The German-speaking world has spawned some of the most extreme contrasts between products of culture--the endlessly fascinating, if cliched, Beethoven-Hitler dichotomy--and thus provokes compelling questions about culture and identity. A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies is an invitation to explore the rapidly expanding scholarship in cultural studies within the German context.
This collection brings together more than twenty-five essays from top-notch scholars and astute cultural critics who examine diverse questions in both broad outlines and specific instances. A literary...

"Race relations" are a controversial topic in today's Germany. Have Germans learned from the past? How far back must one go to understand the tensions, prejudices, and strategies that have marked race relations in the recently unified nation? The Imperialist Imagination explores the German preoccupation with racial and ethnic differences throughout the past two centuries, in a colonial and "postcolonial" context.
Germany's belated national unification in 1870, its short colonial period (1884-1918), and the loss of its colonies as a consequence of World War I, rather than through...

The intersection between social, historical, and political developments in Germany and the emergence of a nonfiction mode of film production

Germans on Drugs is both a groundbreaking study of the creation of youth drug culture in Hamburg during the 1960s and 1970s and an innovative exploration of the paradoxes of modernization. The very processes that allowed West Germany to flourish after the devastation of the Second World War--consumerism, globalization, and democratization--created the conditions under which a new intractable set of social problems could emerge. Placing Hamburg's drug scene within national and international contexts, Robert P. Stephens examines the ways in which mass consumerism created complicated...

The East German uprising of 1989 was not a male revolution. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of the fall of East Germany, compared to that of other East European nations, was the presence of women demanding a political role in the newly emerging social order. As one slogan proclaimed, "Without Women There Is No State."
Yet despite the determination of these women--and of West German feminist groups--to help shape the future of the German state, their influence remained, in the end, very limited. In Triumph of the Fatherland, political scientist Brigitte Young draws on...

Essential to current discussions of gender and the working class in Germany