A landmark book, David Pan’s Sacrifice in the Modern World seeks to explain the continuing emphasis, in modern times, on sacrifice. Pan specifically turns to the culture of sacrifice—ritualized and sanctified death—in Nazi Germany, showing how that regime co-opted an existing discussion of sacrifice and infused it with its own mythology. Pan suggests that sacrifice is a key value in every society but that there is a preponderance of association of sacrifice with Nazi culture and therefore a largely pejorative treatment of sacrifice.

Surveying the arguments of philosopher Alfred Baeumler and other symptomatic Nazi texts, Pan shows how the Nazis’ reactionary intellec­tual culture unraveled much of the Enlightenment project. In so doing, he is able to offer a compelling new perspective on basic theoretical concepts in the work of Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno, Bataille, Girard, and others. He posits that it is only by clearing our way through the Nazis’ misuse of sacrifice that we can understand the durability of sacrifi­cial structures that—following several of the theorists he discusses— establish the fundamental values by which we live our lives.

Rather than condemning the Nazi appeal to sacrifice itself, this book looks at the particular ways in which sacrifice was distributed and structured within that society. All cultures must grapple with the existential violence of the human condition, and they frequently do so through aesthetic treatments of sacrifice, rooted in myths and tradi­tions. Pan argues that our task is not to eradicate these traditions but to engage them by carefully evaluating the commitments and values that they imply.

Sex Changes with Kleist analyzes how the dramatist and poet Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) responded to the change in the conception of sex and gender that occurred in the eighteenth century. Specifically, Katrin Pahl shows that Kleist resisted the shift from a one-sex to the two-sex and complementary gender system that is still prevalent today. With creative close readings engaging all eight of his plays, Pahl probes Kleist’s appreciation for incoherence, his experimentation with alternative symbolic orders, his provocative understanding of emotion, and his camp humor. Pahl demonstrates that rather than preparing modern homosexuality, Kleist puts an end to modern gender norms even before they take hold and refuses the oppositional organization of sexual desire into homosexual and heterosexual that sprouts from these norms.

Focusing on the theatricality of Kleist’s interventions in the performance of gender, sexuality, and emotion and examining how his dramatic texts unhinge major tenets of classical European theater, Sex Changes with Kleist is vital reading for anyone interested in queer studies, feminist studies, performance studies, literary studies, or emotion studies. This book changes our understanding of Kleist and breathes new life into queer thought.

John C. Osborne’s hitherto unpublished translation, Simplicissimus , The German Adventurer, by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, is now available to an English-speaking audience worldwide.  A searing coming to terms with the Thirty Years’ War and the chaos that it drew in its wake, this early novel is arguably the most important German literary work of the seventeenth century.

Tönle Bintarn's story takes place in the Veneto region, which once bordered the Austro-Hungarian Empire and where smuggling provided a means of subsistence to the peasants. Having run afoul of revenue agents, Tönle must seek refuge beyond the frontier in Central Europe, where year after year he survives by doing odd jobs and working as an itinerant print peddler, a horse trainer, and a gardener. When he is pardoned he returns home for good to find his children are grown and nothing remains for him but to tend his sheep, while around him Europe spins toward the catastrophe of the Great War--the conflict that will destroy Veneto's unique way of life.

Interruption is often read as the foundational gesture of modernity—the means through which modernity asserts its existence by claiming its discontinuity with the past. Exposing the limitations of such an understanding, this book offers a very different approach: here, modernity is the site that poses the question of how we are to continue when every attempt to think and understand the present is marked by the necessity of an interruption. Through a reading of Walter Benjamin's writings—particularly on interruption, fashion, and Jugendstil (or Art Nouveau)—Andrew Benjamin in this work offers a sustained meditation on the role of interruption in modernity. His book departs from and elaborates an important but overlooked dimension of Benjamin's discourse: the question of style as it bears upon temporality and spatiality. Extending this meditation in exciting and unexpected ways--toward problems of cosmopolitanism, immigration, and the graphically pornographic, for instance—the author is able to translate Benjamin's multifaceted formulations on style, the dialectical image, awakening, temporality, and spatiality into lucid and highly intelligent stylistics underscoring the philosophical notions of Schein and Erscheining, the interruptions of modernity, and the politics of sameness and otherness.

Nothing less than a rethinking of the conditions of Western art as it relates to politics, architecture, and time, this study of Walter Benjamin's modernity in temporal and spatial terms is a provocative and original work of philosophy in its own right—a work that suggests that the time has come to revise existing paradigms.