Prompted by recent challenges to and debates about the relative public silence concerning the effects of the Allied air war over Europe during World War II, this collection of essays examines literary, visual (film and photography), and institutional (museums) representations of the bombing of civilian targets, predominantly in Germany. The authors examine narrative strategies of both well-known and relatively little known works as well as the moral and ideological presuppositions of the varied representations of the depredations of total war. The introduction and afterword by the editors...

This book is an introduction to the nature of modernity as envisioned by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century, Niklas Luhmann. For Luhmann, modernity is neither an Enlightenment project nor a ludic rejection of that project, but rather the pre-condition of all our deliberations, the structure within which our semantics makes sense, even as we think we celebrate (or mourn) its passing. Rather than viewing modernity as a disease for which we seek a cure, Luhmann poses it as a question to which we continually devise incomplete and partial answers. When we grow...