Gustav Mahler's music is more popular than ever, yet few are aware of its roots in German literary and cultural history in general, and in fin-de-siecle Viennese culture in particular. Taking as its point of departure the many references to literature, philosophy, and the visual arts that Mahler uses to illustrate the meaning of his music, Reading Mahler helps audiences, critics, and those interested in musical and cultural history understand influences on Mahler's music and thinking that may have been self-evident to middle-class Viennese a hundred years ago but are much more obscure today....

This volume illuminates the vexed treatment of violence in the German cultural tradition between two crucial, and radically different, violent outbreaks: the French Revolution, and the Holocaust and Second World War. The contributions undermine the notion of violence as an intermittent or random visitor in the imagination and critical theory of modern German culture. Instead, they make a case for violence in its many manifestations as constitutive for modern theories of art, politics, identity, and agency. While the contributions elucidate trends in theories of violence leading up to the...

Wenn in der Forschung von den wissenschaftlichen Interessen Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs (1742-1799) die Rede ist, sind damit fast immer seine Arbeiten zur Astronomie, Experimentalphysik und Chemie gemeint. Die Universitat Gottingen aber, an der Lichtenberg arbeitete, war im letzten Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts ein bedeutendes Zentrum des europaischen anthropologischen Denkens. Die Studie tragt diesem Kontext Rechnung und versucht eine Leerstelle der Forschung zu schlieen, indem sie sich mit Lichtenbergs Werk vor dem Hintergrund der Fruhgeschichte der modernen Anthropologie und ihrer Wurzeln...