative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.   [brief]
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Title: Historical destiny and national socialism in Heidegger's "Being and time" 
Author: Fritsche, Johannes
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Philosophy | German  Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: There has been much debate over the relationship of Heidegger's philosophy - in particular his book Being and Time - to his practical involvement with National Socialism. Yet the question has never been addressed through a comparison of Being and Time with other texts on history and politics written at the time. Johannes Fritsche does this, providing a detailed interpretation of the relevant passages in Being and Time - especially sections 72-77 on fate, community, and society. He analyzes for comparison two other authors who explicitly regarded themselves as rightists - Adolf Hitler ( Mein Kampf ) and Max Scheler ( Formalism in Ethics and other writings) - and two authors on the left - Georg Lukács ( History and Class Consciousness ) and Paul Tillich ( The Socialist Decision ).Fritsche concludes that Being and Time is a brilliant summary of right-wing politics in general, which proposes the destruction of liberal society in order to regenerate an idealized community. In addition, Heidegger rejects positions on the right, such as Scheler's, that enabled their authors to distance themselves from the most extreme political rightists, and thus he paves the way for National Socialism. Being and Time , Fritsche demonstrates, must be seen as a clear case for the National Socialists and their project of revitalization of the Volksgemeinschaft , the community of the people.   [brief]
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Title: Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany 
Author: Saunders, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German  Studies | Film | United States History | European History
Publisher's Description: 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.   [brief]
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Title: In a cold crater: cultural and intellectual life in Berlin, 1945-1948 
Author: Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | German  Studies | European History | Literature | Film | Music
Publisher's Description: Although the three conspicuous cultures of Berlin in the twentieth century - Weimar, Nazi, and Cold War - are well documented, little is known about the years between the fall of the Third Reich and the beginning of the Cold War. In a Cold Crater is the history of this volatile postwar moment, when the capital of the world's recently defeated public enemy assumed great emotional and symbolic meaning.This is a story, not of major intellectual and cultural achievements (for there were none in those years), but of enormous hopes and plans that failed. It is the story of members of the once famous volcano-dancing Berlin intelligentsia, torn apart by Nazism and exile, now re-encountering one another. Those who had stayed in Berlin in 1933 crawled out of the rubble, while many of the exiles returned with the Allied armies as members of the various cultural and re-educational units. All of them were eager to rebuild a neo-Weimar republic of letters, arts, and thought. Some were highly qualified and serious. Many were classic opportunists. A few came close to being clowns. After three years of "carnival," recreated by Schivelbusch in all its sound and fury, they were driven from the stage by the Cold War.As Berlin once again becomes the German capital, Schivelbusch's masterful cultural history is certain to captivate historians and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: Landscapes of resistance: the German films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub 
Author: Byg, Barton 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | German  Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet - who have lived and worked together for almost forty years - may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance , Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.   [brief]
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Title: A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat 
Author: Applegate, Celia
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | German  Studies
Publisher's Description: At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat - the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity.The ideas and activities clustered around Heimat shed new light particularly on problems of modernization. Instead of viewing the Germans as a dangerously anti-modern people, Applegate argues that they used the cultivation of Heimat to ground an abstract nationalism in their attachment to familiar places and to reconcile the modern industrial and urban world with the rural landscapes and customs they admired. Primarily a characteristic of the middle classes, love of Heimat constituted an alternative vision of German unity to the familiar aggressive, militaristic one. The Heimat vision of Germany emphasized cultural diversity and defined German identity by its internal members rather than its external enemies.Applegate asks that we re-examine the continuities of German history from the perspective of the local places that made up Germany, rather than from that of prominent intellectuals or national policymakers. The local patriotism of Heimat activists emerges as an element of German culture that persisted across the great divides of 1918, 1933, and 1945. She also suggests that this attachment to a particular place is a feature of Europeans in general and is deserving of further attention.   [brief]
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Title: The new German cinema: music, history, and the matter of style 
Author: Flinn, Caryl
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German  Studies | Music
Publisher's Description: When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identity - national, political, personal, and sexual - music and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinn's study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with difference - including that embodied in Germany's difficult history - rather than to "master" or "get past" it. Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter of The New German Cinema examines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing music's role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movement's charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.   [brief]
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Title: On Heidegger's Nazism and philosophy 
Author: Rockmore, Tom 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | German  Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: That Martin Heidegger supported National Socialism has long been common knowledge. Yet the relation between his philosophy and political commitments remains highly contentious and recently has erupted into a vociferous debate. Boldly refuting arguments that the philosopher's political stance was accidental or adopted under coercion, Rockmore argues that Heidegger's philosophical thought and his Nazism are inseparably intertwined, that he turned to National Socialism on the basis of his philosophy, and that his later evolution is largely determined by his continuing concern with Nazism.After developing a framework that clearly outlines the interrelation of Nazism and Heidegger's philosophy, Rockmore analyzes the famous rectoral address the philosopher delivered in 1933 upon becoming rector of the University of Freiburg. In that speech Heidegger sought to ground politics in philosophy. Rockmore examines the inseparable relation of politics and philosophy in Heidegger's Being and Time , the recently published Contributions to Philosophy (written from 1936 to 1938), and the interpretations of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and technology.In his conclusion Rockmore considers the ongoing discussion of Heidegger's thought and Nazism in France. Combining extensive documentation of the Heidegger controversy with philosophical and historical analysis, this book raises profound questions about the social and political responsibility of philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: Over the edge: remapping the American West 
Author: Matsumoto, Valerie J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | California and the West | Popular Culture | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | German  Studies
Publisher's Description: From the Gold Rush to rush hour, the history of the American West is fraught with diverse, subversive, and at times downright eccentric elements. This provocative volume challenges traditional readings of western history and literature, and redraws the boundaries of the American West with absorbing essays ranging widely on topics from tourism to immigration, from environmental battles to interethnic relations, and from law to film. Taken together, the essays reassess the contributions of a diverse and multicultural America to the West, as they link western issues to global frontiers.Featuring the latest work by some of the best new writers both inside and outside academia, the original essays in Over the Edge confront the traditional field of western American studies with a series of radical, speculative, and sometimes outrageous challenges. The collection reads the West through Ben-Hur and the films of Mae West; revises the western American literary canon to include the works of African American and Mexican American writers; examines the implications of miscegenation law and American Indian blood quantum requirements; and brings attention to the historical participation of Mexican and Japanese American women, Native American slaves, and Alaskan cannery workers in community life.   [brief]
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Title: Protecting motherhood: Women and the family in the politics of postwar West Germany 
Author: Moeller, Robert G
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | German  Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place." He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction.The debate over "woman's place" in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question," West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West.Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics."   [brief]
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Title: Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism 
Author: Seyhan, Azade
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism | German  Studies
Publisher's Description: Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Weimar: a jurisprudence of crisis 
Author: Jacobson, Arthur J
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Law | Social and Political Thought | German  Studies | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism.   [brief]
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