Entertainment, defined as occasions for creating pleasure, added an important dimension to the lifestyle and self-definition of the German middle class around the turn of the nineteenth century. Modern forms of culture and consumption appearing around this time not only enhanced pleasure in physical sensations but also enabled imaginary sensations in the absence of actual stimuli. Desiring, rather than having, became an important mode of cultural consumption, linking products and practices with self-image, serving to express social identity in an increasingly more anonymous society - a...

The German-speaking inhabitants of central Europe did not automatically think of themselves as Germans - not before 1871 and not always after unification. In fact, they spoke mutually incomprehensible dialects, owed allegiance to different leaders, worshiped in different churches, and would not have recognized each other's customs. If asked about their identity, these prospective Germans might have answered Austrian, Bavarian, or Prussian, and they could as easily have used more local labels or resorted to occupational markers. For this disparate population to think of itself as German, that...

When Paul Celan was charged with plagiarism in 1960, the ensuing public debate in West Germany threw the poet into a major personal crisis even though most German critics immediately came to his defense. This crisis coincided with a transformative moment in the history of Holocaust remembrance, its first generational reimagining in the wake of a number of highly publicized criminal trials. Words from Abroad takes its lead from this disjunction between public ritual and private crisis to chart the emergence of a new literary diaspora, examining German Jewish writers who were dislocated in the...