Results by title
3745 books match the query 'Europe' and 53 start with j
Just Language
Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish Exile, and the Critique of Linguistic ViolenceDennis Johannßen
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Just Language revisits the Weimar period and its representation in the postwar years to explore narratives of linguistic resistance in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. How did this generation of exile writers grapple with their experiences of oppression and persecution? How did they create a language of resistance during the decades that prepared the Third Reich and the Shoah?
Facing the devastations of World War I, the book explores how Walter Benjamin analyzed language’s ability to radically break the cyclical violence of war and examines his opposition to expansionism and imperialism in Weimar education and culture. Based on Benjamin’s analysis, Johannßen traces the postwar responses of Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. While Arendt proposed strategies of metaphorical thinking to counteract the formation of totalitarianism, Celan mobilized silence as a poetic counterforce against oppression and erasure. Just Language argues that every linguistic act and practice, no matter how small or marginalized, entails the ethical task of opposing the normalization and institutionalization of political violence. By tracing how Benjamin and his interlocutors struggled against German fascism, Johannßen presents a memory-based critique of linguistic violence, opening a dialogue between German-Jewish writers and today’s debates on nondiscrimination, propaganda, and social justice.
Just Wonder
Shifting Perspectives in TraditionPauline Greenhill
Utah State University Press, 2024
These essays examine fairy tales and other traditional forms of the fantastic and the real to offer alternative expressions of justice relevant to gender, sex, sexuality, environment, Indigeneity, class, ability, race, decolonizing, and human and nonhuman relations. By analyzing fairy tales and wonder texts from various media through an intersectional feminist lens, Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme consider how wonder genres and forms blend with diverse conceptions of seeking and enacting justice. International collaborators—both established and emerging scholars who self-identify with different subjectivities, locations, and generations and come from an impressive range of inter/disciplines—engage with contemporary and historical texts from various languages and cultural contexts, including interventions, counterparts, and comparisons to the fairy tale. Just Wonder offers a critical look at how creative wondering can expand the ability to resist modes of oppression while fostering equity, as well as encourage curiosity and imagination.
In a world that can be overwhelming and precarious, this book presents scholarly, artistic, personal, and collective-action interventions to identify and respond to injustice while centering wonder and, thus, imagination, questioning, and hope. Just Wonder will appeal to fairy-tale scholars; folklorists; students and scholars of film, media studies, and cultural studies; as well as a general audience.
Justice Imperiled
The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar GermanyDouglas G. Morris
University of Michigan Press, 2005
-Sister Helen Prejean
Justice Imperiled is the story of the brilliant lawyer Max Hirschberg, one of Germany's most courageous defenders of justice in the face of Hitler's rise to power.
Hirschberg lived an extraordinary life at a defining moment in German and European history. By the time he fled Nazi Germany in 1934, he had argued a series of cases in Munich's courtrooms that shed light on the history of political justice in pre-Nazi Germany and, by extension, the miscarriage of justice in all Western democracies.
Hirschberg was a rare figure: he fought for cases that reflected the new democracy rather than the old monarchy, that valued equality rather than hierarchy, and that showed respect for workers as well as aristocrats.
Throughout the Weimar period Hirschberg squared off in court against Munich's conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis-twice facing Hitler himself. As he litigated politically charged disputes, he also began fighting to reverse the criminal convictions of innocent defendants and to study what mistaken verdicts teach us about the criminal justice system as a whole.
In a unique blend of biography and courtroom drama, Justice Imperiled captures the excitement of Hirschberg's actual cases and presents legal battles that still rage, in different circumstances, to this day.