German Edition Research Articles

Documentation of torture and the Istanbul Protocol: applied medical ethics

The so-called Istanbul Protocol, a Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment was adopted by the United Nations soon after its completion in 1999 and since then has become an acknowledged standard for documenting cases of alleged torture and other forms of severe maltreatment. In 2009 the "Forum for medicine and human rights" at the Medical Faculty at the University Erlangen-Nuremburg has provided the first German edition of this manual. The article traces back the development of the protocol taking into account the general background as well as the factual occasion of its initiation. The main ethical and legal principles of the manual are introduced as well as the projects for implementing the rules provided in the protocol that have been carried out so far. From this the urgent need for implementation of the Istanbul Protocol guidelines also in Europe and in German-speaking countries and here not exclusively but especially within asylum procedures becomes clear.

Resolving Dilemmas Through Bodywork

Pamela Ellen Ferguson and Debra Persinger, co-authors and co-editors of Sand to Sky-Conversations with Teachers of Asian Medicine (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse; 2008), interview Marianne Steele in Germany on her shiatsu and massage therapy work in various forms of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder. The interview was conducted in a series of e-mail exchanges and telephone calls during late 2009 and early 2010 and is intended for a future German edition of Sand to Sky.

Kommentar zu Aurel Kolnai "Die grundlegenden Prinzipien der NS - Ideologie"

Abstract Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) was a moral and political philosopher who in 1938 published War against the West, a critical study of Nazi Socialist ideology. Because the book sold well and received very good reviews Kolnai was asked by his publisher, Victor Gollancz, to give two lectures at the Left Book Club summer school in August 1939, one of which under the headline of pivotal principles of NS ideology covered main topics of his book. This handwritten manuscript is published here for the first time. The Hannah Arendt Institute is planning a historical-critical German edition of Kolnai's War against the West.

Sex Differences on the German Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC-IV)

This study investigates cognitive sex differences in child and adolescent intelligence as measured by the WISC-IV (German edition; Petermann & Petermann, 2007 ). It was hypothesized that there would be no differences attributable to sex in Full Scale IQ (FSIQ), but on various composite score levels. Sex effects were expected to be more pronounced during/after puberty than before. Method: The standardization sample of the German WISC-IV (N = 1650) was used to assess and evaluate sex differences in test performance across defined age groups (6–9, 10–12, and 13–16 years). Results: At all ages, there were no gender effects in the Full-Scale IQ, but gender effects favoring boys in the Verbal Comprehension Index (t = 3.94, p < .001, d = .19) and Perceptual Reasoning Index (t = 2.69, p = .007, d = .13). In the Processing Speed Index, girls scored higher than boys (t = 6.75, p < .001, d = .33). No significant sex-by-age interaction effect was found using ANOVA, but various 1-df contrasts showed substantial sex differences at specific ages. Conclusions: Results are discussed in the context of the specific constructs measured by the WISC-IV, taking into account recent findings in neurobiological and developmental psychology.

Cesare Pavese and Anthony Chiuminatto: Their Correspondence by Mark Pietralunga

582 Reviews out on themanuscript and shedding welcome, though necessarily limited, light on the terms of a controversy that,unless further documentary material becomes available, cannot be consigned to history. Originally, she juxtaposes the first Italian edition with two first editions in French and German, both overseen by Svevo personally, albeit at a distance and in differentmeasure. All subsequent editions came out posthumously. Maier's 1985 edition restores the 1923 original entirely,with the exception of typographical errors. All following editions closely scrutinized the original, as if to search for nuggets of new evidence inside the unreliable narrative of Zeno, an inveterate liar and contradictory first-person narrator. Attributing his own language difficulties to Zeno is also both an alibi and an efficacious literary expedient which Svevo employs in order to highlight the expressiveness of the narrative voice. Stasi examines themanuscripts of the French and German translations in order to shed light on a number of unclear passages. Completed in the spring of 1926, and published in 1927 as Zeno, the French edition is, to Svevo's dismay, seventy-six pages shorter than the original. Svevo was able to follow farmore closely the preparation of a German edition, as testified by the careful letters addressed to him by Piero Rismondo, his German translator. However, he died in 1928 and, of necessity, theGerman edition came out without his final approval in 1929, under the titleZeno Cosini. One can only regret that the firstEnglish translation was as yet unavailable, ifonly until 1930: Svevo had, after all, checked the finalproofs of La coscienza inLondon during one of his extended business trips. This tragic irony would not have been lost on Zeno and Svevo alike. Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, London Katia Pizzi Cesare Pavese and Anthony Chiuminatto: Their Correspondence. Ed. by Mark Pietralunga. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2007. x+309 pp. $60; ?40. ISBN 978-0-8020-9294-6. Tl decennio delle traduzioni', 'the decade of translation', Cesare Pavese's famous label for the 1930s in Italy,described a mythological rather than a chronological time, a time of discovery of foreign lands, literatures, and, most importantly, for eign languages, and especially of that slang' that the Italian belles-lettres tradition had deliberately ignored. By publishing and carefully editing the correspondence between Cesare Pavese (1908-50) and his Italo-American friend Antonio Chiu minatto (1904-73), Mark Pietralunga presents an important new chapter in the complex history of those exchanges. From 29 November 1929 to 8March 1933 the two friends frequently discuss the nuances of the English language as well as the current shape of American culture and society. Itwas not only that Pavese was eager to understand better those popular, accessible, and vivacious novels that his generation had longed to read and translate?each of us should have sent to the other theworthiest novelties of his own literature', he wrote on 29 November 1929 (p. 26). More significantly, he was interested in comprehending the relationship between standard English and slang, since itmirrored that between 'italiano e MLR, 105.2, 2010 583 dialetto\ Indeed, he wrote to Chiuminatto that 'Negro slang is about the hardest, forwe hear so littleof itand on the other hand we get somuch of it inwriting!' (26 December 1929, p. 31). In his famous essay 'Senza provinciali una letteratura non ha nerbo', Pavese had identified themain difference between Italian and American culture in the former's lack of 'slang', and not dialect, which could talk to all readers from Piedmont to Sicily ('You say: thisword is slang, and this is classic', 12 January 1930, Pavese toChiuminatto, p. 33). The book begins with Pietralunga's substantial introduction on the friendship between Pavese and Chiuminatto and ends with a detailed and especially useful appendix, listing all the linguistic variants appearing in the correspondence, as for example 'Come on down?Non e altro che un verbo con le preposizioni raddop piate! "come on" vuol dire "venga", "Come on down" vuol dire "venga giu". In quest'ultimo senso "on" e superfluo,ma si usa molto nello slang' (p. 179). If the relationship between Fascist cultural politics and editorial matters in rela tion to translation practices, and of course censorship, has already been widely...

Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi Germany: individual fates and global impact

The emigration of mathematicians from Europe during the Nazi era signaled an irrevocable and important historical shift for the international mathematics world. Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany is the first thoroughly documented account of this exodus. In this greatly expanded translation of the 1998 German edition, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze describes the flight of more than 140 mathematicians, their reasons for leaving, the political and economic issues involved, the reception of these emigrants by various countries, and the emigrants' continuing contributions to mathematics. The influx of these brilliant thinkers to other nations profoundly reconfigured the mathematics world and vaulted the United States into a new leadership role in mathematics research. Based on archival sources that have never been examined before, the book discusses the preeminent emigrant mathematicians of the period, including Emmy Noether, John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and many others. The author explores the mechanisms of the expulsion of mathematicians from Germany, the emigrants' acculturation to their new host countries, and the fates of those mathematicians forced to stay behind. The book reveals the alienation and solidarity of the emigrants, and investigates the global development of mathematics as a consequence of their radical migration. An in-depth yet accessible look at mathematics both as a scientific enterprise and human endeavor, Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany provides a vivid picture of a critical chapter in the history of international science.

On the Limits of Violence

In February 1970, a twenty-eight-year-old Giorgio Agamben sends a letter to Hannah Ar endt. After introducing himself as a friend of Dominique Fourcade, with whom Agamben attended Martin Heidegger's 1966 and 1968 seminars in Provence, Agamben proceeds to express his gratitude to Arendt: her books, he writes, provided him with a decisive experience. He then indicates his intention to join with others in gap between past and future, and to work within the horizon that Arendt herself had opened up. He signs the letter, Cordially Yours, Giorgio Agamben. But these are not his final words to her. In a postscript Agamben adds: You will excuse if I take the liberty of enclosing an essay on violence which I should have been unable to wright [sic] without the guide of your books.1 A 1985 interview, Un'idea di Giorgio Agamben, in the Roman newspaper Reporter sheds some light on the essay that Agamben sent to Arendt in 1970.2 Respond ing to a question about his involvement with 1968 social movements—posed by Adriano Sofri, one of the cofounders of the extra-parliamentary leftist movement Lotta Con tinua—Agamben answers that he never really felt at ease with 1968. He was reading Arendt at the time, an author whom his friends in the movement considered a reactionary, someone absolutely not to be discussed. In fact, the essay on the limits of violence in which Agamben was coming to terms with Arendt's thought was rejected by a political review and was ultimately published in a literary journal. While an oeuvre sometimes functions as a historical detonator [detonatore storico] accelerating revolutionary mo ments, that was not the case with Arendt. Agamben concludes that such a missed appoint ment with history is one of the most humiliating experiences that time itself affords us. Here then for the first time in English is the essay in which Agamben first attempted to come to terms with Arendt's philosophy of history, the essay that he sent to Arendt and that she referred to in the German edition of On Violence? The original essay, Sui limiti della violenza, appeared in Nuovi argomenti in the winter of 1970.4

Keynes’ Preface to the German Edition of the General Theory: Nazi Sympathies or Methodological Empathies?

In the (1936) preface to the German edition of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes contrasts his methodology with that of Classical laissez-faire economics. He also compares and contrasts his methodology with German economics, which members of the German Historical School had heavily influenced. Unfortunately, some view Keynes as arguing in this Preface that his theory could more deductively apply to fascism than to laissez-faire economies. This would suggest an endorsement of Nazism. Of course, any support offered for Nazism should be condemned. However, instead of displaying Nazi sympathies, this paper argues that the Preface more likely supports the widespread methodological rejection in German economics of deducing laissez-faire outcomes from Classical postulates. Furthermore, Keynes criticizes the more inductive approach of many German economists, and states that he provides them with the theoretical framework which they could deductively apply to their totalitarian economy. Keynes should be read as arguing that his theoretical framework would prove more applicable to a totalitarian system than would a theory based on Classical laissez-faire economics. Comments in the Preface which seem to some to support Nazism should be taken, then, as support for the applicability of his theory to such a system. Keynes’ methodological arguments in the prefaces to the other editions, which reflect his overall methodological approach in the General Theory, his familiarity with German economics, his support for liberal economic and political institutions, and his anti-Nazism, all support this alternative interpretation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Midwest Economics Association Meetings in Chicago on March 16, 2008.

The Composition of the Narrative Books of the Old Testament. By Reinhard G. Kratz

Translated by John Bowden . Pp. xii, 361 , London/NY , T&T Clark , 2005 , $72.00. John Bowden has done us a further service by translating yet another erudite work by a German biblical scholar; composed in 2000 by the professor of Old Testament in the University of Göttingen, it now appears in English. Reinhard Kratz promises us ‘an introduction to the narrative works of the Old Testament’‘based on the historical-critical analysis of the biblical sources’. It is an ‘introduction’ in the German tradition, like Otto Eissfeldt's 1964 The Old Testament. An Introduction, also usefully made available in English the following year by another doyen of academic translation, Peter R. Ackroyd – no mere guidebook for beginners, but a massive digest of the status quaestionis on every aspect of the subject, complete with lengthy bibliographies. Kratz likewise presumes that the reader is well versed in biblical lore before plunging into the quite dense pages of this very lengthy work. Perhaps such an intended readership explains why it is not a particularly reader-friendly ‘introduction’; though a dozen or so tables relieve the text somewhat and summarise the findings, the tone is very business-like and the pace unrelenting. No General Index is provided. Kratz, unlike Eissfeldt, has not gone to the trouble of internationalising his more select bibliographies (nor of including the usual list of Abbreviations); one gets the impression in this case again of ‘the Germans reading the Germans’. And, of course, great figures like Julius Wellhausen and Martin Noth (but not Albrecht Alt) predictably dominate the skyline here; and if the odd English-speaking (but not French, Italian, …) scholar is included in the brief lists heading each chapter (like Antony Campbell and Mark O'Brien on the Former Prophets), they are not invited into dialogue in the endnotes (nor their names always spelt correctly). The Preface to the English edition admits that such concessions were made at that late stage. In one place (p. 157) Kratz divides scholars into two groups, ‘the English-language and Catholic sphere, the other more in the Protestant tradition of German-language exegesis’. What Kratz is offering to his peers is his own take on the whole of OT narrative, beginning with ‘the literary blueprint of the final shape as it has been handed down to us’. So the three sections deal with the Chronistic Writings, the Torah and the Former Prophets, and under a rubric ‘The Myth of Israel’ the Priestly Writing, the Non-Priestly Narrative, and the Hexateuch (the term Octateuch, more familiar to the early Church, as Eissfeldt admits, not occurring here). Each section begins with a ‘Survey’, where Kratz includes his brief bibliographies, including recent research, and closes with a summary, which Bowden has translated as ‘Result’ (an odd term, like his use of ‘assignation’ on p. 255). In the O-so-detailed presentation of his position on all these sections, his tone is magisterial, if not dogmatic; he has no qualms about wielding the sword to cut the Gordian knot. When outlining recent research on the Non-Priestly Narrative, for instance (p. 249), he rules firmly on opposing positions: ‘Some regard the whole non-Priestly text (classical JE) as more or less a unity; here basically it does not matter whether one sees it principally as the (late) ‘Yahwist’ or a pre-Priestly D composition with a Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic stamp, or recognizes the ‘final redactor’ (R) in each and everything. Others reduce the text to a minimum in which they find a(n early) Yahwist, a proto-Yahwist or the sources of the Yahwist and the Yahwistic redaction, but distribute the bulk of the text between pre- and post-Priestly, final-redactional and post-final-redactional elaborations’. In case a luckless beginner should feel at a loss before these positions, or an expert have misgivings, Kratz unhesitatingly delivers his verdict: ‘As so often, the solution lies in reconciling the extremes. There is only one way of escaping the circle of the source hypothesis: it has to be abandoned’. On the other hand, in summarising recent research, Kratz can be clear and detached, as in his summary of (German) research on the Priestly Writing (pp. 226–229), where we gain a clear understanding of hypotheses on documents, sources and strata in the Pentateuch; likewise in his dating of the major sections of OT narrative in his Conclusion. Though not light reading, nor a user-friendly reference book for the interested delver into the Old Testament, this volume in the German style offers the cognoscenti a thorough evaluation of old and new research into its narrative material. The preface to this English edition lists the (mostly German) journals where ‘predominantly friendly’ reviews of the German edition have appeared.

Klaus Bergdolt, Wellbeing: a cultural history of healthy living, transl. Jane Dewhurst, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009, pp. ix, 366, £60.00, (hardback 978-0-7456-2913-1), £18.99 (paperback 978-0-7456-2914-8).

Klaus Bergdolt’s masterly contribution to the bibliography of health has been a long time coming, but is no less welcome for that. Readers will perhaps be startled to see warm words of praise from the late Roy Porter on the back cover, which apparently derive from a translation originally completed in 1999 when the first German edition appeared. Porter suggested that Bergdolt’s text would be “central” to the enterprise of reconstructing the history of health care, which “traditionally constituted the mainstream of medicine”. Bibliographic work on the genre of health care regimens has been painfully slow since its first beginnings in the social history of medicine in the 1970s. This is mainly because interest in “medicine from below” quickly switched to integrated empirical local studies which made bibliographic research look old-fashioned and detached from the wider world. As a result we still have very little idea of the numbers of these health-books in circulation in different periods and places, let alone their titles, authors, editions, content and sub-genres. What Bergdolt has undertaken here for German health bibliography has yet to be done with the genre in (for example) Italy, France, Britain, the USA—or indeed Hungary, Russia, India, China or anywhere else. There is a lot of number-crunching and archive-combing waiting to be done by future research students. However Wellbeing is not that sort of quantitative bibliographic history. Wellbeing is a traditional literary study which takes us carefully through all the major and many of the minor authors of European health history in chronological order. Bergdolt is particularly strong on the classical and Renaissance texts, and on German texts at least up to c.1900, providing a useful introduction to the vast German health archives, and to the work of modern German scholars such as Heinrich Schipperges and Gundolf Keil. Each primary source cited (roughly 600 of them) is conscientiously described and analysed, and the book is lively and well written. Moreover, Bergdolt has attempted some sort of comparative European survey. Italy is well covered, although the shorter sections on the English and French traditions are less assured. American health bibliography is not mentioned. At least half the book covers the earliest definitions of health from the pre-Socratics to the Renaissance. It describes how “health” emerged from a combination of early Greek science and moral philosophy, and developed as a mature professional art during the Roman empire. Bergdolt illuminates the health regimen of the medieval period through deft biographical sketches of key authors from the early Islamic and Christian empires, when religion was heavily involved in promoting Galenic science. New printing techniques combined with sixteenth-century Humanism and Paracelsian doctrines created a flood of popular health literature, ranging from published self-help manuals and herbals, to individual house-books (receipt books) and detailed diaries of self-experimentation in health care. Many fascinating themes and details emerge—such as the influence of Petrarch, the history of utopias, and the history of scholarly health. These first five chapters in particular will set a benchmark in health studies. The rest of the book deals with the long Enlightenment from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and grapples with the effects of Cartesian mechanics and Kantean vitalism. The relationship between religion and science is a difficult area at best, and here in the more complex modern era the underlying limitations of Bergdolt’s literary approach are exposed. The religious and scientific history of these later periods is underwritten, and (in the case of British history at least) rather ill-informed. The lack of any underlying structural analysis derived from politics, economics, demography, religion or science, means that his commentary throughout is relentlessly “linear” and repetitive. Despite all the biographical details the central concept of health is not rigorously unpacked, nor organized, to help the reader. The hygienic non-naturals, in particular, are a constant in this literature for over two thousand years. Lumping them together as “dietetics” is not enough—this notably fails to capture the changing therapeutic balances within the regimen genre. Thus there is no clear interpretation of the interlinked currents of German, English, and American Protestant health radicalism that fundamentally altered the politics of hygiene from the seventeenth century onwards. If there had been, Bergdolt would surely not have been satisfied at stopping with Nietzsche (as he does) just before the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century hygienic Life Reform movements. It would be unfair to criticize Bergdolt for not recognizing the Anglo-Saxon “model” of health history when one of the pleasures of this book is being introduced to the German sources, and seeing health history from the German perspective. Bergdolt has achieved an heroic internal synthesis of the health genre, loosely linked with elements of social history. But modern cultural history it is not.

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials": Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials":Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis Waltraud Maierhofer (bio) The Crucible (1953), by pre-eminent American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), has become widely acknowledged as a timeless play about the hunt for "witches" and other supposed evildoers, and about mass hysteria. According to a popular introduction to this work, the inspiration for Arthur Miller's play was The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), a historical study, albeit not without fictional elements, about the Salem witch trials by Marion Starkey.1 It is a little-known fact that the German-Jewish émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884, Munich–21 December 1958, Los Angeles) published a play about the Salem trials before Arthur Miller did. It was published in German under the title Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston (Mania or The Devil in Boston) in 1948 in Los Angeles.2 A first sketch is dated 22 October 1945.3 Feuchtwanger began writing the play in the final months of 1946 and finished it in late 1947. I. The Devil in Boston The play premiered in Germany in March 1949, in the "Kleines Theater im Zoo" in Frankfurt am Main, directed by Fred Schroer. Feuchtwanger wrote a short statement about his play for the program, "Zu meinem Stück" (About My Play).4 The premiered version was slightly revised from the first American edition in German, and subsequent performances (Deutsches Theater Berlin, March 1949; Nürnberg, 1949) and book editions followed.5 Several stages of typescript translations in English are extant in the Feuchtwanger Archive at the University of Southern California, the first [End Page 355] dated August 1947. The titles vary slightly from Delusion to Boston to Devil in Boston, which appears to have met Feuchtwanger's final approval, and a corrected copy is marked "Copyright 1948").6 Feuchtwanger wanted to have the play performed in the United States in English, but was not immediately successful.7 The American-language premiere did not take place until February 1952 at the Circle Theatre in Hollywood (directed by Benjamin Zemach), where it remained in the repertoire for only half a year.8 Another staging, of a Yiddish translation by N[athaniel] Buchwald, took place the next year in New York by the Yiddish Theater Ensemble, in Barbiyon Plaza. Morris Carnovsky directed and performed in this production.9 Arthur Miller's Crucible (1953) premiered on Broadway on 22 January 1953 and was published that same year. Initially, it was not as sweepingly successful as it later became. Feuchtwanger's drama had its New York premiere in February 1953. The audience, including the critics, did not know of its earlier publication in German and its staging on the West Coast, leading one critic to label it as "Another Play On Salem Witches."10 Reviews of the New York performance immediately compared the two: Vernon Rice pointed out that Feuchtwanger's play had fewer dramatic high points, while his simpler plot and setting fared favorably with John Chapman. It is not important for the following argument whether the two writers knew about each other's plays and whether one might have influenced the other,11 although it remains a valid question. Both draw attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of suspicion, denunciation, persecution, and extermination. Their approaches are very different in that Miller shows trial scenes onstage, while Feuchtwanger has them reported. Both fictionalize one of the "bewitched" girls and main plaintiffs, and incorporate love interests in her characterization, but these choices result in decisive plot differences. However, my goal is not to compare the two plays, but rather to examine the specific perspective of a stateless immigrant on this "American" topic, which the German-Jewish writer here applies to postwar, post-Nazi Germany. Even Feuchtwanger scholarship tends to bypass this play. For example, a recent study on the reception of Feuchtwanger's works in Germany since 1945 only briefly touches on the play, stating as evident that it represented the author's reaction to the beginning of the McCarthy era and intended to draw parallels between persecutions of "witches" and leftists.12 Only [End Page 356] one short comparison with Miller's Crucible has been undertaken, in which Robert...

Die Übersetzung des Genfer Katechismus (1542/1545) ins Deutsche durch Zacharias Ursinus im Jahr 1563

The translation of the Genevan Catechism (1542/1545) into German by Zacharias Ursinus in 1563 It is with considerable surprise that one finds in the “Opera Selecta Calvini” vol. 2 a German translation of Calvin’s Geneva Catechism (1542/1545). The translation dates from 1563, and originated in Heidelberg. Even more surprising is the translator – none other than Zacharias Ursinus, one of the chief com-posers of the Heidelberg Catechism, which was also penned in 1563. The impression could be created that Calvin’s Catechism was intended at the outset to achieve the position later attained by the Heidelberg Catechism. The title of the German translation of Calvin’s Catechism is also interesting: “Catechism of the protestant churches in France”. Olevianus explained in a letter to Calvin that the translation was titled thus for fear that the Germans would otherwise not read the catechism. Comparing the German translation with the Geneva Catechism, it is evident that Ursinus made use of the French edition of 1542 as well as the Latin edition of 1545 as the source text. While his translation is literal, a few alterations in meaning occur, giving rise to decisive theological adjustments. A comparison with the Heidelberg Catechism is complicated by the fact that Ursinus was only one of a committee of composers who worked on the latter document. The theological corrections made to Calvin’s Catechism in the German edition reveal Ursinus’ tendency to emphasise the soteriological meaning in his translation. Beza would eventually be the one who would irreversibly modify Calvin’s theology in the direction of the reformed orthodoxy.

“Empathic Attunement”: Cvetaeva's and Pasternak's Literary Tributes to Rilke

In the summer of 1926, three great poets of the twentieth century – Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and Rilke – exchanged letters. This three-way epistolary exchange conducted by all three poets in German ended several months later, after Rilke's death from leukemia. The correspondence first saw the light in the German edition in the 1980's, then, gradually, it started appearing in other languages, including Russian. It has drawn comments from such a notable critic as Susan Sontag. Tsvetaeva's long poem, ‘Novogodnee’, written shortly after Rilke's death, was analyzed extensively by Joseph Brodsky. In my paper, I provide brief readings of three literary tributes to Rilke by Tsvetaeva and Pasternak. I use the psychological concept of “empathic attunement”, worked out by the prominent psychologist Heinz Kohut. I find that reading the literary tributes through the concept of empathy points to the human, as opposed to the mythical side of this fascinating literary triangle.

The Art of Building in Its Many Forms

Five years ago, I reported in these pages on the first and very successful German edition of this book a seminal work that explores new historiographical possibilities in the history of technology. Everything I wrote then holds true for this inspired, expanded edition, and then some. I would refer the reader to that review, especially for a description of the book's multileveled structure and contents (Technology and Culture 45 [July 2004]: 664-66). Now, five years later, the two wishes I expressed, that the study might someday be translated into English and expanded to include more of the AngloSaxon development of engineering science and of variant ways of thinking, have come to pass, and we have Karl-Eugen Kurrer's revised The History of the Theory of Structures (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 2008, pp. 848, €119). The translation has been expertly rendered, the text completely reworked and expanded from 539 to 848 pages, and its complexity has been correspondingly augmented. As in the original German version, the book is multifaceted. It provides apercus from areas that one would not normally associate with such a supposedly analytical topic, and it is copiously illustrated with diagrams, construction details, and structures, and photographs of working environments, publications, models, manuscripts, advertising ephemera, and portraits 667 illustrations in all. The scope of the visual material alone is evidence of the unusual, matrix-like nature of the

Der Begriff „Funktionale Gesundheit” in der deutschsprachigen Fassung der ICF

In the preface of the German edition of the INTERNATIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF FUNCTIONING, DISABILITY AND HEALTH (ICF) the term "functional health" (Funktionale Gesundheit) is introduced and defined. There is no direct equivalent expression in the original English Version of the ICF. The definition of "Funktionale Gesundheit" was thus strongly disputed among the translators and ICF experts involved in the German translation. In the following, the author suggests reconsidering the definition critically and proposes an alternative solution.

Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? (review)

Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? by Christopher Nicholson. Jerusalem & New York: Gefen, 2007. 474 pp. $35.00. The title of this book, a joint biography of Richard Wagner and Adolf Hitler, raises a rhetorical question. The simple answer to that question is that the antisemitism expressed by Richard Wagner did indeed influence Adolf Hitler's political career. But this answer does not take into account many qualifying variables. Christopher Nicholson, a South African lawyer, is an educated man, but this book shows that he is an amateur with interesting theories but not the means of effectively supporting them. The association of these two men as partners, so to speak, is a risky premise. Many biographers of Hitler note his knowledge and admiration of the work of Wagner, but to consider these two men equally in a historical continuum is, at best, only a fraction of the story of antisemitism in the Germanspeaking countries. Furthermore, although the pairing of Wagner and Hitler is supposed to be political, the author attempts to document antisemitism through discussion of music. This is an uncertain method in the case of Wagner, and it is essentially impossible in the case of Hitler, who has not been the subject of musicological research because he was not a musician or composer. It is difficult to define the authence Nicholson had in mind for this book, which tells a story suitable for nonspecialist readers (complete with soap-opera conflicts and sexual hangups), yet occupies almost every page with footnotes intended presumably for the benefit of scholarly specialists. Except for the cover design, which includes several staves of the piano-vocal score of the overture to Wagner's opera Tannhauser, there are no musical examples in this book. This weakens the author's arguments in favor of manifestations of Wagner's antisemitism in his operatic works. Such arguments are speculative, at best, compared to those based on the antisemitism Wagner expressed in his prose essays. The references listed by Nicholson in his footnotes and bibliography are instructive because they demonstrate his purpose in writing this book, and also his limitations. It is self-evident that first-hand accounts constitute the most reliable documentation of history, and both Wagner and Hitler contributed more than their share of such sources to posterity; yet, in Nicholson's bibliography (pp. 451-57), such references are few, and almost all are in English translations rather than the German originals and represent secondary rather than eyewitness accounts. In fact, this bibliography largely comprises books and articles in English, either original to the language or translations of German editions (and even when Nicholson does cite German sources, errors show that his grasp of the German language appears to be limited); this is a serious problem in a book devoted to subjects who recorded their lives in German. It would have been helpful if Nicholson had consulted Richard Wagner: A Guide to Research of Michael Saffle (New York & London: Routledge, 2002), or the bibliographies in some of the books about Hitler he lists (notably those of John Toland and Ian Kershaw), which include extensive listings of eyewitness accounts and scholarly assessmenrs without being pedantic. The substance of this book is further compromised by second-hand accounts of personal relationships between the two subjects and others in their lives, in which Nicholson takes refuge without careful study of sources related to the other parties. A very unfortunate example of this is the author's assessment of the relationship between Wagner and Giacomo Meyerbeer, the German-Jewish composer who greatly influenced Wagner's career in Paris and Berlin. Nicholson dismisses Meyerbeer as a composer, giving no consideration to the quality of his work or its influence on Wagner's own, and also as a man (without taking the trouble to consult the eight-volume critical edition of Meyerbeer's correspondence and diaries). …

Život a dílo Willy Brandta v deseti svazcích. Nad jedinečnou německou edicí

Život a dílo Willy Brandta v deseti svazcích. Nad jedinečnou německou edicí

The Quarterly of the World Council of Churches

The Quarterly of the World Council of Churches

The Discovery of Hypnosis—Braid's Lost Manuscript, “On Hypnotism” (1860): A Brief Communication

James Braid's last manuscript on hypnotism, summarizing his mature views and lost since his death, existed only in French and German translations. The author discusses the history and importance of this document, “On Hypnotism” (1860), as well as his new English version, translated back from the French and German editions. Braid's manuscript constitutes an important, missing jigsaw piece in the early history of psychological therapy and helps to explain the origin of hypnotherapy and correct certain historical misconceptions that have developed concerning the meaning of the term hypnotism. The rediscovery of this text provides additional evidence that hypnotism originated as an explicitly empirical and “common sense” reaction against the pseudo-scientific excesses of mesmerism. Although drawing heavily on excerpts from his previous writings, some of Braid's observations and techniques may renew interest among contemporary researchers and clinicians.

Mimesis in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on literature and arts are spread over of his works, but his systematic and comprehensive theorization of art (including literature) was to wait until Aesthetic Theory, which Adorno did not live to complete. However, as editors of original German edition, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman, quote Adorno (from a letter he wrote several days before his death), the final version 'still needed a desperate effort' but ... 'basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of substance of book'; (1) it is not inappropriate to rely on Aesthetic Theory as repository of Adorno's thought on subject of art and literature. Supplementing its reading with relevant chapters from Adorno's other works -Dialectic of Enlightenment (which he coauthored with Max Horkheimer), Prisms, and Notes to Literature)-this essay concentrates on concept of mimesis in Adorno's theory of arts and literature in order to examine various meanings Adorno assigns to that concept as well as constellations in which this concept articulates with other concepts. Since Adorno's aesthetic theory forms a coherent part of his overall philosophical enterprise, strategy used here is to discuss briefly some key concepts constitutive of Adorno's critique of and of Capitalist society, and then zero in on concept of mimesis. Adorno was a leading member of Frankfurt School-an institute that championed critical theory, which attempted to grasp contemporary society and culture as a totality, espoused unity of theory and praxis, and critiqued instrumental rationality. (2) Key to Adorno's thinking, as to Frankfurt School's, were Marx's concept of commodity fetishism and Georg Lukacs's concept of reification. Commodity fetishism names enigma in Capitalist society, where value of commodity as product of labor appears as value of commodity itself just as relation between human beings essential to production and exchange of commodities appears as relation between commodities themselves. In other words, commodities become fetishes because they seem to acquire a life of their own. (3) Lukacs's theory of reification extends Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, via Max Weber's theory of rationalization, to argue that not only economic sphere (in Marxist base-superstructure model, socio-economic base comprising of forces and relations of production) but social institutions such as law, administration, and journalism and academic disciplines such as economics, jurisprudence, and philosophy also become permeated by commodity form or logic of exchange. Indeed, according to Lukacs, commodity fetishism governs not only objects in world but equally subjects, who are reduced to exchangeable commodities, like mere things obeying inexorable laws of marketplace. (4) Adorno's favorite word for total reification of society under Capitalism is administered world, which appears repeatedly in Aesthetic Theory as it does in his other works. In Cultural Criticism and Society, Adorno thus describes totalizing and totalitarian effect of reification: This regimentation, result of progressive societalization of all human relations, did not simply confront mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent consistency.... The network of is drawn ever tighter, modeled after act of exchange. It leaves individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, performs it more and more thoroughly, cuts it off a priori as it were from possibility of differencing from itself as all difference degenerates into a nuance in monotony of supply. (5) The Cartesian division between thinking self and extended reality, therefore, no longer holds (if it ever did); subject does not confront object from a position transcendent to it but is rather enmeshed in the network of whole that leaves no room for authentic difference and autonomy. …