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This first volume of Male Fantasies centers on the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. These men were officers in the Freikorps--private, volunteer armies that roamed Germany, serving the cause of domestic repression in the aftermath of World War I. Klaus Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, as well as cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters. He explores these sources, not to discover what their creators thought about fighting or the fatherland, but to seek out and reconstruct their images of women. He shows that the Freikorps male identity was shaped by the dread and revulsion that characterized their relations with women (real or imagined) and that this dread was, in turn, linked to the aggressive racism and anticommunism at the heart of most fascist movements.

Theweleit’s second volume, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, carries Male Fantasies from the female image to the self-image of manhood and its ritualized forms of mass behavior, culminating in warfare. It also is available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Theweleit’s project in Male Fantasies is to discover the emotional core of fascism as it was revealed in the novels and memoirs of the Freikorps, mercenary bands that fought Germany’s border disputes and put down worker revolts in the aftermath of World War I. His excavation of Freikorps literary remains (and the writings of some of their protofascist contemporaries) enabled Theweleit to reconstruct the mythical content of the fascist imagination. An integral part of Male Fantasies is Theweleit’s choice of illustrations--cartoons, advertisements, engravings, posters--that serve as an ironic commentary on the text and extend its meaning in time and space.

In this second volume of the two-volume work Theweleit discovers how the repudiation of one’s own body--and of femininity--became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid--the “Red Flood,” lava, mud--and the “feminine” emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into a “man of steel.” As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.

The first volume of Male Fantasies, also available from the University of Minnesota Press, deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior that threatens to engulf the male ego.

Happel primarily lived and worked in the vigorous port city of Hamburg, which was a “media center” in terms of the access it offered to a wide library of books in public and private collections. Hamburg’s port status meant it buzzed with news and information, and Happel drew on this flow of data in his novels. His books deal with many topics of current interest—national identity formation, gender and sexualities, Western European encounters with neighbors to the East, confrontations with non-European and non-Western powers and cultures—and they feature multiple media, including news reports, news collections, and travel writings. As a result, Happel’s use of contemporary source material in his novels feeds our current interest in the impact of the production of knowledge on seventeenth-century narrative. Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel explores the narrative wealth and multiversity of Happel’s work, examines Happel’s novels as illustrative of seventeenth-century novel writing in Germany, and investigates the synergistic relationship in Happel’s writings between the booming print media industry and the evolution of the German novel.

Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany examines how doctors, writers, and printers in sixteenth-century Germany responded to the rapid expansion of print and its implications for medical knowledge. The spread of printed texts generated widespread suspicion about print’s reliability as a conduit of information and led writers to reflect on questions of audience, vernacularity, and medical authority in their responses to disease. The book investigates literary texts alongside popular vernacular medical pamphlets on the major epidemic diseases of the period––plague, syphilis, and the English sweating sickness––to reveal a widespread concern with the impact of printed texts on public health. During the 1529 outbreak of the English sweating sickness, this concern culminated in writers’ use of a “rhetoric of virality,” explicitly comparing the circulation of texts to the spread of disease, as they confronted the parallel contagions of disease and information.

Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism.

Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.

Tracing the development of Berlin as a center of music from the eighteenth century to the present, examining how its music survived despite its turbulent history.

Berlin is a music-lover’s paradise, offering up everything from operas to raves. Yet unlike Vienna, Leipzig, or even Nashville, Berlin does not immediately come to mind as a city of music. Instead, its turbulent history evokes images of industry, commerce, militarism, destruction, division, and resurrection. Over the past three centuries, Berlin was the capital of a kingdom, an empire, a republic, and a dictatorship; it was ravaged by war and occupied by foreign powers; and its division and reunification made it a powerful symbol of the Cold War. Through all these highs and lows, the music played on. Music Metropolis Berlin is the first full-length exploration of how Berlin became a city of music against all odds. 

Unlike the other European music centers that stake their reputations on the fame of composers like Bach or Beethoven, Berlin is known for its ensembles, artists, theaters, organizers, intellectuals, and media stars. This is because Berlin took a very different, and almost accidental, route to becoming a city of music. Hampered for centuries by rulers who were more focused on military and industrial expansion than on cultural prestige, Berlin’s musical life prospered thanks to the ambitions of entrepreneurs and politicians who saw the value in serving the ever-changing music public in an expanding urban landscape. By focusing on Berlin as a rapidly developing global capital, Music Metropolis Berlin looks beyond the music, its creators, and its institutions to reveal how political, economic, and social forces fueled the creation of the Berlin metropolis and continue to nurture a vibrant and diverse musical life. 
 

Though many well-known German philosophers have devoted considerable attention to music and its aesthetics, surprisingly few of their writings on the subject have been translated into English. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a philosopher, and Oliver Fürbeth, a musicologist, here fill this important gap for musical scholars and students alike with this compelling guide to the musical discourse of ten of the most important German philosophers, from Kant to Adorno.

Music in German Philosophy includes contributions from a renowned group of ten scholars, including some of today’s most prominent German thinkers, all of whom are specialists in the writers they treat. Each chapter consists of a short biographical sketch of the philosopher concerned, a summary of his writings on aesthetics, and finally a detailed exploration of his thoughts on music. The book is prefaced by the editors’ original introduction, presenting music philosophy in Germany before and after Kant, as well as a new introduction and foreword to this English-language addition, which places contemplations on music by these German philosophers within a broader intellectual climate.