Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : German literature
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Author: Terence Renaud
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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A groundbreaking history of Europe's "new lefts," from the antifascist 1920s to the anti-establishment 1960s In the 1960s, the radical youth of Western Europe's New Left rebelled against the democratic welfare state and their parents' antiquated politics of reform. It was not the first time an upstart leftist movement was built on the ruins of the old. This book traces the history of neoleftism from its antifascist roots in the first half of the twentieth century, to its postwar reconstruction in the 1950s, to its explosive reinvention by the 1960s counterculture. Terence Renaud demonstrates why the left in Europe underwent a series of internal revolts against the organizational forms of established parties and unions. He describes how small groups of militant youth such as New Beginning in Germany tried to sustain grassroots movements without reproducing the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and supposedly obsolete structures of Social Democracy and Communism. Neoleftist militants experimented with alternative modes of organization such as councils, assemblies, and action committees. However, Renaud reveals that these same militants, decades later, often came to defend the very institutions they had opposed in their youth. Providing vital historical perspective on the challenges confronting leftists today, this book tells the story of generations of antifascists, left socialists, and anti-authoritarians who tried to build radical democratic alternatives to capitalism and kindle hope in reactionary times.

Author: David Bathrick
Publisher: New German Critique
ISBN: 9780822368151
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This issue is dedicated to the thought and writing of Miriam Hansen, whose contributions broke ground in film history, film theory, and the politics of mass culture and the public sphere. The collection focuses on the areas in which she was most influential: early cinema, its reception, and the legacy of vernacular modernism, including essays touching on the concept's impact on contemporary thinking about Russian and Chinese cinemas. The issue also features extensive commentary on Hansen's pioneering book Cinema and Experience, expanding on the book's inquiry into the continuing legacy of the Frankfurt School.

Author: Rajendra Roy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870708749
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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"The informal movement that critics like to call the Berlin School, " as director Christoph Hochhäusler puts it, is a loose affiliation of filmmakers who emerged around the time the Berlin Wall fell. The founding figures--Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, and Angela Schanelec--and their younger colleagues are not bound by a manifesto or by any singular aesthetic. Nonetheless, their observant portrayals of characters in flux offer a compelling cinematic expression of the search for new identities in a time of societal change. The films of the Berlin School have resonated profoundly since the mid-1990s, making it one of the most influential auteur movements to emerge from Europe in the new millennium.

Author: Alexander Starritt
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316429791
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE A letter from a German soldier to his grandson recounts the terrors of war on the Eastern Front, and a postwar ordinary life in search of atonement, in this “raw, visceral, and propulsive” novel (New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator, and the difficulty of life after war. Found among his effects after his death, the letter is at once a thrilling story of adventure and a questing rumination on the moral ambiguity of war. In his years spent fighting the Russians and attempting afterward to survive the Gulag, Meissner recounts a life lived in perseverance and atonement. Wracked with shame—both for himself and for Germany—the grandfather explains his dark rationale, exults in the courage of others, and blurs the boundaries of right and wrong. We Germans complicates our most steadfast beliefs and seeks to account for the complicity of an entire country in the perpetration of heinous acts. In this breathless and page-turning story, Alexander Starritt also presents us with a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one's own life at the cost of the lives of others and asks whether we can ever truly atone.

Author: Jonathan Littell
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551993643
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 994

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“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.” Dr. Max Aue, the man at the heart of Jonathan Littell’s stunning and controversial novel The Kindly Ones, personifies the evils of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Highly educated and cultured, he was an ambitious SS officer, a Nazi and mass murderer who was in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. He tells us of his experience during the war. He was present at Auschwitz and Babi Yar, witnessed the battle of Stalingrad, and survived the fall of Berlin — receiving a medal from Hitler personally in the last days of Nazi Germany. Long after the war, he is living a comfortable bourgeois life in France, married with two children, managing a lace factory. And now, having evaded justice, he speaks out, giving a precise and accurate record of his life. The tone of his account is detached, lapidary, and for the most part unrepentant, whether he is describing his participation in mass murder on the Eastern Front, his bureaucratic investigations of labour productivity in the death camps, his casual murder of civilians as he tries to break through Russian lines towards the end of the war, or his fervid and convoluted relationship with his twin sister. Over its course, by entwining Aue’s life with those of historical figures such as Eichmann and Speer, Himmler and indeed Hitler, The Kindly Ones comes to depict the entire architecture of Nazism — from its grandest intellectual pretensions to its most minute, most chilling managerial details and executions. The Kindly Ones presents — with unprecedented realism, meticulous research that is both fascinating and compelling, and brilliant literary accomplishment — the greatest horrors imaginable. “War and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers,” Aue says. In the same way, this powerfully affecting, powerfully challenging book confronts the reader with the most profound questions about history, morality, and art without offering any easy resolution. Written originally in French, and published now in English for the first time, The Kindly Ones has already sold to date well over a million copies in Europe. In France it won two prestigious prizes, including the Goncourt, and has been compared to War and Peace and other great classics of literature.

Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694934
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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‘There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking’: this statement, made by Jürgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy’s epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy ‘lost its extraordinary status’, but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems. The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of ‘background knowledge’. Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a ‘space of reasons’ – even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that ‘philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion’, and explores philosophy’s new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.

Author: Reinhart Koselleck
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611572
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences. Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics. Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite. The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk. Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Author: Anson Rabinbach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781003010692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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"Celebrated as an intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler's rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies around Nazism that took place after the regime's demise, the philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts-from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit-and the role of Auschwitz in European history."--

Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780936591
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Adorno's magnum opus, in which he summarises his life's thinking on concepts of beauty, the ugly and the sublime.