Between 1890 and 1950 modernist art and culture set out to challenge century-old notions of the individual and the community, culture and politics, morality and freedom, placing into question the very foundations of Western civilization. The essays in this volume present a novel assessment of various manifestations of modernism in Germany and Scandinavia by posing the question of its critical and political impact beyond traditional polarities such as right vs. left, illiberalism vs. Enlightenment, apolitical vs. engaged. In drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including...

This book explores German and European exile visual artists, designers and film practitioners in the United States such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Hans Richter, Peter Lorre, and Edgar Ulmer and examines how American artists including Walter Quirt, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell responded to the Europeanization of American culture.

This collection focuses on the cultural history of the police as an institution from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Contrary to most studies on the law and the state, Police Forces demonstrates how profoundly modern democracies are enveloped by more informal and less codified modes of social control. In a time when the rule of law appears to be on the retreat, 'police studies' emerges as a field in its own right. This volume helps stake out this new discipline, including the intricate link between police and the law, 'might' and 'right, ' state violence, surveillance technologies,...

Examining a variety of newspapers, novels, and Inquisition trials, Lang demonstrates how the accounts of conversion to the Catholic Church provide an unusual political opinion with serious ramifications in the shaping of national Italian identity during unification.

The book explores European artists' critical engagement with the images and stories that politicians and the media use to advocate globalization.

The twentieth century witnessed genocides, ethnic cleansing, forced population expulsions, shifting borders, and other disruptions on an unprecedented scale. This book examines the work of memory and the ethics of healing in post authoritarian societies that have experienced state-perpetrated violence.

1977 is usually associated with West German terrorism, but it witnessed another cultural watershed: punk music. A new reckoning with the legacy of political and aesthetic spaces, this book argues the centrality of punk music for understanding crises of state and terrorist violence, American racism and German fascism, and aesthetic production.

Cinema After Fascism considers how postwar European films glance ambivalently backward from the postwar period to the fascist era and delves into issues of gender certainties and spectatorship. In this period of film, familiar structures of epistemology and historiography reappear as ghostly imprints on postwar celluloid, and the remnants of fascist subjectivity walk the streets of postwar cities. Through new perspectives on the films of Roberto Rossellini, Billy Wilder, Carol Reed, Alain Resnais, and Marguerite Duras, this book examines the ways in which filmmakers acknowledge the fascist...

Weimar Culture Revisited is the first book to offer an accessible cross-section of new cultural history approaches to the Weimar Republic. This collection uses an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on the everyday workings of Weimar culture to explain the impact and meaning of culture for German's everyday lives during this fateful era.

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.