German Intellectuals Research Articles

L'esilio degli intellettuali tedeschi negli Stati Uniti dopo il 1933

- The exile of German intellectuals after Hitler took power was the largest transfer of skills and talents that ever occurred in modern and contemporary times. German scientists, settled in an American environment which welcomed them, developed a series of analysis on the transformation of society, economy and the future of democracy, that had a great impact on various sectors of the US culture, ensuring to the country a primacy in various fields of knowledge for a long time.Parole chiave: Weimar, esilio, trasformazioni sociali, cultura di massa, democrazia, impatto scientifico Weimar, exile, social transformation, mass culture, democracy, scientific impact

A presença de Simmel na obra de Habermas

This paper aims to collecting texts in which Habermas quotes Georg Simmel (1858-1918), a very creative and popular author, although rejected by German academic institutions. Besides having written two rare and apparently not related titles - a Philosophy of Love and a Philosophy of money-, he has founded a new discipline, the Philosophy of Culture, which influenced Adorno and Horkheimer in their thesis concerning mass culture. Habermas joined in a radio conference a large group of Jew philosophers among German intellectuals up to the post World War II period; this helps us to understand how such prejudices against Simmel, specially his racial origin, had inhibited his career and the reception of his works.

Back from the USSR: The Anti-Comintern’s Publications on Soviet Russia in Nazi Germany (1935–41)

Joseph Goebbels's speech of 13 September 1935 on communism unmasked, held at the party rally of freedom that introduced the antisemitic legislation of the Nuremburg laws, marked the starting point of a propaganda campaign against the USSR that lasted until the rapprochement between the dictatorships in the summer of 1939. (1) Anti-communism was the dominating theme of the Nazi party's rally. Before the assembled faithful in Nuremburg, speakers that included Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg emphasized the need to struggle against the Bolshevik threat. In his speech, the Third Reich's propaganda minister started by refuting the claim of the British press that and Nazism were converging. (2) He claimed that the German and the European public had a distorted view of and promised to expose the true nature of the Soviet regime. According to Goebbels, exemplified the of Jewish-led subhumanity against culture as such. Against this threat, it was Nazi Germany's universal mission to save Europe from the perils of Bolshevism. (3) Goebbels went on to read a long list of crimes that he attributed to Soviet Russia's rulers and their communist allies abroad. In Nuremburg, he set out to convince the German population and the European public that the Comintern was a conspiracy. The speech showed Nazism's proclivity for viewing the world in conspiratorial terms. (4) Goebbels's appeal to join the fight against was soon published as a booklet and became the first component of a concerted campaign. As he vilified in his speech, Goebbels paid tribute to one Soviet achievement: he complimented the Soviet government on its excellent international propaganda. He accepted the challenge to counteract these propagandistic successes and to establish Bolshevism as a Feindbild for the German and European public. (5) Fundamentally, the anti-Soviet campaign was part of the radicalization of Nazi rule and served to legitimize such measures as the antisemitic legislation of 1935. (6) The campaign against the USSR aimed to connect the image of the internal Jewish enemy with Judeo-Bolshevism, which was portrayed as the greatest external threat. From the fall of 1935 onward, Nazi propaganda used a variety of different means to spread this message. The press, exhibitions on Soviet Russia, and speeches by party members kept repeating the same arguments. In the following years, Goebbels's propaganda ministry initiated the publication of a wide range of monographs on the USSR. This article traces the sources of the Nazi regime's anti-Soviet propaganda, analyzes its narratives, and discusses them in the context of the Nazi regime and the German-Russian encounter in the 20th century. I start out by tracing the origins of Nazi discourse about the USSR in the Weimar Republic and introducing the structure of the Anti-Comintern's apparatus. Weimar's Fascination with Bolshevik Russia and the Emergence of Bolshevism The Russian Revolution instantly became a topic of political discussion, and intellectual debate about the new Russia profoundly shaped the political discourse of Weimar Germany. (7) The cultural impact of Soviet Russia transcended the boundaries of the communist movement. Throughout the 1920s, German intellectuals and professionals of various political orientations visited the USSR. (8) For many years, Berlin had become a capital for Russian emigres and the second seat of the Comintern. (9) A range of intellectual traditions for criticizing developed; prominent among them was the early criticism of Rosa Luxemburg and Kari Kautsky, who wrote on behalf of the workers' movement. (10) In the early 1920s, those adhering to National and the Conservative Revolution also discussed the events in Russia and their reverberations in Germany; the fascination with Soviet Russia was not limited to the Left. …

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual

The burden of the past: Martin Walser on modern German identity: texts, contexts, commentary

The German novelist Martin Walser's 1998 speech upon accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade remains a milestone in recent German efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past. The day after the speech, Ignatz Bubis, leader of Germany's Jewish community, attacked Walser for inciting dangerous right-wing sentiment with controversial passages including the notorious statement 'Auschwitz is not suited to be a moral bludgeon,' thus igniting the protracted public battle of opinions known as the 'Walser-Bubis Debate.' The speech continues to loom large in Germany's struggle to acknowledge responsibility for Nazi crimes yet escape a suffocating burden of remembrance. But in spite of its notoriety, little attention has been paid to what the speech actually says, as opposed to the public outcry and debate that followed it. This book presents the text of the speech, along with several of Walser's other essays and speeches about the Holocaust and its impact on German identity, in English translation. It examines them as texts, a process that involves a discussion of literary complexities and an attempt to distinguish valid criticism of German intellectual life from what is justifiably problematic. And it places this textual examination in the context of Walser's and other postwar German intellectuals' attempts to deal with the Nazi past, of German-Jewish relations in the postwar era, and of the once hidden and now - due in part to Walser's speech - increasingly open discourse about Germans as victims during and immediately after the Nazi era. Thomas A. Kovach is professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona.

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual by Aziza Khazzoom

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual by <i>Aziza Khazzoom</i>

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual (review)

Reviewed by: Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual Ben Herzog Aziza Khazzoom . Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pp. x, 344. Cloth $65. ISBN 0804756976. According to C. Wright Mills, sociological imagination should be located in the intersection of biography and history, between the personal and the social structure. Aziza Khazzoom's book fulfills this task flawlessly. Based on quantitative data from the 1961 Israeli census, she shows that in addition to material interest, identity and ideology can also drive social closure and ethnic inequality. In other words, the Westernization ideology affected both internal and external boundaries of the new Israeli state. After presenting the historical background (chap. 2) and reviewing the possible theoretical approaches to ethnic formation (chap. 3,4), Khazzoom posits the "Iraqi Paradox" empirically (chap. 5) and analyzes ethnic inequality in Israel with respect to the Zionist Westernization project (chap. 6,7). Her thesis is an admirable academic endeavor. She produces a fresh and original empirical and theoretical analysis on a topic that has been excessively (and some would say exhaustingly) studied in Israel. The story of her uncle Na'im provided the personal connection to the large-scale empirical puzzle that drives the book's main thesis. Na'im, a book-keeper from Baghdad, immigrated to Israel in 1950. Although he experienced much discrimination, he was finally secured a job in his chosen profession. However, the book's empirical evidence goes well beyond the anecdotal. The personal story only illustrates the general Iraqi paradox described statistically by Khazzoom. In the labor market, Iraqi immigrants (who are socially defined as Mizrahi) received Ashkenazi-level returns on their education. Khazzoom does not reject that dichotomization, the binary distillation of the two ethnic groups, occurred. However, by looking at the exceptions to this process, she suggests that racial and ethnic boundaries are mutable and are not constructed only in respect to the monopolization of resources. In Israel, gatekeepers were primarily interested in developing a modern, Western society. Iraqis, in contrast to other Mizrahi immigrants, could perform and prove Westernness (especially through knowledge of European languages, proof of secular education, and knowledge of European fashions and basic manners) and thus secure a different absorption path. Thus, the book's subtitle, "How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual", is a bit misleading. It does not reflect the originality of the book's main argument and empirical puzzle. The book's important contribution is not in presenting again the unquestionable discrimination against Iraqis and other Mizrahi Jews, but in locating the complex mechanisms of its establishment according to an East/West classification. Zionism is a project of Westernization, and the social construction of a group that could be perceived as "the other" shaped this identity. Zionist veterans (Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel mainly from Europe before the establishment of the State) desired the absorption of all Jewish immigrants. However, they were almost obsessed with preventing the emerging society from being (or being seen as) Levantine. The Zionist veterans resolved the dilemma [End Page 96] by relegating most Middle Easterners to the margins of Israeli society – both physically and symbolically. At the same time, treating Iraqis who did not threaten the Westernization project in a preferential manner provided a chance to practice egalitarianism. However, giving an interpretation to the Iraqi (and to lesser extent, the Egyptian) paradox is not sufficient for Khazzoom to establish her argument. She also disqualifies alternative explanations. For example, she shows that one cannot attribute Iraqis' relative success to the communal strength of Iraqi communities in Tel Aviv/Ramat Gan. The Iraqi paradox remains strong among the salaried, meaning that it is likely it resulted from the gatekeepers' choice rather than ability to resist discrimination. Moreover, Eastern characteristics that were clearly distributed by binary ethnic categories but that were invisible in the job market did not affect Iraqis returns on education. Thus, only by performing Westernness did Iraqis obtain returns on education similar to Ashkenazim. Although the author shows that only visible characteristics alter the ethnic and binary classification system, the...

Structuring German postwar ideologies: review of A. Dirk Moses, German intellectuals and the Nazi past

It is not only because much of the ideological landscape of postwar West Germany remains to borrow one historian's metaphor uncharted intellectual territory that German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past comes as such a key contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century thought. To be sure, while certain canonized figures, such as Jurgen Habermas, Gunter Grass, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, and even the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have received adequate attention in Anglophone scholarship, we have precious few studies in English on many of the thinkers examined here by Moses. These are the lesser-known postwar historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and educationalists (p. 10) who served on government advisory committees, became ministers of culture and education, or in other ways decisively shaped the political discourse of the Federal Republic. For that reason alone Moses was guaranteed to cover new ground. But it is ultimately the innovative way in which he has mapped his subject matter that makes this work stand out, not only as an indispensable guide to early debates about Nazism and West German democracy, but more generally as a distinctively original model for writing about intellectuals and their ideas. This book is not a conventional intellectual history, we are told in the introduction (p. 10). Part of what makes that statement true is the attention Moses pays to fields that is all too often terra incognita for intellectual historians namely, structural anthropology and the voluminous but neglected literature on German social psychology. His case for integrating research on family life, transgenerational transmission, and the like into a history of intellectuals rests on the deceptively profound insight that political ideas and ideologies, arguably nowhere more so than in postwar Germany, often possess existential significance for their articulators. Drawing on Erving Goffman's theories of social drama, Moses presents the political

Aziza Khazzoom, Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: or How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual.

Aziza Khazzoom, Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: or How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual.

German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, by A. Dirk Moses and, Albert Speer: Conversations with Hitler’s Architect, by Joachim Fest

<i>German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past</i>, by A. Dirk Moses and, <i>Albert Speer: Conversations with Hitler’s Architect</i>, by Joachim Fest

Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism Mark Grzeskowiak Ehrhard Bahr . Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. 378 pp. US$ 39.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25128-8. Ehrhard Bahr's book is a thoroughly researched "collection of case studies" on an important group of German intellectuals and artists living in Los Angeles during the Second World War. According to Bahr, the work of exiles such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Arnold Schoenberg can be read within the context of a broader "crisis of modernism," and he persuasively argues that the "exile culture" that existed in Los Angeles between 1933 and 1958 "deserves its place among the global cityscapes of modernism." Weimar on the Pacific differs from previous scholarship in German exile studies in both its language (i.e., it is written in English) and in its exclusive focus on exiles living in the city of Los Angeles during the war. Bahr has based his definition of a particular "crisis of modernism" on British cultural historian Raymond Williams's contention that modernism can be understood as a response to dramatic changes "in the media of cultural production" in the nineteenth century and on Russell A. Berman's tripartite division of German modernist prose writing into "fascist modernism, leftist modernism, and a modernism of social individuality." Rather than present his readers with "another publication on German exile literature," his objective in Weimar on the Pacific is to examine "a particular chapter in the cultural history of Los Angeles" and the "specific German answer" to modernism that found expression there in architecture, film, music, philosophy, and theatre. For some exiled artists, this crisis in modernism provoked a retreat from modernism. Bahr's chapter on Franz Werfel, for example, shows how the Prague novelist and poet alternated between modernism and antimodernism while in his Californian exile. The same can be said of the novelist Alfred Döblin, whose Karl und Rosa, with its message of religious redemption over politics, also indicates a renunciation of modernism. On the other hand, and as is demonstrated in close readings of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Bahr is also able to demonstrate how some of the artists exiled in Los Angeles overcame this crisis and reconstituted modernism in light of their new historical and political situations. In the case of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, for example, Bahr shows how the composer combined traditional liturgy with modernism to produce an oratorio intended as a "commemoration of Jewish identity during a period of persecution." In the case of Doktor Faustus, Bahr employs Walter Benjamin's concept of antinomic allegory to argue that Mann's protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, needs to be read "dialectically" against a background of fascist Germany and modernist art, rather than to be simply identified with either. The employment of a "dialectical reading" is central to Bahr's approach. Drawing upon Brecht's assertion that "emigration is the best school of dialectics," Bahr argues [End Page 482] that the exiled artists and intellectuals treated in his book adopted a "dialectical stance" towards Los Angeles, with its ocean-side bungalows and lush gardens, and that this distancing allowed them to see their new home as a "cityscape of modernism," rather than as a "natural paradise." In this sense, according to Bahr, the dialectic functioned as both a "structural and an intellectual argument in art and literature." To support the latter (intellectual) argument, Bahr relies heavily upon Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which provides a general philosophical backdrop to the book's various case studies. Bahr sees in the Horkheimer/Adorno study "a comprehensive assessment and analysis of modernism and its crisis in the 1940s," and it of enormous benefit to his book that his analysis of The Dialectic of Enlightenment not only addresses its philosophical argument, but also attempts to place it within a specific historical setting. Despite its reliance on close reading and at times...

Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (review)

Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Diasporas, edited by Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 407 pp. $24.95. studies is a vibrant area of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. Relative to other disciplines, however, sociology has been underrepresented in this field, leading some observers to speculate that sociology might even have a Jewish problem. In a recent essay, Burton Halpert laments that when he undertook graduate work in sociology in 1968, he had no idea that the might be an appropriate subject of study for someone pursuing a career in sociology. Two decades later, Zygmunt Bauman noted sociologists' continued neglect and failure to appreciate the as an area relevant to some of the central concerns of the discipline. Since that time, many (though mostly Jewish) sociologists have heeded Bauman's call for a scholarly engagement with the Holocaust. Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf's anthology, Sociology Confronts the Hohcaust: Memories and Identities in Diasporas, is a significant contribution to this effort. Gerson and Wolf's book grew out of an international conference held at Rutgers University in 2001 and includes original contributions by some of the leading scholars in the field. Contained within are interesting empirical studies of neglected topics as well as incisive theoretical analysis of sociological issues. The editors argue that a comparative approach aimed at developing generalizations that apply to other social phenomena should guide sociological research on the Holocaust. As Gerson writes in a chaptet she contributed on memoirs, Continued assumptions of uniqueness only offer to place the outside full scholarly study and perpetuate a priori conclusions about distinctiveness (p. 131). Thus the editors seek to avoid the ghettoization of Holocaust studies as an area of inquiry onto itself (p. 6) and instead link scholarship to broader disciplinary concerns with ethnicity and immigration, diasporas and transnationalism, and collective memory and identity. Among the noteworthy empirical contributions to the book are studies of children who were hidden in Belgian convents during the war, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, wartime and postwar experiences of survivors, German cattle dealers who settled in rural New York, dilemmas of Soviet refugees in Israel and the United States, the international Je wish diaspora business that utilizes tourism to inculcate identity and pro-Israel sentiments, and postwar exchanges among German intellectuals over the question of collective guilt. From these and other contributions to the book we gain greater appreciation of the complexity of the experience - of identity as not only a social construction but a heterogeneous phenomenon, of Jews who mistreat or hold negative attitudes toward other Jews, of the conflict between Israel and the United States as the center of culture and identity, and of cultural boundaries that construct varying accounts of victims, petpetrators, and bystanders of the Holocaust. …

Book Reviews

Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Reviewed by Triadafilos TriadafilopoulosDan Hough, Michael Koss and Jonathan Olsen, The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Reviewed by Christopher S. AllenRoger Karapin, Protest Politics in Germany: Movements on the Left and the Right Since the 1960s (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007)Reviewed by Philipp GassertA. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Reviewed by by Robert C. HolubBarbara Mennel, The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2007)Reviewed by Randall HalleSandra Chaney, Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945-1975 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)Reviewed by Russell J. Dalton

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.

Ehrenfest letters surface

Ehrenfest letters surface

Wilamowitz at War

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff is now principally remembered by non-classi cists not as the great scholar of Greek antiquity that he was, but for his famous dis pute with Nietzsche and with Stefan George and his Circle. However, Wilamowitz also played a central role that is less well known in yet another and vastly more significant conflict. In the opening weeks of the First World War, he gained new notoriety as one of the most prominent and influential signatories of the notorious manifesto signed by 93 German intellectuals and scholars addressed to the civilized world: "An die Kul turwelt!" In this essay, I explore some of the reasons why Wilamowitz would have par ticipated in this ill-advised endeavor and consider some of its consequences.

Transnational Culture War: Christianity, Nation, and the Judeo‐Bolshevik Myth in Hungary, 1890–1920

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesTransnational Culture War: Christianity, Nation, and the Judeo‐Bolshevik Myth in Hungary, 1890–1920*Paul HanebrinkPaul HanebrinkRutgers University Search for more articles by this author Rutgers UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 80, Number 1March 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/529077 Views: 265Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Atalia Omer Religion and Nationalism, (Dec 2018): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0448Mari Rethelyi Good writers, bad Jews: the “Jewish Question” among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no.22 (Jan 2018): 222–235.https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2018.1423742Máté Rigó The Long First World War and the survival of business elites in East-Central Europe: Transylvania’s industrial boom and the enrichment of economic elites, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 24, no.22 (Mar 2017): 250–272.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2016.1257573Rudolf Kučera Exploiting Victory, Sinking into Defeat: Uniformed Violence in the Creation of the New Order in Czechoslovakia and Austria, 1918–1922, The Journal of Modern History 88, no.44 (Dec 2016): 827–855.https://doi.org/10.1086/688969GIULIANA CHAMEDES THE VATICAN AND THE RESHAPING OF THE EUROPEAN INTERNATIONAL ORDER AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR, The Historical Journal 56, no.44 (Oct 2013): 955–976.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X13000320Victoria Harms Living Mitteleuropa in the 1980s: a network of Hungarian and West German Intellectuals, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire 19, no.55 (Oct 2012): 669–692.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2012.719005Holger Nehring ‘Civility’ in history: some observations on the history of the concept, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire 18, no.33 (Jun 2011): 313–333.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.574681James Casteel Historicizing the Nation: Transnational Approaches to the Recent European Past, (Jan 2011): 153–169.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306370_9HOLGER NEHRING, HELGE PHARO Introduction: A Peaceful Europe? Negotiating Peace in the Twentieth Century, Contemporary European History 17, no.33 (Aug 2008): 277–299.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777308004499

L'exil dans l'exil Les stratégies linguistiques contradictoires des exilés aux États-Unis (Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Hans Sahl, Oskar Maria Graf)

This paper focuses on the problem of language in the years of exile. The refugee-writers and most of the German intellectuals exiled in the USA were torn between two contradictory positions. Were they to condemn Germany and its terror regime and yet also throw away its cultural past and the German language for the sake of Americanisation and reeducation ? Adopting the English or the French language was not a solution for most of them and only the very young had the courage to speak and to write in French or in English. Were they to save the best of the German culture in an uncertain future in order to regenerate a German language that had to be freed from the stigma of the LTI-years ? Paradoxically enough it was mostly the German-speaking Jewish writers who did not follow the mainstream and continued to use the German language through which they expressed their Jewishness.

Imperium et Italie au XVe siècle: juristes et humanistes face à la dé-romanisation de l’empire

The nature of the Empire was the object of constant discussion on the part of the jurists. In the 15th century, the Italian intellectuals paid more particular attention to the nationality of the Emperor and confirmed its inevitable non-Romanization and its subsequent Germanization. The present paper examines the sources, both legal and humanistic, of this important debate. One of the turning points in the discussion was the creation of the duchy of Milan in 1395. Baldo degli Ubaldi was one of the legal experts to make his contribution, explaining that the creation of duchy was like a revival of the Empire in Lombardy. At the end of the century, the discussion between Italians and Germans became more virulent. At stake was the legitimate nationality of the emperor. The question is not neutral because it reveals the capacity of the intellectuals to use the most diversified sources to answer the fundamental question of the legitimacy of states, in particular Italian territorial states. It is moreover striking that humanists and Italian jurists, so often in opposition between themselves, have had convergent points of view on this issue, even when the theoretical base of their reflection was not the same. The Empire had stopped being Roman and had been reduced to its Germanic dimension. The German intellectuals naturally tried to benefit from it. Recommended citation: Gilli, Patrick, Imperium et Italie au XVe siècle: juristes et humanistes face à la dé-romanisation de l’empire, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 13 (2008) 133-153, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg13/133-153

« L'Autre Allemagne » face au défi culturel de la traduction Trois figures exemplaires : H. Mann, A. Döblin et E. E. Noth

The article deals with the main problem of translation, starting with the idea of an « other Germany » that could only exist in the state of extraterritoriality after 1933 and with the position of exiled writers towards alien and own culture. Two positions can be found : most writers remained faithful to their own culture that the Diaspora of German intellectuals facilitated, others changed languages and worked as translators, illustrating what can be called a multicultural identity. Three authors serve as examples for testing a “cultural translatability” through their temporal and geographical displacement (France, 1933-1940/41) : Heinrich Mann as a model of a cultural hybridity – that he already developed before 1933 – he used as a translator of others’ and of his own works and – especially in journalism – as a bilingual author ; Alfred Döblin as an example for a failed author despite every attempt to acculturate, Ernst Erich Noth as a case of an author who overcame the translation through a quick and successful change of culture.