Mountains and the German Mind

Mountains and the German Mind PDF Author: Sean Moore Ireton
Publisher: Studies in German Literature L
ISBN: 1640140476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.

Mountains and the German Mind

Mountains and the German Mind PDF Author: Sean Moore Ireton
Publisher: Studies in German Literature L
ISBN: 1640140476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.

"Mountain of Destiny"

Author: Harald Höbusch
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A study of how Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest peak on earth, became the German mountain of the mind.

Heights of Reflection

Heights of Reflection PDF Author: Sean Moore Ireton
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571135022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Examines the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Mountains have always stirred the human imagination, playing a crucial role in the cultural evolution of peoples around the globe and becoming infused with meaning in the process. Beyond their geographical-geological significance, mountains affect the topography of the mind, whether as objects of peril or attraction, of spiritual enlightenment or existential fulfillment, of philosophical contemplation or aesthetic inspiration. This volume challenges the oversimplified assumption that human interaction with mountains is a distinctly modern development, one that began with the empowerment of the individual in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic subjectivity. These essays by European and North American scholars examine the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on the interaction between humans and the alpineenvironment. The contributors consider mountains not as mere symbolic tropes or literary metaphors, but as constituting a tangible reality that informs the experiences and ideas of writers, naturalists, philosophers, filmmakers, and composers. Overall, this volume seeks to provide multiple answers to questions regarding the cultural significance of mountains as well as the physical practice of climbing them. Contributors: Peter Arnds, Olaf Berwald, Albrecht Classen, Roger Cook, Scott Denham, Sean Franzel, Christof Hamann, Harald Höbusch, Dan Hooley, Peter Höyng, Sean Ireton, Oliver Lubrich, Anthony Ozturk, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan, Johannes Türk, Sabine Wilke, Wilfried Wilms. SEAN IRETON is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri. CAROLINE SCHAUMANN is Professor of German Studies at Emory University.

Hitler's Monsters

Hitler's Monsters PDF Author: Eric Kurlander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300190379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
“A dense and scholarly book about . . . the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult . . . reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.”—Daily Telegraph The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. “[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—The Washington Post “Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish.”—The Spectator “A trustworthy [book] on an extraordinary subject.”—The Times “A fascinating look at a little-understood aspect of fascism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review

Orderly and Humane

Orderly and Humane PDF Author: R. M. Douglas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

On Hitler's Mountain

On Hitler's Mountain PDF Author: Irmgard A. Hunt
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062119893
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A German woman recounts her youth during World War II under Hitler’s regime in this “richly texture memoir” (Publishers Weekly). Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden—just steps from Adolf Hitler’s alpine retreat—Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war—and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime—aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in. In May 1945, an eleven-year-old Hunt watched American troops occupy Hitler’s mountain retreat, signaling the end of the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. As the Nazi crimes began to be accounted for, many Germans tried to deny the truth of what had occurred; Hunt, in contrast, was determined to know and face the facts of her country’s criminal past. On Hitler’s Mountain is more than a memoir—it is a portrait of a nation that lost its moral compass. It is a provocative story of a family and a community in a period and location in history that, though it is fast becoming remote to us, has important resonance for our own time.

Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity

Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity PDF Author: Dawn Hollis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350162841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Throughout the longue dureé of Western culture, how have people represented mountains as landscapes of the imagination and as places of real experience? In what ways has human understanding of mountains changed – or stayed the same? Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity opens up a new conversation between ancient and modern engagements with mountains. It highlights the ongoing relevance of ancient understandings of mountain environments to the postclassical and present-day world, while also suggesting ways in which modern approaches to landscape can generate new questions about premodern responses. It brings together experts from across many different disciplines and periods, offering case studies on topics ranging from classical Greek drama to Renaissance art, and from early modern natural philosophy to nineteenth-century travel writing. Throughout, essays engage with key themes of temporality, knowledge, identity, and experience in the mountain landscape. As a whole, the volume suggests that modern responses to mountains participate in rhetorical and experiential patterns that stretch right back to the ancient Mediterranean. It also makes the case for collaborative, cross-period research as a route both for understanding human relations with the natural world in the past, and informing them in the present.

Secularism and Hermeneutics

Secularism and Hermeneutics PDF Author: Yael Almog
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251253
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, established biblical readers as a coherent collective. In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, she contends, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging. Secularism and Hermeneutics reveals the tension between textual exegesis and confessional belonging and challenges the modern presumption that interpretation is indifferent to religious concerns.

Writing the Mountains

Writing the Mountains PDF Author: Jens Klenner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Writing the Mountains reconsiders the role of mountains in German language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation. In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges often features as passive settings, or which trace the influence of geographical and geological sciences in literary productions, this study argues for the dynamic role in literature of presumably rigid mineral structures. In German-language fiction after 1800, the counter-intuitive topology of rocky mountain ranges and unfathomable subterranean depths of the Alpine imaginary functions as a space of exception which appears to reconfirm and radically challenge the foundations of Enlightenment thought. Writing the Mountains reads the mountain range as a rigid yet permeable liminal space. Within this zone, semiotic orders are unsettled, as is the division between organic and inorganic, between the human and the other.