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 of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible.

Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new...

A Dubious Past examines from a new perspective the legacy of Ernst Junger (1895-1998), one of the most fascinating figures in twentieth-century German intellectual life. From the time he burst onto the literary scene with The Storms of Steel in the early 1920s until he reached Olympian age in a reunited Germany, Junger's writings on a vast range of topics generated scores of controversies. In old age he became a cultural celebrity whose long life mirrored the tragic twists and turns of Germany's most difficult century.

Elliot Neaman's study reflects an impressive...

Marsha Meskimmon furnishes a fresh perspective on the art of women in the Weimar Republic and in the process reclaims the lost history of a number of artists who have not received adequate attention--not only because they were women but also because they continued to align themselves with the modes of realistic representation the Expressionists regarded as reactionary. Reconsidering the traditional definitions of German modernism and its central issues of race politics, eugenics, and the city, Meskimmon explores the structures that marginalized the work of little known artists such as Lotte...

Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and...

Berlin Electropolis ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin's transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on three key groups--railway personnel, soldiers, and telephone operators--Andreas Killen traces the emergence in the 1880s and then later decline of the belief that modernity caused nervous illness. During this period, Killen explains, Berlin became arguably the most advanced metropolis in Europe. A host of changes, many associated with breakthroughs in technologies of transportation,...

The 1972 Munich Olympicsremembered almost exclusively for the devastating terrorist attack on the Israeli teamwere intended to showcase the New Germany and replace lingering memories of the Third Reich. That hope was all but obliterated in the early hours of September 5, when gun-wielding Palestinians murdered 11 members of the Israeli team. In the first cultural and political history of the Munich Olympics, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young set these Games into both the context of 1972 and the history of the modern Olympiad. Delving into newly available documents, Schiller and Young...

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis' total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of...

Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno--affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument--developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which technological media played a key role. This book explores in depth their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including Benjamin's artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from these writings...

One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siecle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New Yorkand to the influential work of the Frankfurt SchoolVeronika Fuechtner traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in...