The Illusion of Nostalgia: The German Quest for the ‘Hellenic Magic Mountain’

This collection of original essays examines various ways in which cultural trends and social developments have influenced each other in modern German history. Each contribution explores some aspect of either high (elite) or low (popular) culture. A thoughtful introduction by Leonard Krieger draws together many of the common themes and important questions raised in the individual studies: the interplay of ideas and social forces in German history; the response of the German elite to the emergence of modern social relations and mass culture; and the relation between elite and popular culture. David King presents a broad interpretation of Germany's resistance to modern Western cultural values and social institutuions and offers a new perspective on Germany's divergence from the Western core of modern civilization. Charles McClelland examines the values and subculture of Germany's academic elite during the nineteenth century and explains why the leadership of that elite declined as Germany modernized. David Gross traces the evolution of theories and critiques of everyday German culture in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Gary Stark analyzes the growth of the cinema in Germany before the First World War and the response of the nation's political and cultural elite to this new form of popular culture. Vernon Lidtke's essay examines the use of music and song by the Nazi movement, finding the Nazi music mirrored the eclectic origins, broad social appeal, and emotional dynamism of National Socialism and became an effective means of mobilizing and socializing the German masses after 1933. Collectively, the essays in this volume yield new insights into modern German culture by revealing its social dimensions.

List of illustrations List of contributors List of abbreviations Chronology In search of German culture: an introduction Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will 1. The citizen and the state in modern Germany Peter Pulzer 2. German national identity John Breuilly 3. Elites and class structure Hans-Georg Betz 4. Jews in German society Andrei S. Markovits, Beth Simone Noveck and Carolyn Hoefig 5. Non-German minorities, women and the emergence of civil society Eva Kolinsky 6. Critiques of culture Andrew Bowie 7. The functions of 'Volkskultur', mass culture and alternative culture Wilfried van der Will 8. The development of German prose fiction Martin Swales 9. Modern German poetry Karen Leeder 10. German drama, theatre and dance Michael Patterson and Michael Huxley 11. Music in modern German culture Erik Levi 12. Modern German art Irit Rogoff 13. Modern German architecture Iain Boyd Whyte 14. German cinema Martin Brady and Helen Hughes 15. The media of mass communication: the press, radio and television Holger Briel Index.

Written between 1916 and 1917, between the battlefields of the First World War and the admission to a war psychiatric hospital, Walter Hasenclever’s Antigone provides an ideal ground – even if extremely problematic – to problematize the impact of the figure at the center of Sophocles’ tragedy on modern German culture and literature. Placed at an almost symmetrical distance between Hölderlin’s famous translation/rewriting and the Brechtian reworking of the years after the Second World War, Hasenclever’s drama hints at new potential meanings and transformations of the Sophocles myth, without succeeding in carrying out its potentialities. Beyond the historicalliterary categories, the aporias of this rewriting of Sophocles tragedy can constitute, today, the main reason for a re-reading of this drama.

Reviewed by: Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist by Ellwood Wiggins Eleanor ter Horst Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist. By Ellwood Wiggins. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. Pp xvii + 319. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-1684480371. Ellwood Wiggins’s study of anagnorisis in ancient and modern texts encourages us to examine anew a term from Aristotle’s Poetics that has been extensively analyzed and explicated by literary theorists and philosophers, thus performing the very action (re-cognition, or knowing again) that it takes as the object of its observations. Indeed, the relationship between performance and anagnorisis is the major focus of the book, with Wiggins inviting the reader to view recognition not as a singular event in time, but as a process involving the give-and-take of improvised performance between two people. Wiggins uses key terms from Aristotle’s definition of anagnorisis to structure his book, which draws parallels between ancient Greek (primarily Homer’s Odyssey) and modern (Shakespeare as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German) texts’ exploration of concepts such as “the self (to auto),” “change (metabolē),” “knowledge (gnōsis),” “friendship (philia),” and “fortune (tukhē).” Part 1 of the book involves the ancient world and texts, part 2 the modern. All of these key terms appear in Aristotle’s brief but cryptic definition of anagnoris (Poetics II, 1452a, 29–31), which Wiggins translates thus, “Recognition, just as the name itself signifies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, into either friendship or enmity, among those bound for good or bad fortune” (21). Throughout the book, Wiggins displays an impressive command of ancient Greek, and shows a sensitivity to Aristotle’s syntax and use of language. While the term “the self (to auto)” is not to be found in this passage of the Poetics (the word, “tounoma,” which Wiggins translates as “the name itself” would be more literally translated simply as “the name”), Wiggins does provide an illuminating analysis of Plato’s use of the term to auto (“the self” or “the same”) in the Alcibiades. Wiggins’s ability to read ancient Greek as well as modern German- and English- language texts in the original languages enables him to draw significant parallels between ancient and modern modes of representation. Many of his detailed textual analyses yield original insights. For example, he shows how the character of Penelope in the Odyssey is essentially illegible to other characters, as well as to the readers of the epic: we are unable to discern when and how she recognizes Odysseus. Wiggins’s claim is that the opaqueness of Penelope’s knowledge and motives is key to understanding how both literary interpretation and the evaluation of other humans operate: an interpretation is both necessary and elusive. His readings of modern texts, like Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and [End Page 605] “Glückliches Ereignis,” and Kleist’s Penthesilea, are also original, convincing, and based on analysis of passages and key terms in the texts. One of his more surprising claims is the paradox that recognition is a process involving a theatrical performance of one’s identity for another, and thus includes an element of deception. Wiggins elucidates this claim with respect to the long process of testing and role-playing that occurs between Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey following the wanderer’s homecoming. He discerns a similar process at work in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, in the shifting interactions between Thoas and Iphigenie, which depend on her playing a variety of roles with respect to him, from object of his erotic desire to friend to daughter, in order to elicit his permission for the Greeks to depart, and his final, opaque pronouncement, “Lebt wohl.” Like Aristotle himself, Wiggins ventures beyond literary analysis into areas such as political theory and ethics. A key concept for this multidisciplinary venture is the term “friendship (philia),” which Wiggins uses to make a distinction between ancient Greek and Christian ethics. For ancient Greeks, ethical behavior involved helping one’s friends and doing harm to one’s enemies, while Christian ethics requires forgiveness of one’s foes. Wiggins...

In Framing Attention, Lutz Koepnick explores different concepts of the window-in both a literal and a figurative sense-as manifested in various visual forms in German culture from the nineteenth century to the present. He offers a new interpretation of how evolving ways of seeing have characterized and defined modernity. Koepnick examines the role and representation of window frames in modern German culture-in painting, photography, architecture, and literature, on the stage and in public transportation systems, on the film screen and on television. He presents such frames as interfaces that negotiate competing visions of past and present, body and community, attentiveness and distraction. From Adolph Menzel's window paintings of the 1840s to Nam June Paik's experiments with television screens, from Richard Wagner's retooling of the proscenium stage to Adolf Hitler's use of a window as a means of political self-promotion, Framing Attention offers a theoretically incisive understanding of how windows shape and reframe the way we see the world around us and our place within it.

Stefan George (1868-1933) was one of the most important figures in modern German culture. His poetry, in its originality and impact, has been ranked with that of Goethe and Holderlin. Yet George's reach extended beyond the sphere of literature. In the early 1900s, he gathered around himself a circle of disciples who subscribed to his vision of comprehensive cultural-spiritual renewal and sought to turn it into reality. The ideas of the George Circle profoundly affected Germany's educated middle class, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, when their critique of bourgeois liberalism, materialism, and scholarship (Wissenschaft) as well as their call for new forms of leadership (Herrschaft) and a new Reich found wider resonance. The essays collected in the present volume critically re-examine these ideas, their contexts, and their influence. They provide new perspectives on the intersection of culture and politics in the works of the George Circle, not least its ambivalent relationship to National Socialism. Contributors: Adam Bisno, Richard Faber, Rudiger Gorner, Peter Hoffmann, Thomas Karlauf, Melissa S. Lane, Robert E. Lerner, David Midgley, Robert E. Norton, Ray Ockenden, Ute Oelmann, Martin A. Ruehl, Bertram Schefold. Melissa S. Lane is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Martin A. Ruehl is Lecturer in German Thought and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.

Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption opens with an outspoken critique of German idealism's rejection of the body's (i.e., the individual person's) independence from the body politic. Even though he first referred to philosophy in general and has often been said not to distinguish between ancient Greek and modern German thought, in the course of the introduction to The Star he did, indeed, mark Hegel and Kant as a break within Western metaphysics. On the battlefields of World War I, Rosenzweig emphasized that, rather than trying to escape any kind of fetters (irgendwelchen Fesseln entfliehen)-as philosophy sets out to convince usman... wants to remain, he wants to-live.' To be sure, he did not see any causal connection that would tie a philosophical dualism between immanence and transcendence-or, between belief and knowledge-to the carnage perpetrated in World War I. On the contrary, blood had been shed in order to increase a nation's economic and political influence. However, Rosenzweig saw, behind this nationalist aggrandizement, a pseudotheological conflation of the immanent with the transcendent. Instead of being aware of the gulf that lies between these two entities, nationalist politicians set out to deify the immanent notions of nation and Volk.

Reviewed by: Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture Jeffrey L. Sammons Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture. Edited by Stefani Engelstein and Carl Niekerk. Amsterdam and London: Rodopi, 2011. Pp. 296. Cloth $89.00. ISBN 978-9042032958. A thematically organized volume often generates a centrifugal proliferation of senses of its topic; thus in the case of this book, violence is sometimes taken literally, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes physically, sometimes psychologically, sometimes overtly, sometimes needing to be teased out by theory. A long, learned introduction on the relationship of violence to social formations and dynamics, reviewing theories from Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant through Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Daniel Goldhagen, and several other contemporaries, proposes “interrogating notions of culture, community, and agency as constitutive for theories of violence” (13). But as there is no central thesis about the history of German violence, there is nothing for the reviewer to do but to touch upon the twelve contributions separately. In a section concerned with the French Revolution and its aftermath, Stephanie M. Hilger finds in Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf “an allegory for search of a new viable body politic” (38), which turns out to be illusory and without closure; along the way Hilger defends Huber’s right not to be a feminist of our time. In a difficult study of Heinrich von Kleist, inflected by deconstruction, the editor Stefani Engelstein finds a linkage among fatherland, patriotism, filial duty, and violence “as the only alternative to a vacuum of signification” (65); the severe treatment of Die Hermannsschlacht is oddly indifferent to the political context or Kleist’s purpose. More persuasive is Jeffrey Grossman’s elucidation of the “complex and subtle mechanisms” (67) violence can take in Heinrich Heine’s early poetry and reportage from Paris. Heine perceived the violence both in the aristocratic order and in revolution. A second section on imagining the primitive opens with Laurie Johnson’s ascription of the escalating violence of Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell to male hysteria and the psychology of “living through the tensions of Enlightenment, and of a violent period” (101). In a fine analysis of Wilhelm Raabe’s Zum wilden Mann, Lynne Tatlock shows that the central image refers to “the relationship of the violence [Agonista] embodies to human community and social order” in general (120); Kristeller is not the saintly figure he is often taken to be, but an evader of his little fortune’s origin in violence. The editor Carl Niekerk looks thoughtfully at Ödon von Horváth’s novel of fascism, Jugend ohne Gott, through the prism of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung. A third section on the modern period begins with a pessimistic interpretation of the course of Jewish emancipation by Barbara Fischer (mourned for her death in an accident), stressing how the Jewish enthusiasm for Goethe and Lessing was turned against them with a charge of an alien occupation of German culture. Another deconstructionist, Mark Christian Thompson, tackles the enigma in Franz Kafka’s Der Verschollene of Karl Rossmann’s identification of himself as “negro” when applying [End Page 151] to “Das Naturtheater von Oklahama,” with an assumption that Karl is on the way to becoming an artist; perhaps “artiste,” or performer, would be a better term. Drawing from Kafka’s source text, Arthur Holitscher’s Amerika heute und morgen (which Thompson seems to think no one else has considered), he argues for an identification of Jew and black. I am a little skeptical about this, but am not an expert, though doubtless it is true that Kafka commands “an aesthetic system of indeterminacy” (197). I am even less competent to comment on Claudia Berger’s elucidation of Joe May’s 1921 film, Das indische Grabmal, or, in the fourth section on modernism and representation, on Lutz Koepnick’s distinction of the construction versus the instrumentalization of violence in photography and cinema, though his essay is interesting even for an unversed reader. In this section Patrizia McBride applies the violence of Kurt Schwitters’s cut-and-paste montages to his prose texts. In a different genre, Peter M. McIsaac describes the evolution and present layout...

Spirit and system: media, intellectuals, and the dialectic in modern German culture – By Dominic Boyer

It is, of course, far too early to consider what the long-term consequences for the EU of the British exit will be. Is it the first nail in the ultimate coffin, or the trigger for a re-configuratio...

MLR, .,   character who speaks. Chapter  examines the difficulties of conveying the shis in tone and situation that this rich polymetric verse marks in the original. Jeffs examines the opening stanzas of the four plays that were staged in the Swan to exemplify the kinds of decisions that were taken to preserve some sense of the original verse structure. Chapter  augments the analysis of these decisions with respect to characterization, while Chapter  analyses the deployment of metatheatrical moments, particularly with respect to the play-within-the-play sequences, ceremonies, and role-play. ese two chapters offer a wealth of individual case studies of how the texts were explored in rehearsal and how they worked in performance. e final chapter considers the impact that the RSC’s Golden Age season has had on subsequent productions in the US, Spain, and, more centrally, the UK until . Apart from briefly considering two American stagings of e Dog in the Manger, it traces Boswell’s subsequent comedia productions, first in Madrid with Rakatá (El perro del hortelano in – and Fuente Ovejuna in , both performed in Spanish) and then in Bath. As Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio in the latter city, he produced e Phoenix of Madrid (a reworking of No hay burlas con el amor) by Calderón in , and then a three-play season in : A Lady of Little Sense (La dama boba) by Lope de Vega, Don Gil of the Green Breeches (Don Gil de las calzas verdes) by Tirso de Molina, and Punishment without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza) by Lope de Vega. Jeffs’s book is a stimulating and hugely detailed account of the making of the landmark RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season. It analyses the challenges of working on the interface between two very different dramatic traditions and languages, displaying rigorous linguistic, cultural, and scholarly awareness of the processes of translation and adaptation. is book proposes a model to foster more widespread production of these plays, a kind of collaborative toolbox to revive Spanish comedias for modern English-speaking audiences in the twenty-first century. We can only hope that theatre practitioners and producers may draw inspiration from Jeffs’s painstaking work to revive more of the hidden treasures of Spain’s rich dramatic heritage. U  L J A. P D Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture. By A F. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. . xx+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Precarious Times takes as its starting point fundamental shis in the temporal conditions of the twenty-first century brought about by the interconnected forces of digitization, globalization, and accelerated capitalism. As Anne Fuchs observes, much recent criticism on these matters is imbued with ‘temporal anxieties’ (p. ) and pervaded by a crisis narrative that paints present-day experiences of time as stagnant, flat, disembedded, or atomized. Wary of such ‘monolithic and deterministic ’ (p. ) perspectives, Fuchs turns to the realm of culture to draw a more  Reviews multifaceted picture of our contemporary timescapes. Engaging with a remarkable collection of authors and genres, ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and focusing on German-language literature and culture in particular, Fuchs interrogates the alarmism underpinning much of the recent temporal diagnostics. She convincingly illustrates that temporal anxieties and complexities ‘are part and parcel of the complicated story of modernity’ (p. ) and hence not solely a problem of the here and now. Moreover, she emphasizes that artistic practice has since modernity provided opportunities for questioning dominant time regimes, allowing for the exploration of alternative temporal trajectories and the recuperation of Eigenzeit (pp. –). Fuchs is careful, though, not simply to celebrate art as a panacea for modern culture’s continuing struggles with time. While contemporary art in particular is deeply committed to the possibility of alternative experiences of time, oen accompanied by more attentive relationships with the world and others, these attempts oen remain fleeting and precarious. e book’s first chapter introduces key theoretical engagements with time in the era of digitization, including seminal accounts by Hartmut Rosa, Byung-Chul Han, John Tomlinson, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Harvey, and Robert Hassan. Fuchs identifies...

Aphrodite in Aulis, George Moore's last complete novel, is a fine example of the strong current of Hellenism found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western culture. The strong Hellenic presence in this work, ubiquitously in evidence in the use of names, themes and images deeply rooted in the Greek past, is combined with modem fiction to create an interesting story with a colour. Even though this has been recognized by critics,1 and the usefulness of contextualizing Aphrodite in with respect to its sources has been well demonstrated,2 the ancient Greek and literary texture of this work has thus far received very little scholarly attention. Yet, a closer examination of the Greek images can furnish an insight not only into this novel but also into Moore's literary sophistication.How accurate are references to events and characters in this novel? What purpose do allusions to the ancient Greek world serve? Does the prominent Hellenic element affect a reading of this novel, and, if so, in what way and to what extent? To attempt a largescale examination of the above questions would be a task extending far beyond the limits of this essay. However, it is both useful and important to bring out the connotative and cultural significance of some of the ancient Greek symbols and images employed by Moore, while looking more closely within the novel at statements about storytelling which, I will suggest, can be read as Moore's selfconscious allusions to his own art of writing.Anachronisms and inconsistenciesHow historically accurate is this historical novel? In George Moore: l'homme et l'oeuvre, Jean Noel praises Moore's thorough research into Classical antiquity, including various aspects of Greek life and topography, and states that could hardly reproach him for so painstakingly seeking to avoid anachronisms and topographical impossibilities.3 Noel's claim notwithstanding, Moore's novel is not without anachronisms and inconsistencies,4 as will be demonstrated below.It is known that Phidias' famous gold and ivory statue of Athena was completed and dedicated in 438 BC and that Aristophanes' Banqueters was produced by Callistratus in 427 BC. The two events, however, are presented as simultaneous in Moore's novel, where Phidias says that his statue of Athena has just been completed, and, later on, a very young Aristophanes (mistaken for a teenaged boy by Rhesos) announces that he is preparing to stage his Banqueters.5Moreover, Kebren's speech at Otanes' funeral is likened to Pericles' funeral oration, which is cited by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War6 Pericles' speech was delivered at the burial of the first Athenian war dead a year after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. This means that the opening of Aphrodite's temple in Moore's novel, on which occasion Pericles' funeral oration is recalled, must be at least one year later than 430 BC. The statement that Aulis would soon rival Corinth,7 on the other hand, which is one of Thyonicus' arguments in support of the view that the temple in should be dedicated to Aphrodite, is more likely to be a reference to Corinth at the time when the city was still powerful and prosperous, and certainly before the late 430s BC, when Corinthian economy started to decline dramatically due to its active involvement in the Peloponnesian War.However, if the early 420s BC are accepted as chronological backdrop to the second half of Moore's novel, the picture of the Greek world that the novelist draws is different from the events of that period: relations between Greek city-states had been particularly tense in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.8 Boeotia, with the sole exception of Plataea, had sided with the Peloponnesians against the neighbouring city-state of Athens, and had been engaging in hostile action for several decades before the war started. …

<i>Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho</i>. By John Dillery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. [xxxviii] + 494.

The Ottoman military was mobilizing but not yet at war in September 1914 when one of the battalion doctors attached to the Tenth Army Corps in north-eastern Anatolia was informed that a soldier was...

This paper addresses the philosophical and cultural significance of the concept of «sobornost’» both in the cultural context of Silver Age and in the historical context of World War I. The analysis of Ivanov’s thought is based on a philological approach of his essay «Legion and Sobornost’» (1916), in which the author explains his understanding of such terms as organisation, cooperation, collectivism in order to clarify his own idea of collegiality and the ontological opposition of the title. The opposition between legion and collegiality duplicates the confrontation between Germany and Russia. Vyach. Ivanov first conducts a cultural analysis of such a confrontation, and criticizes Nietzscheanism in German culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He proves the false understanding of the organization in modern German culture. In his opinion, the main values of freedom and personhood are the measure of lies or truth. In the last chapter of his essay, Vyach. Ivanov gives his own definition of collegiality, not referring to Russian thinkers, but quoting the two cities of St. Augustine’s thought. The author of the article shows that the culturological perspective is overcome by the Christian anthropological and mystical perspective, which proclaims humanism and Christocentrism. Therefore, accordind to Vyach. Ivanov, the word “sobornost” is a “universal word”, which mentions that the true social union has Christ as its center. In this sense, the concept of collegiality signifies the same mystical reality that the City of God of St. Augustine.