Suchergebnisse

Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jews. Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the

At the end of WWII, Martin Heidegger & Hannah Arendt both attempted philosophical articulations of the meaning of the Nazi death camps. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1949), Arendt discussed the "insane mass manufacture of corpses." In two lectures he gave in Bremen, Heidegger mentioned the "fabrication of corpses in gas chambers & death camps." Later on he described the "alienation of the modern world caused by the dominance of technology," saying that technology destroys the essence of being. He never mentioned the Holocaust again, & began to speak in the passive tense of what happened in the camps, not that the Germans killed the Jews, but "they' were liquidated." In "What Is Existential Philosophy" (1946), Arendt criticized Heidegger's view of the authenticity of the Holocaust & the individuality of those who died during it. She tried to understand the conditions that might make mass death possible, & explored the impact of such horror on human nature. Other incidents of genocide are considered in light of Heidegger's & Arendt's probings into death, & other philosophies of the meaning of death, especially mass death, are put forth. J. Stanton

In this article, I will discuss how my own work on a project called "Hypermedia Berlin"—a Web-based study of Berlin's "cultural geography"—can be situated in a lineage that goes back to Hoffmann's reflection on media and represents another instantiation of what Hinrich Seeba has called "Berlin" as a site for the development of new cultural-critical methodologies for interdisciplinary German Studies.

Founded in 1919, UCLA is nearing its first centenary, but the university builds on humanistic and liberal arts traditions that are many centuries long and globally diffused. The core disciplines that we recognize today as comprising the Humanities have deep roots in these institutional, cultural, and technological histories. But yet, for all its grand ambitions for reckoning with the world, the university has remained by and large an isolated institution, walled in and often walled off from its surrounding community, accessible to a chosen few, stratified by economic, social, and racial differences, and perhaps too invested in the security of its storied past. The Urban Humanities initiative is an attempt both to apply conventional tools in unconventional ways and to invent new tools by respecting the fundamental virtue of bricks, namely their porous nature. Is it possible to decolonize knowledge? If so, the studio courses it develops will have profound implications for the role of the classroom, syllabus, and for rethinking and developing new knowledge and practices.

Introduction / Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner -- Part I. The stakes of narrative: Historical truth, estrangement, and disbelief / Hayden White -- On "historical modernism": a response to Hayden White / Saul Friedländer -- Sense and sensibility: the complicated Holocaust realism of Christopher Browning / Wulf Kansteiner -- A reply to Wulf Kansteiner / Christopher R. Browning -- Scales of postmemory: six of six million / Ann Rigney -- Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: a search for six of six million -- The death of the witness; or, The persistence of the differend / Marc Nichanian -- Part II. Remediations of the archive: The ethics of the algorithm: close and distant listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive / Todd Presner -- On the ethics of technology and testimony / Stephen D. Smith -- A "spatial turn" in Holocaust Studies? / Claudio Fogu -- Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul B. Jaskot, contributing authors of Geographies of the Holocaust -- Freeze-framing: temporality and the archive in Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer / Nitzan Lebovic -- Witnessing the archive / Yael Hersonski -- Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: Peter Eisenman's memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe / Gavriel D. Rosenfeld -- Berlin memorial redux / Peter Eisenman -- Part III. The politics of exceptionality: The Holocaust as genocide: experiential uniqueness and integrated history / Omer Bartov -- Anxieties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies / A. Dirk Moses -- The witness as "world" traveler: multidirectional memory and Holocaust internationalism before human rights / Michael Rothberg -- Fiction and solicitude: ethics and the conditions for survival / Judith Butler -- Catastrophes: afterlives of the exceptionality paradigm in Holocaust Studies / Elisabeth Weber -- Epilogue: Interview with Saul Friedländer

Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice , and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim--Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles--with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote "literary justice" in Los Angeles.