German Imagination Research Articles

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger

Reviewed by: The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger Sarah Clemmens Waltz The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries. By Anna Maria Busse Berger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 360 + 25 halftones, 12 musical examples, 2 tables. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0226740348. The disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology currently exist in an uneasy tension as scholars begin to question what distinguishes "ethno"-musicology from the "historical" musicology developed by German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century. Busse Berger's The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries exemplifies the historical underpinnings of this tension by demonstrating the original entanglement of those disciplines through the scholarship and valuation of medieval music. The story of how (and what) music was treated in four different missions in the German East African colony (now Tanzania) connects through the foundations of German musical scholarship, contemporaneous German ideals about collective music-making, the development of scholarship and historical narrative about medieval music, and the birth of "ethnomusicology" from the old "comparative musicology." Above all, Busse Berger's examination of scholarship about and in Africa, occasionally by African scholars, suggests the way forward for a less-blinkered musicological discipline. The historiography in this examination makes it a critical read for musicologists, but the book is also very much of interest to the general humanist. Little of a technical nature intrudes except a few excurses on pentatonic (five-note) scales. German scholars' deliberate invocation of comparative linguistics in developing comparative musicology is a fascinating opening, leading to a covert throughline comparing those who claimed the Indo-European proto-language as superior to those who claimed harmony as a peculiarly Western accomplishment. We find, however, that the book's intriguing "cast of characters" (helpfully referenced in an appendix) was not uniformly motivated by evolutionist notions of culture. The work is in three parts, corresponding to the "scholars, singers, missionaries" of the subtitle. Part I explains the beginning of comparative musicology among German scholars (often of medieval music, not coincidentally) and also how the study of ethnomusicology impacted the discipline of historical musicology. Individual scholars' [End Page 159] work is investigated in detail. Their proto-ethnomusicological work provoked a number of theories now verified by medievalists if still overlooked: that medieval polyphony was most likely improvised, and that polyphony—far from being a purely Western development—existed in a global context of improvised multi-voiced music-making. Especially compelling is the chapter on Nicholas Ballanta, an African scholar born in Sierra Leone who, in the 1920s, described African music from an African perspective. Though Ballanta received the first Guggenheim for music research, his story shows how, despite great support for Ballanta's ability, Western scholarship was unprepared for his research, which was derailed by seemingly surmountable issues—various travel roadblocks, recordings he sent which were lost, leading in the end to a loss of support and inappropriately negative reviews of his research. By detailing Ballanta's publications, compositions, and arguments (for the use of African music and against the use of medieval modes and Western notation), the chapter greatly contributes to the restoration of African scholarship's role in African and African American music. Part II is about the role of group music-making, the use of medieval music, and contemporaneous comparisons to music-making in the missions in Africa as reflected in the growing communal music-making movements in Germany: the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung. These chapters re-center our image of medieval music from, perhaps, arcane esoterica toward an Arcadian realm of simplicity in the contemporary German imagination, explaining how many of those called to mission work were attracted to the idea of simple community life, which also attracted them to medieval music. A historiography of medieval musicology, including landmark performances of the 1920s, blossoms from this. Busse Berger notes that revivals of folk song, the Middle Ages, and interest in nature contributed not just to the development of musicology but to ordinary life: "It is no exaggeration to say that this movement profoundly affected every German in...

In the Face of Tragedy – Nanga Parbat and National Socialist Radio

During the 1930s, Nanga Parbat, like no other mountain, captured the imagination of German mountaineers, mountaineering officials, and the public alike. Referred to as the ‘mountain of destiny’ due to repeat disasters striking German expeditions in 1934 and 1937 and a resulting death toll of 26 mountaineers and porters, the mountain occupied a prominent position in the German public imagination of the period. By expanding on existing research on the representations of Nanga Parbat in print and film and tracing a third path of Nanga Parbat into the German imagination via radio, the coverage of 1930s Nanga Parbat expeditions in the German media shall be revealed as a closely coordinated campaign of German mountaineering and sports officials designed to connect the fate of German mountaineers on Nanga Parbat to the fate of the German nation and, in the process, propagate and disseminate some of the key concepts of National Socialist ideology.

Theology and politics in the German imagination, 1789–1848

ABSTRACT This piece introduces a special issue of Global Intellectual History, on the theme of Theology and Politics in the German Imagination, 1789–1848. The essays in the issue proceed from a conference of the same name, held in Cambridge at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), in July 2017, which was supported by funds from the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub. The event was primed to consider the distinctive relationships between theology and politics, church and state, that emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany (and German-speaking central Europe). By focussing on figures, institutions, and events from this period – when a nascent ‘Germany’ was defining itself as a nation and a culture – we challenged the all too frequent reduction of religion in the modern world to an ideology which simply competes with politics. Instead, we sought to discuss the subtle and significant ways in which theology and politics interact and inform one another. During our opening roundtable discussion, panellists stressed the need to re-think the category of ‘nationalism’ as applied to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany.

"Consuming" China: Images of China in German and American Television Advertisements of the Twenty-First Century

Examining the representation of China and the Chinese people in German and American television advertisements aired between 2008 and 2012, this essay provides a critical analysis to illustrate how these images and their function in commercials reflect popular views of China in German and American society. I argue that the place that China holds in the German imagination is drastically different from that in the American view. Specifically, the German perception of China is evidently influenced by remnants of older European orientalist, or even colonialist worldviews, while the American view of China reflects various responses to the notion of globalization.

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination by Joanna Neilly, and: E.T.A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism ed. by Christopher Clason

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination by Joanna Neilly, and: E.T.A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism ed. by Christopher Clason

Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp.

Reviewed by: Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller Ulrike Schneider Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000357 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the "development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems" (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned "major" German Jewish authors. Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine. The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter "'O Beastly Jews': A Brief History of an (Un) Natural History" gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of "the Jew" and "the Jew-Animal" had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in "humorous" postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who [End Page 252] supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question "of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order" (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—"did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups" (45). Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars' defamation of Jewish writers and...

Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller

Reviewed by: Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller Ulrike Schneider Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000357 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the "development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems" (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned "major" German Jewish authors. Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine. The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter "'O Beastly Jews': A Brief History of an (Un) Natural History" gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of "the Jew" and "the Jew-Animal" had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in "humorous" postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who [End Page 252] supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question "of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order" (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—"did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups" (45). Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars' defamation of Jewish writers and...

E. T. A. Hoffmann's Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination by Joanna Neilly

E. T. A. Hoffmann's Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination by Joanna Neilly

Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik ed. by Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart

Reviewed by: Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik ed. by Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Erika Berroth Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart, editors. Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 47, nos. 1–2, 2014 (recte 2017). 179 pp. Paper €45.00. Framing Islam offers seven articles representing cutting-edge scholarship on a topic of ever increasing relevance: the multifaceted representations of Islam and Muslim identities in German literature, film, and popular culture. All contributors work in US higher education contexts, adding to and engaging with scholarship coming out of Germany and from scholars who identify as Muslims. Realities in Germany, where multiple generations of Muslims have backgrounds and histories in diverse geographies, do not prevent their representation as a homogeneous mass. In interdisciplinary and intersectional readings, scholars provide insights into how the diverse representations of Muslim identities and of Islam are constructed and connected to a real or imagined spectrum of reactions of fascination and fear. The editors' introduction provides a rich context for the subsequent discussions of individual works, genres, and authors. Acknowledging the sustained presence of Islam and its pivotal role in the German imagination since the eighteenth century, as well as the variety of Muslim identities and belongings in German culture, the introduction highlights [End Page 155] the impact of contemporary national political discourses that include Islamophobia, the racialization of faith, and stereotyped perceptions. Close readings and critical analyses reveal deep and intricate cultural connections and powerful tensions. The first two articles draw on Enlightenment traditions. David Coury's "Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn in Contemporary German Literature" demonstrates how humanistic traditions in Kermani's oeuvre counter Islamophobia. Coury examines how Kermani, recognized as one of Germany's most prominent scholars of Islam, envisions Muslim ways of belonging in a post-secular and post-national Germany in children's books, fiction, and in his essayistic work. Priscilla Layne's "Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in Verrücktes Blut" investigates resistance to the racialization of Islam in a play by Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, where plays by Schiller and Molière serve as intertexts, debunking discourses deeming Islam incompatible with German values. Similarly, in "Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media," Berna Gueneli's case studies of Fatih Akin's films, episodes in the Tatort crime series, and Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel's Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black virgins) emphasize that Islam needs to be decoupled from ties to a particular ethnicity. With "'Don't Panic, I'm Islamic': Voicing Resistance through Documentary," Olivia Landry turns to the genre of documentaries. She demonstrates the genre's potential as resistance narrative and integrates pop-culture strategies as evocative verbal gestures opposing racist Islamophobia. In "'Islam Light': Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms," Heidi Denzel de Tirado's analysis of representations of teenage Muslim girls in German sitcoms reveals second-and third-generation "Islam Light" Turkish-German identifications and their connections to discourses of belonging around the contested concept of Leitkultur. Islam as a marketing brand is the topic of Lindsay Lawton's "Truth in Advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around 'Muslim' Women's Memoirs." Lawton reflects on the commodification of best-selling memoirs by women who describe nuanced varieties of engagements and experiences with Muslim faith. Although they can be seen as post-Muslim women, they are lumped together and marketed as Muslim women victims of religious violence, thus reiterating the trope of Islam as a threat. Faye Stewart's insightful analysis in "Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone's Fremde Haut" reveals the compounded and complex challenges the [End Page 156] Iranian gay Muslim woman protagonist faces in a homophobic and Islamophobic environment. Close readings of significant scenes reveal Muslim identities coming into and out of focus as multifaceted and fluid, contributing to understanding queer Muslim pluralism and intersections of queer identities with Islamic faith. This volume...

Book Review: Harald Höbusch: Mountain of Destiny: Nanga Parbat and its Path into the German Imagination

Book Review: Harald Höbusch: Mountain of Destiny: Nanga Parbat and its Path into the German Imagination

Mountain of Destiny: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination

Mountain of Destiny: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination

Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period

AbstractFrom the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

Amerika: The Super Bowl and German Imagination

The Super Bowl has played a central role in the diffusion of American football in Germany, as interviews with the ‘founding fathers’ of ‘gridiron’ football clubs and analysis of German media accounts reveal. American football and the Super Bowl have also played an important role in the construction of traditional German Amerikabilder – images, ideas, and symbols associated with America. German media rarely covered American football until the late 1970s. At that time, brief highlight shows of the Super Bowl on German television and broadcasts on the American Forces Network significantly contributed to the diffusion of American football and the emergence of an American football league in Germany in the late 1970s. In the process of covering the Super Bowl, German journalists reproduced Germany’s double-headed Amerikabild: America as a model of modernity on the one hand, and as a violent, cultureless society on the other. The press further invoked historical clashes between German Kultur and the dreaded Zivilisation of the West. This exploration of the social processes surrounding the reception of the Super Bowl in Germany employs the theories of cultural globalization, migration, and electronic mediation developed by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai to explain the complexities of contemporary global cultural flows.

“Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination by Harold Höbusch

Reviewed by: “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination by Harold Höbusch Samuel J. Kessler Harold Höbusch, “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2016. 282 pp. Harold Höbusch’s “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination is three books in one: a history of the German exploration of the Himalayan mountain known as Nanga Parbat; an analysis of the relationship between the ethos of mountaineering and the ideology of National Socialism; and a critical discussion about why mountains became such a common referent in German popular culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Though the title suggests the book’s common thread will be Nanga Parbat, in fact Höbusch has given us something far more wide-ranging. “Mountain of Destiny” is a deeply sourced account of the co-development of mountaineering culture and Germany’s modern self-identity, hinged around the rhetoric and trauma of National Socialism. Höbusch opens by laying out a theory of the interrelation of mountains and cultural identity, tracing how the ethos and ideology of mountaineering was increasingly depicted and valorized in German popular culture between the 1920s and 1950s. “The various representations of these [Himalayan] expeditions to the German public in print, film, and audio—[are] in my opinion the crucial segments of Nanga Parbat’s path into the German imagination,” he writes (13). This widespread use of mountaineering as a means of depicting communal values he calls, somewhat awkwardly, “the cultural phenomenon Nanga Parbat.” This theoretical lens (“the cultural phenomenon Nanga Parbat”) overshadows, however, Höbusch’s most incisive and compelling findings. It is not that Nanga Parbat the mountain plays such a role in German cultural [End Page 173] identity. Instead, it is the spirit of expedition, of brotherhood on the icy slope, and of attaining a prize (reaching the summit)—these qualities permeate German mass culture. Höbusch, it often seems, is writing two equally compelling though at some level quite different books. Either this is a history of Nanga Parbat (the ninth-highest mountain in the world) and the German men who climbed it, or it is a study of mountaineering as a social and ideological phenomenon, an analysis of the way that climbing as an ethos became a cipher for German angst, self-glorification, and moral education before, during, and after National Socialism. It is the latter book, buried inside the former, that has the most consequence for historians of twentieth-century Germany. For reasons not entirely clear, Höbusch avoids placing “Mountain of Destiny” into conversation with others works that discuss the cultural preludes and propagandist exploits of National Socialism. Yet some of the most fascinating and disturbing moments in “Mountain of Destiny” describe the way mountaineers and their texts were easily (and often happily) appropriated by the Nazi state. Analyzing the language of mountaineers from the 1920s Höbusch repeatedly points to the aspects of the sport that allowed its cooptation by the Nazis: the idea of the mountain as spiritual alternative to modernity; the valorization of struggle as the central character of the endeavor; and the description of the forging of non-egocentric bonds in the midst of extraordinary circumstances in order to achieve success. “Mountain of Destiny” is an excellent account of how NS ideology infiltrated (or perhaps merely accentuated) one more aspect of prewar German life. Höbusch describes how willingly German climbers were to adapt their seemingly apolitical culture to fit Nazi ideology. Why, then, does Höbusch not situate the book as part of the history of National Socialism? The answer lies, perhaps, with Höbusch’s other, primary research area: the history of sports. By describing this book as a history of sports and its effect on national popular culture—rather than on the way political ideology coopted or manipulated the language of mountaineering—Höbusch allows himself the space to give a richer, fuller account of mid-twentieth-century German mountaineering and the men who defined it. It also allows him to show that, though the tenets of...

Book Reviews

Jon Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945-1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015) Reviewed by Jonathan BachMicahel Krüger, Christian Becker, and Stefan Nielsen, German Sports, Doping, and Politics: A History of Performance Enhancement (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) Reviewed by Heather L. DichterSusanne Rinner. The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013) Reviewed by Kirkland Alexander FulkKristen Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012) Reviewed by Alexander WochnikSean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, eds., Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Rochester: Camden House, 2012). Reviewed by Wilko Graf von HardenbergFrank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). Reviewed by Carol Hager

The Drones of Others: An Insight into the Imagination of UAVs in Germany

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have come to be a central military technology in the current era and have also recently entered the civil sector. Like any technology, UAVs are not just a technical object with distinct technical qualities but also the product of social negotiations and imaginations in public discourses. This article takes the word drone as a distinct component of these negotiations and imaginations of UAVs. With an interest in the German imagination of UAVs, the article presents an analysis of what is captured in the word Drohne ( drone ) in a corpus generated from an established German news platform. This analysis provides insight into the meanings attached to the word Drohne, such as ‘military power’, ‘hyper-progress’ and ‘threat to extant technology’. Importantly, it uncovers the distinction between two kinds of ‘Drohnen’: actors and tool, and unveils a geography of ‘Drohne’, in and through which ‘Drohnen’ are ‘managed’. With that the analysis reveals an intriguing subtle theme in the social negotiation of UAVs in Germany. In this theme the technology ‘Drohne’ (drone) is imagined as potentially ‘game changing’ in nature. At the same time, it is symbolically ‘tamed’ and organised through a (modern) understanding of bordered social ‘containers’, in which ‘Drohnen’ are imagined to exist and are subject to ‘compartmentalised’ responsibilities.

Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. ix + 395 pages + 15 b/w illustrations. $80.00.

Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. ix + 395 pages + 15 b/w illustrations. $80.00.

Women—Writing—Warfare: Literary Negotiations of Conflict around 1800

Women—Writing—Warfare: Literary Negotiations of Conflict around 1800 Julie Koser Stephanie M. Hilger, Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015). Pp. 183183. $70.00. Wendy C. Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013). Pp. 195. $80.00. In the field of German studies, the subject of women and warfare around 1800 has captivated scholars since the 1980s, beginning with the seminal research of Inge Stephan and others. In the last decade, the topic of women as warriors has received renewed scholarly attention in such works as Elisabeth Krimmer’s In [End Page 91] the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women around 1800 (2004); Patricia Anne Simpson’s The Erotics of War in German Romanticism (2007); contributions to the volume Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, edited by Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (2009); and Watanabe-O’Kelly’s Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (2010). Building on this body of research, Stephanie M. Hilger and Wendy C. Nielsen—aided by their backgrounds in comparative studies and their interdisciplinary approaches to women, writing, and warfare—add greater contour to existing scholarship, resulting in new and productive approaches to the topic. Both authors focus on the nexus of gender and genre, place concerted emphasis on women as writers, interrogate women writers’ strategic literary interventions in the public realm of politics, and read the woman warrior of German literature within the broader European political and cultural contexts. While Hilger confines her analyses to works by German women writers, Nielsen expands the scope of her study by placing the German woman warrior in dialogue with her counterparts in works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and British authors of both sexes. Taking the works of German-speaking women writers, from prolific authors such as Sophie la Roche and Therese Huber to the lesser-known Swiss widow Regula Engel, Hilger organizes her critical intervention in issues of women, writing, and warfare in the decades surrounding the French Revolution around six distinct genres: domestic and historical fiction, historical tragedy, autobiography, encyclopedic entries, and the bildungsroman (6). Of central concern in Gender and Genre are the ways in which German women writers appropriated and strategically deployed established modes of writing as mediums for women’s participation in the political and ideological discourses (from which they were “formally” excluded) about the social and political upheaval engendered by the Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars and Wars of Liberation. Anchoring Hilger’s analysis of German women writers’ occupation with the French Revolution are the tropes of the woman warrior and the woman emigrant. These figures, she argues, not only embody German-speaking society’s multifaceted responses to and negotiation with the decades-long culture of war and unrest but also expose the tension between women’s fictional and actual positions in the “political and literary sphere” around 1800 (158). New in Hilger’s examination of these literary works and their female protagonists is her identification of the “orphaned female protagonist” (8), who is liberated from familial bonds and traditional roles as mother, wife, and daughter in order to engage unfettered in the public sphere of revolutionary politics and to explore utopian fantasies of the New World. Hilger productively employs Lynn Hunt’s concept of the French Revolution as a “family romance” in her interrogation of the woman warrior in chapters one through four. Susanne Zantop’s groundbreaking work on “colonial fantasies” guides Hilger’s assessment of the woman emigrant in the New World in the concluding two chapters. Emerging from Hilger’s innovative study is the conclusion that fictional renderings of the woman warrior in Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf (1795/96), Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1815), Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday (1804), and Regula Engel’s Lebensbeschreibung (1821) not only pose a challenge to patriarchal structures of power; more importantly, they also “highlight the clash between the metaphorical representation of the body politic as a woman and the precarious situation of real women...

Reviews

Mary Helen Dupree. The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism. reviewed by gaby pailer Sean Franzel. Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. reviewed by antje pfannkuchen May Mergenthaler. Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung: Die Frühromantik im Symposion der „Athenaeums-Fragmente“. reviewed by andreas arndt John Tresch. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. reviewed by jocelyn holland Sean Ireton, Caroline Schaumann (eds.). Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Midle-Ages to the Twenty-First Century reviewed by wolfgang straub

Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century

Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century