German Intellectual Tradition Research Articles

Introduction

One often speaks of the importance of poetry for thought, even of poetry as a mode of thinking, and perhaps nowhere more than in Germany, the country of Dichter and Denker, of poets and thinkers. The German intellectual tradition is defined by a long, intimately interwoven relation between poetry and thought going back to the solidification of the Modern Age in the eighteenth century: Klopstock's “Republic of Letters”; Goethe and Schiller's Classicism, especially Schiller's “aesthetic state”; Hölderlin's “founding poets” and the centrality of poets in “the time of need”; Jena Romanticism's inextricable relation between “Symphilosophie” and “Sympoesie”; Hegel's definition of…

Quietism in German Mysticism and Philosophy

A contribution to the sixth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” this article argues that a strong strain of quietism runs through German intellectual history, from medieval mystics such as Eckhart to the main line of modern philosophers, including Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Magee treats each of these in turn, establishing case by case that the relation of the individual to the universal is the central issue of German thought, as it is of quietist thinking generally. The identity of the universal varies; sometimes it is said to be God, sometimes the moral law, and sometimes reason (whether human reason or an objective reason inherent in the nature of the world). The process of grappling with how human beings must orient themselves toward the universal very often issues in conclusions that are quietistic: we are enjoined to acquiesce to the universal, and to accept the world as its manifestation. And such, Magee argues, is the case throughout the mainstream German intellectual tradition.

Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. By Charles Youmans.

Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. By Charles Youmans.

Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism (review)

Richard Strauss's Music and the Intellectual Tradition: Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. By Charles Youmans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. [x, 294 p. ISBN 0-253-34573-1. $39.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography. This is the first book-length treatment of central project in Strauss scholarship over the past decade or so: rescuing the composer from his outdated status as late romantic and recasting him as an antiromantic and early modernist. In this important book, Charles Youmans shores up this project and adds significant original contributions. Since the book assumes thorough knowledge of Strauss's life, the orchestral and their programs, and to lesser extent German, most readers will need supplementary life and works volume. book is divided into prologue and two main parts: The Private Intellectual Context of Strauss's Early Career-with chapters on the composer's to Wagnerism and appropriation of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Goethe, respectively -and Orchestral Composition as Philosophical Critique with chapters on the two cycles of tone poems and two later symphonies. book's title, however, does not represent its contents accurately; the discussion of Strauss's orchestral occupies less than half the book, the German intellectual tradition includes only Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and the context of outside the confines of Strauss's orchestral remains largely unaddressed. One suspects that the title might be calculatedly overblown, to use Youmans's characterization of Strauss's Symphonia domestica and Eine Alpensinfonie (p. 214). premise of the book, as stated in the prologue (pp. 3-4), is that the hijacking of modernism by Schoenberg has blinded us to the avant-garde edge of its early phase beginning around 1890 in addition to changing the focus of attention from aesthetics to musical technique, thus necessitating reinvestigation. After useful discussion of the Schopenhauerian or metaphysical conception of music shared by the feuding absolute and program music camps, Youmans states his revisionist argument: The thesis of the present book is that Strauss's coming of age was an intellectual as well as musical process, with the intellectual side of things directly affecting, in specific and sophisticated ways, all of his major for orchestra (p. 16). He dedicates his first three chapters to correcting what he feels to be the misguided traditions in Strauss scholarship making this book necessary: one-dimensional view of the role of Alexander Ritter and lack of appreciation of the intellectual activity of Strauss's early career. first chapter, on Strauss's conversion to Wagnerism, begins by fleshing out his relationship with Bayreuth in charting the conflicting versions of Wagnerian ideology that he encountered, concluding that by the early 1890s Strauss had developed dephilosophised attitude toward Wagner (p. 38), and that Strauss's conversion is more complex and less datable than commonly held. Although based on good deal of speculation, this nuancing is helpful and long overdue. Still more valuable is Youmans's account of Strauss's relationship with Alexander Ritter, his close friend and mentor ca. 1885-93, pieced together from primary sources (such as Ritter's articles for the Bayreuther Blatter) and the most comprehensive to date. He identifies Ritter's ideology as a form of neo-romanticism unsurpassed in its exaggerated spiritual claims (p. 44) and notes that this was the specific type of Wagnerism that Strauss rejected. In the following two chapters, Youmans proves once and for all that the image of the composer as clueless and superficial materialist uninterested in the deeper issues of his art, cultivated by Strauss himself and still battled by biographers, was only convenient facade. Using mostly primary sources, many of them unpublished, the author carefully chronicles Strauss's deep engagement with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the evolution of his revolutionary rejection of the prevailing metaphysical conception of music. …

Richard Strauss's orchestral music and the German intellectual tradition: the philosophical roots of musical modernism

Contents Intellectual History and Artistic Production: Case of Richard Strauss Part I. Private Intellectual Context of Strauss's Early Career 1. The Conversion: Strauss and Wagnerism 2. Music and the Denial of the Will: Schopenhauer in Strauss's Life and Work 3. Strauss's Nietzsche 4. Goethe and the Development of Strauss's Mature Worldview Part II. Orchestral Composition as Philosophical Critique 5. First Cycle of Tone Poems: Genesis of a Critical Musical Technique 6. Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Quixote, Strauss: Crystallization of a Persona 7. Absolute Music, Twentieth-Century Aesthetics, and the Symphonies of Richard Strauss Notes Works Cited Index

CULTURAL STUDIES IN GERMANY REVISITED

This contribution takes up the arguments developed in the essay ‘Cultural Studies in Germany (and Austria): why is there no such thing?’ (European Journal of Cultural Studies (1999), 2(1): 109-15). It refers, however,only to the German reception of cultural studies and focuses on the different ways cultural studies have become influential in various contexts since the 1970s. Three major stages can, roughly, be detected. The first comes from a new Leftist background dealing with working class and youth culture, and the discussion of the notion ‘ideology’. The second grew out of the youth culture debate in an attempt to re-politicize it, elaborated by the so-called ‘German Pop left’. The third is now within academia, particularly in media studies and‘Kulturwissenschaften’. The contribution aims to sketch out the limitations of the, however different, lines of the German reception of cultural studies as well as the weaknesses of the attempts to work in cultural studies with reference to what can be called the German (intellectual) tradition.

Volksgeist as Method and Ethnic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition

Franz Boas, the founding figure of anthropology in America, came to the United States from Germany in 1886. This volume in the History of Anthropology series explores the extent and significance of Boas' roots in the German intellectual tradition and late-19th century German anthropology.

Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research.

In the 1930s, with the rise of the Third Reich, thousands of European intellectuals sought refuge in the United States. Through the tireless efforts of Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, nearly two hundred of these scholars came to be affiliated with the University in Exile, later known as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. This book presents an intellectual history of that remarkable group of social and political scientists, documenting their experiences and their influence on both European and American thought. Johnson was one of the first to recognize the need for action to prevent Hitler's destruction of the German intellectual tradition. He sought out many of the best European scholars of the day and brought them to the newly created University in Exile in New York. There, the refugees framed as intellectual problems the social and political experiences that had so disrupted their lives and careers. They examined the cultural roots of fascism, the bureaucratization of Western societies, and the prerequisites for a historically and morally informed social science. In the field of economics, the exiles developed theoretical concepts and models that came to be instrumental in the formation of New Deal policies and that remain relevant today.

The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory

Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists-such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, Foucault, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss-have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngold's heralded book, The Fate of the Self, published for the first time in paperback with a spirited new preface, appears at a time when the relationship between the self and literature is a matter of renewed concern. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), the book examines the poetic self of German intellectual tradition in light of recent French and American critical theory. Focusing on seven major German writers-Holderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger-Corngold shows that their work does not support the desire to discredit the self as an origin of meaning and value but reconstructs the allegedly fragmented poetic self through effects of position and style. Offering new and subtle models of selfhood, The Fate of the Self is a source of rich insight into the work of these authors, refracted through poststructuralist critical perspectives.