Suchergebnisse

Overview of factors in political changes since 1988; parliamentary election results in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, 1989-90.

This essay focuses on the questions of whether German unification resulted in a wholesale retreat of intellectuals from politics and engagement with social issues, as the rhetoric of failure would indicate, or whether the key debates of the period can be read instead as a sign that Germany is on the road to becoming a more 'normal' European nation. Before returning to these issuesat the end of this paper I first provide a broad historical and theoretical context for my discussion of the role of the concerned intellectual in Germany, before offering an overview of the respective functions of literary intellectuals in both German states in the post-war period. I then address a series of key debates and discussions in 1989 and the early nineteen-nineties that were responsible for changing the forms of engagement in intellectual debates in post-unification German society. I argue that the 1990s and early years of the new millennium hastened the disappearance of the writer as a universal intellectual and focused attention on the writer as an individualist and a professional. Today's youngest generation of writer in Germany is a specialist intellectual who intervenes in political and social matters from time to time but who is not expected to take a moral-ethical stance on most issues of national and international concern. S/he is one who frequently writes about personal subjects, but may also occasionally, as witnessed after September 11, turn his or her pen to topics of global concern as in terrorism and Islam. More often than not, however, writers now leave the work of commenting on political affairs to writers of the older guard and to other 'senior' specialist intellectuals.

New York Times best-selling author Leland Gregory is one of Andrews McMeel Publishing's most successful noncartoon humorists. Silly, shocking, weird, hilariously funny--and outrageously true--the short anecdotes inside his anthologies of human stupidity are culled from print, online, and broadcast media from all over the world. Inside Stupid Ancient History, Gregory chronicles Greek philosophers, Roman conquerors, and historic mythconceptions, including: -- To fight off Roman ships in 300 BC, Carthaginians catapulted live snakes at them. -- The Athenian lawmaker Draco died of suffocation when gifts of cloaks were showered upon him by grateful citizens at an Aegina theater in 620 BC. -- In ancient Rome, long before the advent of the Christian Bible, Roman men swore to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" by placing their right hand on their testicles. It is from this ritual that we derived the term "testimony." -- Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus burned to the ground in 356 BC. The arsonist was executed; and to make sure his wish for everlasting fame wouldn't come true, it was ordered that his name be stricken from all records and never mentioned again. But people will talk. Despite all efforts, his name leaked, and Herostratus is remembered as one of the most notorious firebugs in history.