Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex.
Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.
In light of the legendary difficulty of Walter Benjamin's works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to 1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote—and broadcast—numerous scripts, on the order of fireside chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical and theological concerns.
In
Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of "The Task of the Translator;" a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;" a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's essays on fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false-messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years. The radio scripts for children, that is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.
A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute talks—from the perspective of childhood, before an invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the critic's mind—are also by their very nature the closest we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of Walter Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance, Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to Benjamin's life and work.
This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to understand one of this century's most suggestive and perplexing critics.
The Last Major Combat for American Troops in Germany During the Final Days of World War II
By April 1945, the last German counteroffensive in the west had been defeated, the vaunted Siegfried Line was no more, the Rhine River had been crossed, and major German cities were being bombed relentlessly. The war in Europe appeared to be in its final stages. As American and British armies overran central Germany, the Russians were smashing their way from the east toward Berlin. Optimism reigned up and down the Allied lines. But as the American Army’s 100th Infantry Division pushed along the west bank of the Neckar River across from bomb-shattered Heilbronn, resistance unexpectedly stiffened. In that 700-year-old city, a major industrial and communications center still operating for the benefit of the Nazi war machine, Hitler’s subordinates had battened down for a last-ditch stand. For sheer ferocity, it would exceed anything the now-battle-hardened Americans had experienced. Here, American troops faced a grueling campaign of house-to-house fighting, with Hitler Youth, Volkssturm militia, and an SS division attempting to stop the American advance at this critical sector of the European theater. Having been repeatedly targeted by Alllied aircraft, the city resembled a vast, Hellish ruin, and as American soldiers inched their way forward, they encountered booby traps, withering sniper fire, deadly Panzerfaust rounds, and a fanatical enemy. The nine-day battle for Heilbronn would be the last major combat for American troops in Europe. Within three weeks of their securing the city, Hitler would be dead and Germany defeated.
In War in the Ruins: The American Army’s Final Battle Against Nazi Germany, Edward G. Longacre recounts this neglected but essential chapter in the history of World War II, describing the 100th Division’s swift but grueling advance through the Vosges Mountains, their Rhine River crossing, the assault on the historic Maginot Line, and the ominous approach to Heilbronn. The author then describes the entire bitter battle and its aftermath, using private letters, journals, German and American action reports, and other primary source material, to establish War in the Ruins as an essential volume in the history of World War II in Europe.
In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the “wild east,” a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army’s eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime’s annihilation policies.
Ben Shepherd enters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. He investigates how anti-partisan warfare was conducted, not by the generals, but by the far more numerous, average Germans serving as officers in the field. What shaped their behavior was more complex than Nazi ideology alone. The influence of German society, as well as of party and army, together with officers’ grueling yet diverse experience of their environment and enemy, made them perceive the anti-partisan war in varied ways. Reactions ranged from extreme brutality to relative restraint; some sought less to terrorize the native population than to try to win it over. The emerging picture does not dilute the suffering the Wehrmacht’s eastern war inflicted. It shows, however, that properly judging ordinary Germans’ role in that war is more complicated than is indicated by either wholesale condemnation or wholesale exoneration.
This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.
Some Voices of the People
Bärbel Bohley/ "Mother of the Revolution"
Rainer Eppelmann/ Protestant Pastor
Klaus Kaden/ Church Emissary to the Opposition
Hans Modrow/ Former Communist Prime Minister
Ludwig Mehlhorn/ Opposition Theorist
Ingrid Köppe/ Opposition Representative
Frank Eigenfeld/ New Forum
Harald Wagner/ Democracy Now
Sebastian Pflugbeil/ Democratic Strategist
East German Workers
Cornelia Matzke/ Independent Women's Alliance
André Brie/ Party Vice-Chairman
Gerhard Ruden/ Environmental Activist
Werner Bramke/ Party Academic
This book is a profound reexamination of the role of the German army, the Wehrmacht, in World War II. Until very recently, the standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops, and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette, a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity.
This book reveals the Wehrmacht's long-standing prejudices against Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks, beliefs that predated the prophecies of Mein Kampf and the paranoia of National Socialism. Though the sixteen-million-member German army is often portrayed as a victim of Nazi mania, we come to see that from 1941 to 1944 these soldiers were thoroughly involved in the horrific cleansing of Russia and Eastern Europe. Wette compellingly documents Germany's long-term preparation of its army for a race war deemed necessary to safeguard the country's future; World War II was merely the fulfillment of these plans, on a previously unimaginable scale.
This sober indictment of millions of German soldiers reaches beyond the Wehrmacht's complicity to examine how German academics and ordinary citizens avoided confronting this difficult truth at war's end. Wette shows how atrocities against Jews and others were concealed and sanitized, and history rewritten. Only recently has the German public undertaken a reevaluation of this respected national institution--a painful but necessary process if we are to truly comprehend how the Holocaust was carried out and how we have come to understand it.
Between 1939 and 1945 more than 17,000 Catholic German priests and seminarians were conscripted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Men who had devoted their lives to God found themselves advancing the cause of an abhorrent regime. Lauren Faulkner Rossi draws on personal correspondence, official military reports, memoirs, and interviews to present a detailed picture of Catholic priests who served faithfully in the German armed forces in the Second World War. Most of them failed to see the bitter irony of their predicament.
Wehrmacht Priests plumbs the moral justifications of men who were committed to their religious vocation as well as to the cause of German nationalism. In their wartime and postwar writings, these soldiers often stated frankly that they went to war willingly, because it was their spiritual duty to care for their countrymen in uniform. But while some priests became military chaplains, carrying out work consistent with their religious training, most served in medical roles or, in the case of seminarians, in general infantry. Their convictions about their duty only strengthened as Germany waged an increasingly desperate battle against the Soviet Union, which they believed was an existential threat to the Catholic Church and German civilization.
Wehrmacht Priests unpacks the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime, including the Church’s fierce but futile attempts to preserve its independence under Hitler’s dictatorship, its accommodations with the Nazis regarding spiritual care in the military, and the shortcomings of Catholic doctrine in the face of total war and genocide.
"This book will make a valuable contribution to the field of German history, as well as the histories of gender and sexuality. The argument that Weimar feminism did bring about tangible gains for women needs to be made, and Roos has done so convincingly."
---Julia Sneeringer, Queens College
Until 1927, Germany had a system of state-regulated prostitution, under which only those prostitutes who submitted to regular health checks and numerous other restrictions on their personal freedom were tolerated by the police. Male clients of prostitutes were not subject to any controls. The decriminalization of prostitution in 1927 resulted from important postwar gains in women's rights; yet this change---while welcomed by feminists, Social Democrats, and liberals—also mobilized powerful conservative resistance. In the early 1930s, the right-wing backlash against liberal gender reforms like the 1927 prostitution law played a fateful role in the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism.
Weimar through the Lens of Gender combines the political history of early twentieth-century Germany with analytical perspectives derived from the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality. The book's argument will be of interest to a broad readership: specialists in the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality, as well as historians and general readers interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany.
Julia Roos is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Jacket art: "Hamburg, vermutlich St. Pauli, 1920er–30er Jahre," photographer unknown, s/w-Fotografie. (Courtesy of the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte.)
Here is a lively study of marriage and the family during the Reformation, primarily in Gemany and Switzerland, that dispels the commonly held notion of fathers as tyrannical and families as loveless.
Did husbands and wives love one another in Reformation Europe? Did the home and family life matter to most people? In this wide-ranging work, Steven Ozment has gathered the answers of contemporaries to these questions. His subject is the patriarchal family in Germany and Switzerland, primarily among Protestants. But unlike modern scholars from Philippe Ariès to Lawrence Stone, Ozment finds the fathers of early modern Europe sympathetic and even admirable. They were not domineering or loveless men, nor were their homes the training ground for passive citizenry in an age of political absolutism. From prenatal care to graveside grief, they expressed deep love for their wives and children. Rather than a place where women and children were bullied by male chauvinists, the Protestant home was the center of a domestic reform movement against Renaissance antifeminism and was an attempt to resolve the crises of family life. Demanding proper marriages for all women, Martin Luther and his followers suppressed convents and cloisters as the chief institutions of womankind’s sexual repression, cultural deprivation, and male clerical domination. Consent, companionship, and mutual respect became the watchwords of marriage. And because they did, genuine divorce and remarriage became possible among Christians for the first time.
This graceful book restores humanity to the Reformation family and to family history.
In 1934 Theodore Abel went to Germany and offered a prize, under the auspices of Columbia University, for autobiographies of members of the National Socialist movement. The six hundred essays he received constitute the single best source on grassroots opinion within the Nazi Party, and they form the empirical foundation for Abel’s fascinating yet curiously neglected 1938 book. Although a number of scholars have drawn on these reports, Abel’s own treatment has never been surpassed. Of particular value is his presentation of the life histories of a worker, a soldier, an anti-Semite, a middle-class youth, a farmer, and a bank clerk, all of whom explain in their own words why they joined the NSDAP. In the vast literature on National Socialism, no more useful or revealing testimony exists.
In a new Foreword, Thomas Childers discusses how the past half-century of research and writing on Nazi Germany has upheld Abel’s original insights into the broad appeal of the National Socialist movement, thereby reaffirming this work’s enduring value for students of the topic.
Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde demonstrates that the poetics of the Dada movement was profoundly influenced by the telegraph and the technological and social transformations that it brought about in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While telegraphy’s impact on Italian Futurism and German Expressionism is widely acknowledged, its formative role in Dada poetics has been largely neglected. Drawing on media history and theory, avant-garde studies, and German literary studies, Kurt Beals shows how the telegraph and the cultural discourses that surrounded it shaped the radical works of this seminal avant-garde movement. The “nonsense” strain in Dada is frequently seen as a response to the senseless violence of the First World War. Beals argues that it was not just the war that turned Dada poetry into a jumble of senseless signals—it was also the wireless.
As she did in The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living “on the margins” in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women—one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant—left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis’ deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history.
All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l’Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands.
Drawing on Glikl’s memoirs, Marie’s autobiography and correspondence, and Maria’s writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time—childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature—and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe’s troubled and ambivalent relations with other “marginal” peoples.
The publication of Martha B. Helfer’s The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture marks a stunningly original new direction in the interpretation of canonical works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature.
Between 1749 and 1850—the formative years of the so-called Jewish Question in Germany—the emancipation debates over granting full civil and political rights to Jews provided the topical background against which all representations of Jewish characters and concerns in literary texts were read. Helfer focuses sharply on these debates and demonstrates through close readings of works by Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Achim von Arnim, Annette von Droste- Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, and Franz Grillparzer how disciplinary practices within the field of German studies have led to systematic blind spots in the scholarship on anti-Semitism to date.
While all the authors discussed are well known and justly celebrated, the particular works addressed represent an effective mix of enduring classics and less recognized, indeed often scandalously overlooked, texts whose consideration leads to a reevaluation of the author’s more mainstream oeuvre. Although some of the works and authors chosen have previously been noted for their anti-Semitic proclivities, the majority have not, and some have even been marked by German scholarship as philo-Semitic—a view that The Word Unheard undertakes not so much to refute as to complicate, and in the process to question not only these texts but also the deafness of the German scholarly tradition. With implications that reach into many disciplines, The Word Unheard will be a foundational study for all scholars of modern Germany.
Writing with Authority: Students’ Roles as Writers in Cross-National Perspective offers a comparison of student writers in two university cultures—one German and one American—as the students learn to connect their writing to academic content. David Foster demonstrates the effectiveness of using cross-cultural comparisons to assess differences in literacy activities and suggests teaching approaches that will help American students better develop their roles as writers in knowledge-based communities. He proposes that American universities make stronger efforts to nurture the autonomy of American undergraduates as learner-writers and to create apprenticeship experiences that more closely reflect the realities of working in the academic community.
This comparative analysis identifies crucial differences in the ways German and American students learn to become academic writers, emphasizing two significant issues: the importance of self-directed, long-term planning and goal setting in developing knowledge-based projects and the impact of time structures on students’ writing practices. Foster suggests that students learn to write as knowledge makers, using cumulative, recursive task development as reflexive writing practices. He argues for the full integration of extended, self-managed, knowledge-based writing tasks into the American undergraduate curriculum from the onset of college study.
A cross-national perspective offers important insights into the conditions that influence novice writers, Foster says, including secondary preparations and transitions to postsecondary study. Foster proposes that students be challenged to write transformatively—to master new forms of authorship and authority based on self-directed planning, researching, and writing in specific academic communities. The text also addresses contested issues of power relations in students’ roles as academic writers and their perception of personal authority and freedom as writers.
A course model incorporates significant, self-directed writing projects to help students build sustainable roles as transformative writers, outlines “change goals” to help teachers develop curricular structures that support cumulative writing projects across the undergraduate curriculum, and shows how teachers can develop self-directed writing projects in a variety of program environments.
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