Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- INTRODUCTION Explaining the Possibility of Modernism -- CHAPTER ONE Philosophizing with a Stammer -- CHAPTER TWO Incipit Zarathustra: A Reading of "Zarathustra's Prologue" -- CHAPTER THREE Dionysus, the German Nation, and the Body -- CHAPTER FOUR Cartesian Subjects, Promethean Heroes, and the Sublime -- CHAPTER FIVE Eternal Recurrence, Acts I and II -- CHAPTER SIX Eternal Recurrence, Act III -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

"Widely regarded as one of the foremost cultural critics of the last century, Walter Benjamin's relation to Modernism has largely been understood in the context of his reception of the aesthetic theories of Early German Romanticism and his associated interest in avant-garde Surrealism. But this Romantic understanding only gives half the picture."--

This paper makes the case for a "socialist modernism" to understand the development of Alexanderplatz by the regime of the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s. We propose that the socialist era development on Alexanderplatz was staged as the realization of the modernist vision. At the same time, the 1960s design of Alexanderplatz also includes distinctive 'socialist' features, notably the emphasis on centrality and visually dominant tall structures that are in striking contrast to the (Western) high modernist canon. The paper consists of two parts: First we consider the GDR conception of urbanism and the development of the city centre. Alexanderplatz was in many ways the pinnacle of such conception that built on the modernist legacy and imported Soviet ideas of city building. Second, we look at Alexanderplatz through a historical lens. We argue that the GDR development built on the experience of previous modernist development plans for Alexanderplatz in the late 1920s. While Alexanderplatz was to demonstrate the unique socialist capacity to realize the promises of modernity, "Alex," as the square is colloquially termed, also contrasts with stylizations of the "socialist city" as proposed by Sonia Hirt or Iván Szelényi.

Classicism and Modernism in German Administration.
The German administrative System is at once both modem and classical. It is modern because it encompasses a distribution of functions via a series of sub-systems and contains autonomous areas of activity. It is classical because its mode of organisation has lasted despite political changes, because it is enriched by a legal culture which respects the principle of legality and because it is integrated into the world of economies. As in the rest of Europe, the scarcity of public resources dominates the question of the evolution of Germany's administration. This does not necessarily mean a lesser role for the State, but involves a redeployment of State intervention in new areas of activity.