Suchergebnisse

Even a cursory glance at the artistic projects and aesthetic conceptions that take shape in the German-speaking parts of Central Europe between 1890 and 1930 and that have since come to be viewed as indispensable to an understanding of German Modernism will yield an enormous variety of projects. From the early expressionist projects of the Brücke and the Viennese Sezession to the brutally satiric and anti-aestheticist indictments of a bankrupt bourgeois culture in Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, or Max Beckmann in the visual arts; from the second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern to the unique amalgamation of seemingly disparate and often brilliantly adaptive styles in late-or avowedly post-Romantic composers such as Mahler, Berg, Zemlinski, Korngold, or Kurt Weill; and from the post-Humanism of such dissimilar figures as the post-Nietzschean pessimist Oswald Spengler and the only slightly more upbeat projects of Max Weber and Georg Simmel to the epigrammatic concision of Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein, German Modernism, characterized by a propensity for manifesto-style self-authorization, claims programmatic status for itself even is it comprises enormously diverse and distinctive figures.

A reassessment of post-1945 German literary production in the East & West. Socialist realism is historically located & successive movements in its transformation are analyzed: the committed literature characteristics of the end of the Weimar Republic & on the eve of the Linkskurve debates; the critical literature written & against the Socialist United Party (SED) debates in the first decade of the German Democratic Republic; & the wavering literature of the 1960s, written on the eve of the reemergence of a critical socialist realism that would openly borrow from Weimar realism. The newly fashionable & elitist aestheticism of Bohrer & Ulrich Greiner are opposed with a conception of German studies that investigates cultural practices by focusing on the interplay of literary text, politics, & history by appropriating the most advanced formalist reading strategies. The approach employed refuses to consider the dominant Western notions of literary excellence as well as the SED's definition of socialist realism as a closed artistic system. It is concluded that current West German condemnations of East German intellectuals has reinvigorated the melodramatic conflict characteristics of Cold war discourse. D. Schwartz

Long admired for judicious analysis steeped in history, from Schoenbergian Brahms to Brahmsian Schoenberg, Walter Frisch, in German Modernism: Music and the Arts, topples a historiography in place for at least sixty years. Chapters on ''Ambivalent Modernism" (Parsifal) and "Regressive Modernism" (Pfitzner's Palestrina) serve as bookends. Reger receives twenty-three pages, Schoenberg four-and those four on the works in a performance that set Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc aglow. The book traverses a half-century of early modernism, as Frisch occasionally specifies, from 1870 to 1920. If the book's title overreaches, laying claim to the entire sweep of German modernism, one need only recall that at the time, the music of Wagner and Strauss, Mahler and Schreker, sparked debates over "modern" music, whereas Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg fell by the wayside, receiving scant notice in the annals of history and more scorn than recognition from critics. All this would change, but only after World War I, when musical life became politicized and polarized, each camp with its own advocates. Frisch has a different story, and one worth telling.

Thomas Pfau (Duke University) explores the radical transformation of the Bildungsroman - and of the image ( Bild ) as its narrative, speculative fuel - in 'The Magic Mountain'. Contrasting Mann's narrative process with that of Goethe and Hegel, and drawing on the sociological writings of Georg Simmel and Arnold Gehlen, Pfau reads Mann's novel as decisively breaking with Romanticism's self-generating, organicist, and teleological conception of cultural narrative.