The plays and prose works of the German writer, director, and political activist Peter Weiss (1916-1982) were immensely influential in the shaping of European Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century. Combining exploratory aesthetic openness with an uncompromising ethical drive, Weiss's literary works, especially the plays Marat/Sade (1964), The Investigation (1968), and Holderlin (1971), as well as the novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-81) continue to provide vital points of reference for any discussion of culture and politics in our times. Berwald's study serves as a...

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of the twentieth century. His work encompasses aesthetics, metaphysical language and narrative theories, German literary history, philosophies of history, the intersection of Marxism and Messianic thought, urban topography, and the development of photography and film. Benjamin defined the task of the critic as one that blasts endangered moments of the past out of the continuum of history so that they attain new significance. This volume of new essays employs this principle of actualization as its methodological...

Thomas Mann is among the greatest of German prose writers, and was the first German novelist to reach a wide English-speaking readership since Goethe. Novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doktor Faustus attest to his mastery of subtle, distanced irony, while novellas such as Death in Venice reveal him at the height of his mastery of language. In addition to fresh insights about these best-known works of Mann, this volume treats less-often-discussed works such as Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and Felix Krull, as well as his political writings and essays. Mann...

Upon publication in 1895, Gabriele Reuter's From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie) became something of a cultural event, making its author one of Germany's most talked-about women of letters. Set in the first two decades of the Second German Reich, this story of a Prussian bureaucrat's daughter caught between conformity and rebellion struck at the core of the class that upheld the empire, revealing the hypocrisy and misery at the very heart of the bourgeois family. It recorded the conflicted and ultimately interminable adolescence of a middle-class girl who failed to fulfill the destiny...

Throughout his oeuvre Goethe invokes the writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment: Voltaire and Goldsmith, Sterne and Bayle, Beccaria and Franklin. And he does not merely reference them: their ideas make up the salt of his most acclaimed works. Like Hume before him, Goethe takes up the topic of suicide, but in a best-selling novel, Werther; the beating heart of Faust I is the fate of a woman who commits infanticide, a burning social issue of his age; in an article for a popular journal Goethe takes up the cause of Kant and Penn, who wrote treatises on how to establish peace in Europe. In...

The Bulgarian-born scholar and author Elias Canetti was one of the most astute witnesses and analysts of the mass movements and wars of the first half of the 20th century. Born a Sephardic Jew and raised at first in the Bulgarian and Ladino languages, he chose to write in German. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature for his oeuvre, which includes dramas, essays, diaries, aphorisms, the novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fe) and the long interdisciplinary treatise Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). These works express Canetti's thought-provoking ideas on culture and the human psyche...

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, German intellectuals and writers were forced to confront perhaps the most difficult complex of problems ever faced by modern intellectuals in the western world: the complete defeat and devastation of their country, the crimes of the Hitler dictatorship, the onset of the Cold War, and ultimately the political division of the nation. To a large extent these debates took place in literature and literary discourse, and they continue to have pressing relevance for Germany today, when the country is rediscovering and exploring this previously...

Many aspects of the works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) have attracted attention. His work as a philosopher and pioneering thinker in poetics and aesthetics and as a historian have recently been the focus of much attention. But Schiller's dramas have always held the most interest, and they continue to be performed regularly both in German-speaking lands and around the world. Schiller is a dramatist of psychological conflict rather than of abstract ideas, and he had a unique grasp of how to use the stage to that end. This study of Schiller's use of gesture begins with a discussion of the...

Although beset by social, political, and economic instabilities, interwar Vienna was an exhilarating place, with pioneering developments in the arts and innovations in the social sphere. Research on the period long saw the city as a mere shadow of its former imperial self; more recently it has concentrated on high-profile individual figures or party politics. This volume of new essays widens the view, stretching disciplinary boundaries to consider the cultural and social movements that shaped the city. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted not in an abandonment of the arts, but...

Warlike women are a recurring phenomenon in German literature and culture since 1500. Amazons, terrorists, warrior women -- this volume of essays by leading scholars from the UK and Germany analyzes ideas and portrayals of these figures in the visual arts, society, media, and scholarship, always against the backdrop of Germany's development as a culture and as a nation. The contributors look for patterns in the historical portrayal of warlike women, asking the questions: What cultural signals are sent when women are shown occupying men's spaces by dressing as warriors or in men's clothing?...