Eric Michaud, Un Art de L'Éternité: L'image et le temps du national-socialisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).Michael Wildt, Vom kleinen Wohlstand: Eine Konsumgeschichte der fünfziger Jahre (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996).
Franz Kafka's personal interest in and contact with the anarchist movement have been fairly well documented, and many have pointed to affinities between his work and anarchist ideas. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship has documented the influence of anarchist politics on modernist aesthetics per se, primarily in terms of a shared resistance to representation—a project that Kafka appears not to share, or at least one he pursues in a very different way. This essay redescribes the strategies of representation found at work in novels such as The Trial and stories such as "The Refusal" in relation to anarchism, and thereby to contribute to a better understanding both of Kafka's political engagements and his unique form of narrative realism.
The article looks critically at attempts to explain the rise of National Socialism in Germany by trying to identify a peculiarly German tradition of antimodernism or reactionary modernism (by, among others, Jeffrey Herf). By looking at different critiques of civilisation in imperial Germany, it tries to show that most of them accepted the necessity of modern technology. What was new about the so-called 'reactionary modernists' in the Weimar Republic was not their willingness to use modern technology, but the full acceptance of the fact that modern technology could only exist on the basis of large technological systems, industrial production and fundamental social and cultural changes. They demanded that Germans unreservedly embrace all aspects of modernity, though without giving up their conservative political ideals.While the 'reactionary modernists' tried to arrange the whole of society in accordance with an alleged technological functionality, National Socialism was politically more successful, exactly because its attitude towards technology and modernity was less coherent. As National Socialism had a purely pragmatic and open attitude towards technology, it could accept without hesitation that its goals were only achievable through the use of modern means, but that the cultural and private sphere should compensate for the deficits of a public life characterised by hardship and instrumental reason.
Imperial Germany : towards the commercialization of culture / Robin Lenman, John Osborne, Eda Sagarra -- Weimar culture : the birth of modernism / Stephan Lamb, Anthony Phelan -- Culture and the organization of national socialist ideology 1933 to 1945 / Wilfried van der Will -- The failed socialist experiment : culture in the GDR / Axel Goodbody, Dennis Tate, Ian Wallace -- Reconstruction and integration : the culture of West German stabilization 1945 to 1968 / Keith Bullivant, C. Jane Rice -- The Federal Republic 1968 to 1990 : from the industrial society to the culture society / Rob Burns, Wilfried van der Will -- Unification and its aftermath : the challenge of history / Godfrey Carr, Georgina Paul
Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an "Austro-Modernism" that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.
This book explores modernity under the spell of the 'primitive.' Proponents of the ideology of progress as well as critics of civilization, utopians dreaming of a re-enchanted existence and supporters and opponents of nascent fascism alike were all profoundly shaped by the phantasm of the ,primitive', a central element of which, this book argues, is the notion of 'primitive thought'. This comprises a distinct mode of thinking - characterized by turns as magical, mythical, mystical, or prelogical - that allows for a fundamentally different way of relating to the world. It was associated not only with indigenous cultures, but also with other figures of alterity, such as children and the mentally ill. The book examines the discourse on 'primitive thinking' in the social sciences, writings on art and language, and - most centrally - literary works by Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn, and Robert Müller
As the Second World War raged throughout Europe, modernist writers often became crucial voices in the propaganda efforts of both sides. This volume is a comprehensive study of the role modernist writers' radio works played in the propaganda war and the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and propaganda. Drawing on new archival research, the book covers the broadcast work of such key figures as George Orwell, Orson Welles, Dorothy L. Sayers, Louis MacNeice, Mulk Raj Anand, T.S. Eliot, and PG. Wodehouse. In addition to the work of Ango-American modernists, Melissa Dinsman also explores the radio work of exiled German writers, such as Thomas Mann, as well as Ezra Pound's notorious pro-fascist broadcasts. In this way, the book reveals modernism's engagement with new technologies that opened up transnational boundaries under the pressures of war
Title Page -- Contents -- Tables and Figures -- Introduction -- 1. Money from the Spirit World -- 2. Perfecting the State -- 3. The Money Tree -- 4. Silver Thaler and Ur-Cameralists -- 5. "All That Glitters Is Not Gold, But . . ." -- 6. A Conspicuous Lack of Consumption -- 7. "Alles Geld gehet immer auf" -- 8. Status, Friendship, and Money in Hamburg around 1800 -- 9. Luxury and the Nineteenth-Century Württemberg Pietists -- 10. Marx on Money -- 11. Modernism, Relativism, and the Philosophy of Money -- 12. A Narrative in Notgeld -- 13. Predatory Speculators, Honest Creditors -- 14. Mobilizing Citizens and Their Savings -- 15. "One Would Not Get Far Without Cigarettes" -- 16. When the Deutsch Mark Was in Short Supply -- 17. Between Memorialization and Monetary Revaluation -- Afterword -- Index
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Intro -- SPIS TREŚCI / TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Prze-pisać taneczny modernizm: sieci -- Palimpsesty: taneczny modernizm -- Historie elastyczne i nieelastyczne. Analiza wczesnodwudziestowiecznych kategorii niemieckiego tańca modern -- Ausdruckstanz w obliczu historii i pamięci. Odtworzenia przeszłości -- Seksualność i queerowa uczuciowość w Karnawale Michaiła Fokina -- Miejsca i transnarodowe linie tańca wyzwolonego i ekspresjonistycznegow Europie -- Mary Wigman i Azja: między orientalizmem i transnacjonalizmem -- W drodze do "Azji": egzotyczność, wędrówka i autokreacja a początki środkowoeuropejskiego tańca modern -- Sada Yakko - rekonstrukcja w działaniu -- Żydowskie tango i pytanie o tożsamość -- Taniec polski w sieci transkulturowych powiązań (1918-1939) -- Prze-pisać taneczny modernizm - perspektywa chorwacka -- Wybrane aspekty czeskiego modernizmu tanecznego w kontekście tanecznej (r)ewolucji z początku XX wieku -- Polskie - nasze / zagraniczne -cudzoziemskie - obce -- ILUSTRACJE / ILLUSTRATIONS -- Re-writing Dance Modernism: Networks -- Palimpsests: -- Flexible and Inflexible Histories: An Examination of Early 20th Century Categories of Modern German Dance -- Ausdruckstanz Facing History and Memory: Reenacting the Past -- Sexuality and Queer Sentiment in Mikhail Fokine's Le Carnaval -- Places and Transnational Lines of Free Dance and Expressionist Dance in Europe -- Mary Wigman and Asia: Between Orientalism and Transnationalism -- On the Way to 'Asia': Exoticism, Itinerancy and Self-Fashioning in the Making of Central European Modern Dance -- Sada Yakko: Reconstruction in Action -- Jewish Tango and the Question of Identity -- Transcultural Cross-over: Polish Dance (1918-1939) -- Re-writing Dance Modernism: A Croatian Perspective.
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In 1941, the Nazi regime revoked the long-established convention of typesetting German texts in Fraktur styles. This study examines the significance of the messages conveyed by letterforms in Nazi propaganda and the extent to which the regime put into practice its professed typographic policies. Taking into account different audiences and channels, it focuses on books by the Ahnenerbe institute controlled by Heinrich Himmler, the women's magazine NS-Frauen-Warte and the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. Fraktur styles seem to have functioned as the main letterforms of the blood and soil ideology, but another strand of Nazi typography departed from Fraktur and probably translated the importance of the Oera Linda book and the Codex Aesinas in the image of a supposedly 'Aryan' past. Meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda incorporated forms and norms that it appropriated from modernist typography, a topic implicitly raised in the dispute between Max Bill and Jan Tschichold in 1946. Typography functioned as an instrument for exclusion, racial discrimination and gender stereotyping and to mark the boundaries of the 'Aryan' community, challenging the notion of print-language as intrinsically inclusive expressed in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.
"Grete Meisel-Hess (1879-1922), a contemporary of Freud, Schnitzler, and Klimt, was a feminist voice in early-twentieth-century modernist discourse. Born in Prague to Jewish parents and raised in Vienna, she became a literary presence with her 1902 novel Fanny Roth. Influenced by many of her contemporaries, she also criticized their notions of gender and sexuality. Relocating to Berlin, she continued to write fiction and began publishing on sexology and the women's movement. Helga Thorson's book combines a literary-cultural exploration of modernism in Vienna and Berlin with a biography of Meisel-Hess and a critical analysis of her works. Focusing on Meisel-Hess's negotiations of feminism, modernism, and Jewishness, it illustrates the dynamic interplay between gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity in Austrian and German modernism. Analyzing Meisel-Hess's fiction as well as her sexological studies, Thorson argues that Meisel-Hess posited herself as both a "New Woman" and the writer of the "New Woman." The book draws on extensive archival research that uncovered new sources including an unpublished drama, letters scattered in various collections across Europe, and Meisel-Hess's medical history. Until now there have been only limited secondary sources about Meisel-Hess, most containing errors and omissions regarding her biography. This is the first book on Meisel-Hess in English"--
Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author's main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form.
Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- KulturConfusão: On German-Brazilian Hybridities and Intercultural Hermeneutics / Finger, Anke / Kathöfer, Gabi / Larkosh, Christopher -- Indigenous Projections -- Germans and Indians in Brazil: The Transatlantic Construction of Ethnic Identity in the Discourse of Indian Protection / Ritz-Deutch, Ute -- "Paradise with Black Angels": Brazil in Eighteenth-Century Germany / Clara, Fernando -- Devouring Culture: Cannibalism, National Identity, and Nineteenth-Century German Emigration to Brazil / Kathöfer, Gabi -- Cultural Entanglements and Ethnographic Refractions: Theodor Koch-Grünberg in Brazil / Beebee, Thomas O. -- Everyday Cultures and Media -- German-Brazilian Cultural Exchange in the Times of the Dictatorship: The Cultural Magazine Intercâmbio / Musser, Ricarda -- From Documentation to Dialogue: On Bringing Brazilian Popular Music and Jazz to West Germany / Hurley, Andrew W. -- Conceptual Metaphors: A Culture-Specific Construction of Meaning Using the "Life Is War" Metaphor in Brazilian and German Rap Lyrics / Schröder, Ulrike -- Transnational Film History? Um Cinema Teuto-Brasileiro / Fuhrmann, Wolfgang -- Literary Fusions and Interstitial Spaces -- Tropical Subjectivity and the European Tradition of Bildung: Macunaíma, a Hero Without a Character, by Mário de Andrade / Nitschack, Horst -- "Everywhere Paradise Is Lost": The Brazilian National Myth in the Works of Refugees of Nazism / Eckl, Marlen -- Submarine: Germany Resurfacing in the Contemporary Brazilian Novel / Larkosh, Christopher -- "Exiled from the World": German Expressionism, Brazilian Modernism, and the Interstitial Primitivism of Lasar Segall / Wolfe, Edith -- Between São Paulo and Stuttgart: Multilingualism, Translation, and Interculturality in Haroldo de Campos's and Vilém Flusser's Work / Guldin, Rainer -- Contributors -- Index
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The article examines the co-operation between a (Swedish-speaking) modernist author with a (Finnish-speaking) workers' theatre in 1920s Finland. It shows how modernist aesthetics and the socialist movement met in the practices of the workers' theatres and what dangers lay in this combination. I am especially interested in the moments when the radical intelligentsia - artists, writers, and theatre directors - joined forces with the workers' theatres in order to create political theatre. Political turmoil was about to occur when Hagar Olsson's play S.O.S. premiered in Helsinki in March 1929. The venue was the Koitto Theatre (in Finnish "Koiton Näyttämö"), a semi-professional workers' theatre run by a socialist temperance association, already known for its performances of German expressionist plays. In my paper, I ask what goals lay behind the co-operation between Olsson and Koitto – and what came out of it?
