German Intellectuals Research Articles

The Strange Case of Beethoven's Coriolan: Romantic Aesthetics, Modern Subjectivity, and the Cult of Shakespeare

Both musical and literary criticism in the nineteenth century were engaged in aggressive projects of canon formation. Although their motives and methods differed in many particulars, the two projects were alike in seeking a centered aesthetic order as a counterweight to the increasingly decentered organization of modem life. To use the language of Max Weber, they sought to make the aesthetic the locus of the charismatic as the social became the locus of the bureaucratic. Given the era's social ideology, this aim required that the aesthetic, always dangerously proximate to the feminine, be a locus of masculine identity as well. The result was a mode of canonization focused more on persons than on texts and centered on the charisma of a single supreme-and supremely virile--figure.1 There was never much doubt about the identity of the supreme figure for either music or literature; the archetypal geniuses were going to be Beethoven and Shakespeare. But this selection introduced a slight asymmetry, which gives this article its topic. Because of Shakespeare's chronological priority, Beethoven could best be seen to equal Shakespeare if he could be seen to resemble Shakespeare. The resemblance, in turn, could best be justified if Beethoven, like so many nineteenth-century composers after him, had written music on Shakespearean topics. But this he perversely declined to do. Beethoven was an avid reader of Shakespeare, like most German intellectuals of his day, and he did consider writing an opera on Macbeth. But the opera remained unwritten, and there is no authorized Shakespearean composition in Beethoven's output. Some musical ideas intended for the Macbeth project may have found their way into the eerily atmospheric slow movement of the so-called Ghost Trio

The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud

Witz first became a burning issue for German intellectuals after 1671 when le Pere Dominique Bonhours in his Entretiens d'Artiste et d'Eugene informed them that they didn't have any. According to Bonhours, it wasn't really the Germans' fault that they were a little dim, it is just that they live in a cold climate and tend to be fat. A feud between French bel esprit and German Intellekt erupted that has persisted ever since. Scholarly investigations into the nature of the joke have traditionally been plagued by a bad conscience and invariably begin with an apology to the reader for taking time for such a frivolous subject. In breaking with this tradition, Hill places wit almost at the heart of the universe, tracing it from Genesis to the dawn of themodern age. Even if the reader is reluctant to grant Witz this metaphysical and world-historical status, it must at least be admitted that Witz cannot be dismissed as a just a joke. Witz can serve either builders or destroyers, defenders of the faith or heretics, diplomats or oafs, male chauvinists or radical feminists. Witz shows its volatility in setting up cultural, class, and gender boundaries just to smash them. Hill argues that there is something about Witz that makes it quintessential to the plight of modern culture. He views Witz as an ahistorical subject developing over time and transcending the lifespans and intentions of the authors who have wirtten with or about it. In Der Witz, for instance, Freud thougth he was describing the workings of a historical psychological process, but the material he works with betrays him. His examples twist, mock, and undermine the theories he makes about them. And though Fred wrote dismissively of it, there is a long history of Witztheorie from which his own sprang. It has a long history through which its meaning shifts many times. The very word Witz was fought over, sometimes sluggishly and between buffoons but often with a brilliance that gave it lustre.

The Fascination of Amorality: Luhmann's Theory of Morality and its Resonances among German Intellectuals

The Fascination of Amorality: Luhmann's Theory of Morality and its Resonances among German Intellectuals

Black Bread-White Bread: German Intellectuals and the Frech Revolution.

Black Bread-White Bread: German Intellectuals and the Frech Revolution.

FERRUCCIO BUSONI AND HIS EUROPEAN CIRCLE IN BERLIN IN THE EARLY WEIMAR REPUBLIC

World War One reduced Berlin from a splendid, bustling, exciting intellectual and financial German capital to a dark, isolated, foreboding ruin. When the war ended in 1918 Berlin had lost its cultural prominence in Europe. German politicians, intellectuals and artists emerged from their isolation with a fervent desire to establish sound international relations. Leo Kestenberg, the newly elected advisor on musical affairs of the Weimar government's Ministry of Arts, Sciences and People's Education, resolved to reestablish Berlin as a cosmopolitan musical center by single-handedly bringing the best musicians from all over Europe to work there. He committed himself to bringing back to the German capital his teacher, mentor, and friend, Ferruccio Busoni. Like most of his contemporaries he saw Busoni as a quasi-mythical figure, a pure, deepley humanistic spirit whose mixed German-Italian blood had enabled him to rise above the turmoils and petty nationalistic squabbles of his day. Kestenberg remembered Busoni's avant-garde concert series

The Writers, Their Socialism, the People and Their Bad Table Manners: 1989 and the Crisis of East German Writers and Intellectuals

The Writers, Their Socialism, the People and Their Bad Table Manners: 1989 and the Crisis of East German Writers and Intellectuals

The Inevitability of Nation: German Intellectuals after Unification

The German 1980s could be described as a decade obsessed with memory. Wedged between the Berlin Prussian exhibition of 1981 and the recent burial rites for Frederick the Great at Sans Souci, there has been a trail of anniversaries of the key moments in twentieth-century German history, replete with public debate, television documentaries, and media commentaries. Most of these fiftyyear anniversaries were of a deeply troubling nature, and all of them had to do with the dark side of the German nation: 1983-the fiftieth of Hitler's rise to

The Displaced Intellectual? Adorno's American Years Revisited

America which for him meant the U.S.A. as a happy or successful relationship. In fact, most commentators have rightly stressed the highly problematic nature of this meeting, either by pointing out how unable and unwilling Adorno was to adjust to the American way of life or by emphasizing how the United States failed to receive and integrate the persona and work of the German-Jewish philosopher. Charges of cultural elitism and arrogance were common among American as well as foreign contemporary observers, charges that were later reiterated by critics of Adorno or intellectual historians dealing with the generation of German intellectuals exiled from Germany after 1933.' Defenders of Adorno, on the other hand, tend to foreground the incongruity between Adorno's European outlook and the intellectual atmosphere in the United States during the 1940s and early 1950s. By and large, foes and friends seem to agree that Adorno's complex and ambiguous attitude to America was rooted in his European and German Wleltanschauung, his critical humanism that motivated him to reject modern America its political order, its economic system, and particularly its culture. Because of his education and his commitment to an (elitist) humanist tradition (steeped in classical literature), so the argument goes, Adorno ended up giving a largely negative account of

Basic Aspects of an Imaginary Debate

History has already passed by the debate that I will be discussing in what follows. What remains, hence, are a few questions questions which may perhaps lead to some clarification on one of the specters that haunt politics and political science: patriotism. The debate I am referring to concerned the question as to whether the GDR ought to join the Federal Republic as the sum of its state territories according to Article 23 of the Basic Law, or whether, via a constitutional debate under the auspices of Article 146 of the Basic Law, a new German state ought to be founded. I find this question interesting not for reasons of technical law or for political considerations, but rather because a number of West German intellectuals believed that they were duty-bound to stand up for a constitutional debate and a global revision of the Basic Law. At first glance the political fronts seem quite clear: leftist, liberal, and critical spirits were in favor of a constitutional debate, while almost the entire liberal/ conservative to conservative spectrum of political scientists favored the accession of the GDR to the Basic Law.

After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals

The patterns of intellectual and political discourse in the new unified Germany are undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift. Innumerable feuilleton and magazine essays, books and conference proceedings, lecture series and round table discussions of the past year and a half reveal a far-reaching crisis in the self-understanding and public role of German intellectuals. A certain high-pitched tone betrays raw nerves. Tempers are fraying; irritation and exasperation abound. The threshold from reasoned argument to confession and last judgment is crossed ever more quickly and ever more frequently. A rhetoric of accusation and self-righteousness accompanies the escape from critical reflection into the realm of pure morality. Something is rotten in the state of German culture.

Reviews Book

Reviews Book

Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals

Sociological theory is ambivalent about the rationalizing processes of which it forms a part. This constitutive difficulty presents itself today in ways that have instructive parallels to the problem constellation confronting the first generation of 20th-century sociological classics. Karl Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was extraordinarily successful in Germany at the historical turning point of the Weimar Republic. This marks him as a representative figure among those contemporaries who acknowledged the force of irrationalist criticisms of progressive liberalism but sought to contain the destructive dynamics of such criticisms within a new type of rational framework, both intellectual and political. The article contrasts Mannheim's encounters with antirationalist thought in Ideologie un Utopie with the later pragmatist instrumental rationalism of his writings in English exile. In analyzing the shift, special attention is paid to Mannheim's involvement in Paul Tillich's religious socialist circl...

Thomas P. Saine, Black Bread — White Bread. German Intellectuals and tbe French Revolution.

Thomas P. Saine, <i>Black Bread — White Bread. German Intellectuals and tbe French Revolution.</i>

Black Bread-White Bread. German Intellectuals and the French Revolution

Black Bread-White Bread. German Intellectuals and the French Revolution

Gründgens, Mann, and Mephisto

Klaus Mann, the eldest son of Thomas Mann, was among the first emigrants to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933. From the vantage point of his early exile in Amsterdam, he looked back disapprovingly at German artists and intellectuals who appeared to thrive under Hitler's regime. Especially galling to him was the success of actor/director Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), his former brother-in-law:I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism. So intense was the facination of his shameful glory that I decided to portray Mephisto-Gründgens in a satirical novel. I thought it pertinent, indeed, necessary to expose and analyse the abject type of the treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.

Mitteleuropa and Post-Modern European Identity

Contemporary Europe is going through a period of increasingly rapid change. The post-war order, symbolized by Yalta and built on the permanent division of appears to be trembling under the impact of a political and perhaps cultural earthquake with the main epicenter located in the eastern half of Europe. In the long run the most lasting result of this earthquake will probably be the re-emergence of nationalist passions in the Soviet Union, the last great multiethnic empire, and in the eastern part of Europe. Lithuanians and Estonians, Armenians and Kazakhs, even former Volga Germans now living in Kazakhstan, are reasserting their national identities. Nationalist passions are running high between Hungarians and Romanians over the mistreatment of the Hungarian minority by the Romanians, and the planned razing of hundreds of villages in Romania supposed to make room for Ceaucescu's latest agro-village project, and between Albanians and Serbs over alleged Albanian atrocities committed against the Serbian minority in Kosovo. In the wake of this earthquake a growing number of politicians, pundits, and academics have advanced a variety of ideas for a new structure capable of reorganizing the relations between the peoples of Europe. Gorbachev's notion that we are all living in one common house is among those quoted most often. Among Central European and increasingly among West German intellectuals and publicists another formula is being advanced the idea of Mitteleuropa. Its central goal, at least for its West German advocates, is what the noted West German historian Andreas Hillgruber has defined as the reconstruction of the destroyed center of Europe, either as a precondition for or

The French Revolution and the Problem of German Modernity: Hegel, Heine, and Marx

The response of German intellectuals in the late 18th century to the French Revolution was various and changing. Some were immediately suspicious of the Revolution's intentions and prospects. Goethe showed a skeptical reserve; Schiller doubted its ability to bring about a free society.' Others who at first welcomed the Revolution quickly became disillusioned when it yielded war, regicide, and Jacobin dictatorship. Klopstock's initial poetic celebrations gave way to expressions of bitter disappointment.2 Gentz travelled from one extreme to the other: the Revolution's energetic apologist in 1789, he had become by 1792 one of its most vociferous critics.3

Fantasies of Mitte: Mittellage and mitteleuropa in German geographical discussion in the 19th and 20th centuries

Lately, German intellectuals have once again begun making reference to geographical constants. This is by no means innocuous, for the key terms in this discussion—Germany's Mittellage (central position) and Mitteleuropa (Central Europe)—are lodged in historical memory as representatives of Germany's striving for power and hegemony, a goal of German foreign policy since Wilhelminian imperialism until as late as 1945. A look at the history of geography shows that this reference to geographical constants is impermissible. Mittellage and Mitteleuropa, also, were not employed in a politically neutral manner. Using the Mittellage concept, Germany was given a special role in Europe which, in accordance with historical circumstances, could assume a defensive or offensive aspect. Mitteleuropa was originally a broad tract of land extending from the French Atlantic coast to the Black Sea or Ural Mountains, separating Nonhern and Southern Europe. With the founding of the German Reich (1871), the Mitteleuropa concept, too, became a political character. Consequently, the German striving for hegemony acquired the aspect of scientifically founded necessity. After 1945, instead of critical approach to the misuse of Mittellage and Mitteleuropa, geographers lamented that once again Germany had become a victim of its Mittellage.

The Revelatory Moment: Fichte and the French Revolution

As the French Revolution lurched toward the Terror in the early 1790s, the reaction of the German educated public shifted from qualified approval to horrified condemnation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the few German intellectuals who defied the trend. In the spring of 1793, at age thirty-one, Fichte denounced the governments of Europe for their reliance on secrecy and censorship and appealed for unconditional freedom of public expression. It was a fitting irony that this brief but impassionedZurückforderung der Denkfreiheithad to appear anonymously, with its place of publication given as “Heliopolis, in the last year of the old darkness.”

Black Bread: White Bread: German Intellectuals and the French Revolution

Black Bread: White Bread: German Intellectuals and the French Revolution