German Mind Research Articles

Not So Quiet on the Western Front: German Reactions to Netflix's 2022 Remake

In October 2022, Netflix's remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) opened to great acclaim in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries, receiving rave reviews from critics and movie-goers alike, eventually winning seven BAFTAs and four Oscars, the most awards ever for a German-language production. In Germany, however, reactions could not have been more different. The film was roundly panned by historians as “flawed, cliché-laden, and unauthentic [all translations from German by Michael Geheran],” and derided by critics as Oscar bait, an anti-American trope often used to disparage a cultural production. In what has now become something of a punchline, the Süddeutsche Zeitung quipped that “No book is so good you can't make a bad film out of it,” while the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung charged that the producers were “horny for an Oscar,” having removed “the inner plot, the brains of the story” and “replaced them with a Hollywood program.” How to make sense of such dramatically different reactions to the same film? Germans’ responses cannot simply be explained by the historical liberties taken by the director, Edward Berger, or disappointment with the plot differences between the movie and Erich Maria Remarque's novel, but arguably reveal deeper anxieties as the long shadow of Germany's past continues to weigh heavily on German minds. Does the film pander to popular images about war in a way that has different meaning in Germany than, say, in the US or the UK, with their different memory cultures? How much is German dislike of the film shaped by the legacy of the Second World War and not just the First? With these questions in mind, this essay will consider German reactions to the 2022 film and what they say about Germany's memory culture, paying close attention to the film's language, connotations, and imagery that may be particularly meaningful to German audiences. To be sure, film reviews are not the most reliable source for getting at popular attitudes and mentalities, but the stark divergence of opinion about Netflix's All Quiet say something important about how and whether memories of militarism and the Holocaust continue to shape how Germans think about war.

Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009 ed. by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann

Reviewed by: Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009 ed. by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann Noah Heringman Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, eds. Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. vii + 361 pp. A. C. Spectorsky prefaced his classic anthology, The Book of the Mountains (1955), by interrogating the figure of alpine "conquest": Currently, there has been an effusion of writing about the conquest of heretofore impregnable peaks. Conquest is an odd word used thus: Months and years of planning weeks and months of desperate and perilous toil are invested in a brief moment when perhaps two men, swaddled, numb, gasping like stranded fish, triumphantly stand with their heads some six feet higher than the hoary peak of a mountain which has—massive and impersonal—forced upon them adaptations almost beyond the limits of human flexibility and endurance. Not surprisingly, Spectorsky's curiosity about what it might mean to conquer a mountain led him to include several German-speaking authors in his anthology, and he could have found much additional material in Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann's new anthology, Mountains and the German Mind. Spectorsky had the scope to include a global cohort of authors from antiquity to the present, and to address "the total sense of the mountain world … of which mountain climbing is only a part." Mountains and the German Mind has the more modest aim of surveying German-language writings focused mainly on climbing. Alexander von Humboldt is the only author shared by the two anthologies, though the series of German expeditions to the Himalayas, featured in one chapter of Ireton and Schaumann's book, is also documented in The Book of the Mountains. Ireton and Schaumann's admirable goal is to make important German texts available for the first time in English. Each of its thirteen chapters consists of an introduction followed by a translation from a Germanophone mountaineer-author. As advertised, the German texts span the period 1541–2009, from the Swiss humanist Conrad Gessner to the South Tyrolese celebrity Reinhold Messner. [End Page 206] By depicting mountaineering as a centuries-old pursuit, this volume makes visible inherited tropes conditioning this pastime long before it was a sport, while also revealing unique constellations of scientific, aesthetic, and ideological positions that characterized each stage of its development. Some of the most persistent tropes include the sublime, nationalism and nativism, primitivism, survival, geological time, and claims of priority, the latter being a subset of the larger topos of mastery or "conquest" identified by Spectorsky in 1955. A more scholarly book from the 1950s, Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), provides a key reference for the editors in their introduction and for the translators of the first two chapters. The early modern narratives of Gessner (trans. Dan Hooley) and Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (trans. Jennifer Jenkins) help to make clear the limitations of Nicolson's argument (drawing mainly on English literature) that a sudden cultural transformation in the late seventeenth century made the appreciation of mountains possible. While echoing Nicolson's insistence on actual travel through the mountains, these authors show that the English travelers she studies were latecomers on the scene. Even the third chapter, an excerpt from the 1784 Alpine travelogue of Sophie von La Roche (trans. Martina Kopf), shows the influence of a much longer tradition of interpreting mountains through the lens of "providential design." Christoph Weber's emphasis on this point in his introduction to Scheuchzer, together with Kopf's helpful gloss on the Swiss literary tradition that inspired La Roche, helps to establish "mountain glory" as an abiding through-line for the volume. The conquest of mountains, however, becomes a much more dominant preoccupation in the nineteenth century, bearing out the idea of a historical "shift" put forward by the editors. In chapter 5 on Humboldt, we find a strong emphasis on priority claims in the primary text, reinforced by Schaumann's contextualization of his "mountain feats." For Herrmann von Barth, the subject of the next chapter, conquest becomes the raison d'être of "Alpine sport": "Man longs to feel that he is...

Review Essay: Mountains, History, and Nature: A View Back from the Anthropocene Towards Historical Mountaineering Literature

Review essay of Caroline Schaumann’s Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century and of the anthology edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner.

Book Reviews: Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (eds): Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Meissner, 1541–2009

Book Reviews: Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (eds): <i>Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Meissner, 1541–2009</i>

Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009 ed. by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann

Reviewed by: Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009 ed. by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann Martina Gugglberger Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009. Edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Pp. vii + 361. 28 illustrations. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1640140479. Mountaineering sports enjoy great popularity in Europe and the US. Besides activities on rock and ice, mountaineering is known as one of the most literary of sports. [End Page 398] Achievements and experiences in alpine areas have been printed in books and journals even before the beginning of what is called modern alpinism. These narratives reached many readers and influenced views of and discourses on not only mountains and mountain sports but also social and environmental issues in these areas. This book gathers thirteen key German nonfiction texts on mountains and mountaineering written by authors from German-speaking regions such as Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and South Tyrol in Italy. With translations and introductions by relevant scholars, these texts are now accessible to English-speaking readers. The translated texts span a period of four hundred and fifty years from early modern to postmodern times and include treatises, travel diaries, book chapters, and excerpts from longer texts. The selections offer different views of mountain landscapes and are devoted to geographical descriptions as well as philosophical and aesthetic observations and autobiographical climbing narratives. In the introduction, the two editors explain that the texts "illuminate the wide range of motivations, perspectives, and ideological contexts vis-à-vis mountains and mountaineering in Germanophone cultural history" and can "therefore safely be subsumed under the title Mountains and the German Mind" (5). Whereas the notion of a "German mind" appears clear in the four texts related to national social ideology, in the other texts the connecting thread seems to be primarily the German language. The volume begins with texts from the renowned Swiss naturalists Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) and Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733). Gessner's texts, introduced by Dan Hooley, were originally written in Latin and prefigure the Romantic attraction to mountain landscapes for their beauty but also their physical and spiritual challenges. Approximately 150 years later, Scheuchzer contributed a tremendous encyclopedic volume on Swiss landscapes. Excerpts of his work, translated by Jennifer Jenkins and introduced by Christoph Weber, reveal Scheuchzer's enduring fascination with the Alps, which he considered to be proof of a divine architect. For a long time, traveling to alpine regions and writing about it was a male domain. Nevertheless, among such writers are few women are also to be found, such as Sophie von La Roche (1730–1807), who published a travel diary about her journey through Switzerland, presented here by Martina Kopf. La Roche refers to God's omnipotence and human beings as part of a greater system when describing her feelings in the face of mountains. Only a few years later, the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) visited Switzerland and wrote a travel diary about his seven-day walk through the Bernese Alps. He was skeptical about a sublime view of mountains and reflects on the limitations of freedom for those who live in alpine areas. Another well-known representative of this period is Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who attempted to climb several Andean mountains during his expedition to the Americas. Caroline Schaumann reveals unpublished diary excerpts of his endeavors on Chimborazo and Antisana in 1802. In contrast to Hegel, Humboldt is enthusiastic about the [End Page 399] surrounding nature and mountain landscapes, which he scientifically considered as microcosms of the earth. During the nineteenth century, the number of visitors to the Alps increased as motives shifted from scientific interests to recreational and adventure incentives. Hermann von Barth (1845–1876) was one of the first peak collectors and promoters of guideless climbing, eventually reaching 250 peaks in the Alps of Bavaria, Tyrol, and Salzburg. Sean Ireton translated two parts of von Barth's influential book on his mostly solo climbs. Sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) represents an entirely theoretical approach, and Jens Klenner introduces Simmel's essay on journeys through the Alps as well as one on aesthetics. Simmel...

Humor in German media coverage of Poland and Poles

Media play a significant role in perceiving the world and constructing our conception of reality since the samples of social discourses exposed in the media have a strong influence on the shaping of the image of nations, opinions, attitudes, and hierarchies of values. The present article discusses humorous content in German press, television, and Internet coverage from recent years, which has reinforced a negative image of Poland and Poles in German minds. In the introductory part, the attention is focused on presenting the essence and functions of humor in the light of contemporary humor research, with a special emphasis placed on the interdependencies between humor, language, and discourse on the one hand, and ethnic cultures on the other, which differ in terms of preferred norms and values.

Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State by Brian E. Crim

Reviewed by: Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State by Brian E. Crim Jared S. Buss (bio) Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State. By Brian E. Crim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 264. Hardcover $39.95. Brian E. Crim's Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State is a valuable contribution to Cold War scholarship and the history of technology. Crim sleuths through a trove of declassified documents to reveal complex layers of debate about Project Paperclip, the military-led incorporation of German scientists and engineers into the American postwar scene. By describing the absorption of "our Germans" into the national security state or military/civilian apparatus of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), the book highlights contentious debates, shifting priorities, increasing pressures for immigration expediency, and other considerations about the past, current, and future capabilities of German-born scientists and engineers. The moral debate about utilizing "our Germans" is ever-present, from public media to internal State Department resistance. The author demonstrates how moral and ethical considerations about engineers' pasts became secondary considerations amid the obvious military priorities of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union became a far more immediate threat. By showcasing interservice rivalries, departmental infighting, and various strong-arm tactics of military personnel, the book reveals the avenues of tacit or enthusiastic support for Project Paperclip and the lingering resistance and doubts about the "Nazi scientists." The tensions of these debates are fascinating, particularly when questions arise as to the reputation of the "German mind," the future potential of propagandized German "wonder weapons," and the viability of V-2 rocket technology. Crim also explores the contradictory goals of American efforts to obtain the best of German [End Page 917] minds while bolstering the capabilities of West Germany, which would depend on thriving centers of research and development. Because the United States recruited thousands of German scientists, Project Paperclip had far-reaching consequences for superpowers and their allied and/or satellite nation-states. Crim examines competing priorities, contradictory goals, and constant infighting among both military and civilian factions. Thus, Our Germans is an interesting case study of the nexus of military and industrial cooperation/competition regarding state-sponsored research and development. Crim navigates these debates with attention to details, which both enrich the book and complicate the narrative. Although Our Germans is a short book, readers will encounter a demanding collection of code-names, military jargon, and abbreviations of agencies, departments, and organizations. Some readers may become frustrated by the descriptive sections of the book, which include excerpts from military documents. The primary sources affect the readability of the book due to operational language of military or governmental personnel. Other readers, particularly historians of spaceflight, will appreciate the work's treatment of von Braun and his rocket team. The book recognizes von Braun's importance as a public figure associated with "our Germans," yet it explores the larger scope of Paperclip, in which the rocket team played a lesser role compared to other fields, especially aeronautics. Some scholars may wish for an overview of Paperclip that further decenters von Braun, in turn steering readers away from more sensationalistic and popular accounts that expose the alleged Nazi contributions to postwar American science and technology. In this regard, Crim's arguments may disappoint some scholars. For example, the author asserts that the German wartime research center of Peenemünde served as an influential model during the expansion of the American military-industrial complex (MIC) with its competing interests and shrewd personnel who learned to navigate, chart, and even direct the currents of big science. "Big science knows no ideology," Crim argues (p. 12). Many of the Germans "became a permanent component of the MIC they served, and in no small part, created" (p. 85). Historians may wonder how groups of postwar Germans could so heavily influence a system of military and industrial coordination that originated with the First World War, if not the American Civil War's coordination of industrialists, factories, and weapons specialists. Arguably, the book gives far too much credit to "our Germans," especially the rocket team. Nevertheless, these criticisms are minor. Our Germans should appeal to many different...

Spaces on the temporal move: Weimar Geopolitik and the vision of an Indian science of the state, 1924–1945

ABSTRACT The termination of the Great War hailed a universally modern moment and a new ‘global’ condition. Early to recognize this was the Bavarian scholar and general Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), who built his Geopolitik school on temporal expectation. Defying its reduction to Hitler and Nazism, Haushofer’s Geopolitik aimed to gain revolutionary momentum from anti-colonial nationalisms in the East. In Haushofer’s vision, geopolitical spaces themselves acquired motion as the long-dormant East rose with a globally resounding ‘energism’. Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (‘Journal for Geopolitics’) made India a particular model for Germans seeking to ‘catch up’ on world affairs. The world signified exposure, but, if harnessed correctly, rejuvenation for the nation. In his attempt to de-orientalise the German mind to prepare it for geopolitical momentum, Haushofer drew on the vision of a dynamic East offered by the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949). This flipped the temporality of colonialism. Geopolitical temporality offered the promise of a history that would not manifest itself in time, but in space. In 1933, for Haushofer, the centre of emancipatory dynamism shifted to the fascist countries as champions of a just spatial order against the ‘status quo’ of British or US hegemony.

Re-education of German POWs as a German-Jewish Task: The Case of Adolf Sindler

AbstractTowards the end of the Second World War, as a German defeat seemed inevitable, the Allied powers began searching for a postwar policy that would prevent the resurgence of Germany as a hostile military power in Central Europe. Instead of material destruction, the British preferred to tackle the German mind. As a means of achieving the objectives of ‘Denazification,’ the British launched a large scale plan for political re-education of the German people. The plan included a pioneering program for German Prisoners of War held in dispersed British captivity camps. In charge of executing the program in one such camp, located alongside the Suez Canal, was a German-Jewish refugee named Adolf Sindler. His service as a ‘Training Adviser’ began in early 1946 and lasted for two years. Sindler’s leadership in the camp created some of the earliest, and perhaps most unusual, encounters of the immediate postwar period between German soldiers, some of whom were still ardent Nazis, and German-Jews, in this case, one who was in charge of their mental rehabilitation. Sindler was provided constant support by a group of German-speaking socialist émigrés who had found shelter in Palestine. This paper explores how this historical case study informs our understanding of the inner-Jewish dialogue concerning the involvement of émigrés in the moral reconstruction of their former society. In addition, it seeks to contribute to our knowledge of the nature of operations during the early stages of the pretentious British re-education plan.

When Goethe met Vuk...: Views on selected pages of Serbian-German relations

Serbian-German relations were viewed within a specific social and cultural-historical development of both nations, and were also interpreted from the standpoint of cognitive and semiotic theory of culture. The first part of the paper deals with the dominant trends and spiritual tendencies in German culture, from the transformation of the humanist interest in 'exotics' into Herderian romantic understanding of nation and into Grimm's equalization of the poetic and the folk quality, thanks to which in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as during the Serbian liberation wars against the Turks, the Serbian way of life gained the position of an ideal cultural model. Therefore, special attention is dedicated to Vuk's relations with the most important German minds of the so-called golden age. The paper particularly underlines the contribution of Talfj, who adjusted her translations of Serbian poetry to German sensibility, as well as to the entire contemporary European taste. The second part of the paper follows the changes in the Serbian-German relations from the second half of the nineteenth century till our days, conditioned by unhappy historical-political occurrences. Illustrated both from the German and Serbian standpoint with works, experiences, thoughts and feelings of statesmen and warriors scientists and writers, as well as ordinary people - these relations are presented as ambivalent, but never broken.

Sarah Austin and the Politics of Translation in the 1830s

austin was an early Victorian translator of note, working to supplement the income of her lawyer husband, John Austin, and after his death editing and publishing his famous treatise on jurisprudence. She belonged to that Unitarian circle of intellectual thinkers, writers, and philosophers that included Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, the Grotes, and the Carlyles, and she was related to the Martineaus. Her nephew was Henry Reeve, later an influential and long-term editor of the Whig quarterly, the Edinburgh Review, from i%SS to 189^. As I have noted elsewhere, Austin, Carlyle, and Coleridge spearheaded an industry that introduced German intellectual thought into England (Johnston 124) . Austin had located what we would term today a niche market, in which she offered British readers a range of texts translated, or, to use Andre Lefevere's term, rewritten, from the German.1 Austin's translations from the German in the decade between 1831 and 1841 were especially significant in introducing German intellectual thinking and writing into England.2 One contemporary commentator notes in a review of Fragments from German Prose that Austin has done more, perhaps, than any living writer, to bring the German mind into contact with the (Austin's German Prose Writers £04-06) . Like that of her contemporaries, Austin's engagement with literature and translation characterized the practice of a generation of thinkers whose early work would come to inform the intellectual thrust of the Victorian age. This is especially so with regard to the literary output of women. Across the decade, Austin offered to the English non-professional reader Hermann Puckler-Muskau's Tour in England, Ireland and France, in the Years 1828 and 1829 (1832); Characteristics of Goethe (1833), from the German of Johann Falk and Friedrich von Muller, among others; Friedrich von Raumer 's England in 183^ (1836); and Leopold von Ranke 's The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome (1840) and Fragments from German Prose (1841). While Austin also translated works from the French by Cousin, Sismondi, and Guizot, French was far more established in Britain as the second language of the educated middle classes. Austin's own correspondence reveals the degree to which this was so in her particular case, extensively interlarded as it is with French words and phrases (as are her translations) . The personal correspondence of other British women of the same period and of comparable intellectual and social

The Knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

THE KNOWLEDGE OF SHAKESPEAEE ON THE CONTINENT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The question of continental interest in Shakespeare during the period immediately preceding the publication of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, was discussed, for Germany, by R. Gen?e in his valuable Shakespeare in Deutschland more than thirty years ago; for France more recently by J. J. Jusserand1. My object in the following notes is to add some facts to the evidence already collected, and to indicate the relations in which several of the items stand to their English sources and to each other. The earliest mention of the name Shakespeare in a book printed on the continent, is to be found in the Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie, published at Kiel in 1682 by the famous * Polyhistor/ Daniel Georg Morhof: ?et John Dryden fyxtgar tt>ofl aelafyrivortber Dramatica Poesi gefdjrieben.3)ie (Sttgeftanber bte cr fyterin atifufyrt, feinShakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, tjon weldjettid) nid)t$ gefetyen fyabe2. And in Adrien Baillet's Jugemens des Savans, printed at Paris in 168586 , the name Shakespeare appears for the first time in a French book, it being included in a list of the principal poets of the British islands3. But for both France and Germany the first knowledge of the English poet which went beyond the mere name, was drawn from Sir 1 B. Gente, Geschichteder Shakespeare* schen Dramen in Deutschland, Leipzig, 1870, and J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous Vancien regime, Paris, 1898 (English translation, London, 1899), where referencesto other literature on the subject will be found. 2 In the chapter Von der Engelldnder Poeterey, p. 250 (the passage is quoted by A. Koberstein, Vermischte Aufsatze,Leipzig, 1858, pp. 163 ff.,and by Gente, p. 60). The name ' Shakespeare' also occurs in the summary of Morhofs chapter (p. 227) and in a quotation fromCamden's Remains(p. 232). In a subsequent chapter Vonden Schauspielen, Jonson and Milton are mentioned, not Shakespeare. Later editions of the Unterricht appeared in 1700 and 1718. 8 Jusserand, p. 141 (English translation, p. 176). On a still earlier ms. notice of Shakespeare in France, see p. 137 (170). [105] J. G. ROBERTSON 313 William Temple's widely-read Essay on Poetry. A French translation of this essay appeared in the (Euvres melees of Temple, published at Utrecht in 1693 and frequently in subsequent years. Here (p. 366) occurs the statement: ' Je ne suis point etonn6 de voir jetter des cris & repandre des larmes a beaucoup de Gens, lors qu'ils lisent certaines Tragedies de Sckake-spear.' Here, too, was to be read that claim for the superiority of the English dramatist to all others ancient or modern, in the quality of ' humeur,' Shakespeare having been the first to introduce it on the English stage. The second reference to Shakespeare in a book written by a German is based on Temple. It occurs in a tract, Vindiciae nominis Germanici} cojitra quosdam obtrectatores Gallos (Amsterdam, 1694), one of the many replies to the famous charge brought against the Germans by Bouhours, that they were deficient in ' esprit.' The tract takes the form of a letter by J. F. C. (i.e. J. F. Cramer1) to F. B. Carpzow. On p. 35 is to be found the following : Quantam autem poetices vernaculae facultatem habeant Angli, non ita pridem demonstravit Templeus Equcs...Sidnejum, Equitem Anglum, omnibus & Anglis & exteris Poetis, qui aut nostra aut major am nostrorum aetate ingenii laude praestiterunt , anteponere longo intervallo ; Spencerum comparare cum Petrarcha & Ronsardo? Shakespearium cum Molierio, in genere comico ; & in ludicra dictione, Joannem Minceum, Equitem, praoferre etiam Tasso & Scarroni, vir compluriuin linguarum & omiiium hujus generis elegantiarum callentissimus non dubitat2. In January, 1702, the Acta Eruditorum, that magnificent monu? ment of German learning, industry and cosmopolitan literary interests, had a little more information to offer on the subject of Shakespeare. In a review of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poetry, the critic, in summarising the work, quotes (p. 38) the following passage, which could hardly have failed to impress the German mind: Tantis enini eum laudibus eftert,ut si non ingenio, certe arte superatum ab eo putet ipsum Shakespearium, qui ut eruditus minus fuit, ita ingenio modernos omnes Poetas & tantum non veteres quoque...

Composer in Interview: Edward Rushton – an Englishman in Switzerland

A time there was when it was de rigueur for the self-respecting English composer to sample the life and art of our Germanic neighbours. A little time in the Land der Musik, it seemed, might help them make their own a little less ohne. Elgar supped at the springs in the Bavarian Highlands; Sullivan, Stanford and others in the Leipzig low-lands. It remains perplexing to the German mind that a reference to the ‘Frankfurt School’ in conversation with an Englishman can elicit praise for Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter and Co., but not a word about Adorno. Even Britten would have studied with Alban Berg, had the RCM not declared him ‘immoral’, thus forcing Ben to seek out immorality closer to home. To be sure, the rise of National Socialism reversed the tide for a while (the present writer is typical of his generation in that he owes the quality of his musical education to German-Jewish émigrés). But Gemiania proves today as seductive as ever to the English. Thanks to better pay and employment prospects, our finest graduates are regularly lured across the water to join their countrymen in maintaining the high standards of provincial German opera houses and orchestras. Our composers might on the whole be not as popular; but mentioning the name of Brian Ferneyhough still elicits the same mixture of awe, reverence and enthusiasm in German conservatories and radio studios as would a reference to the Pope in Cracow or to David Beckham at Old Trafford.

Collateral Damage on the German Mind, or, How Young German Directors Became More Involved with the Issue of War

Collateral Damage on the German Mind, or, How Young German Directors Became More Involved with the Issue of War

:Infidels, Turks, and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca. 1400- 1600

Contents: This is not a book about the South Slavs. It is a book about being different, about not being German, as seen through the eyes of Germans.

Late Modern

The Oxford Companion to British History. Edited by John Cannon Charity, Self‐interest and Welfare in the English Past. Edited by Martin Daunton Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914: Essays in Honour of F. M. L. Thompson. Edited by Negley Harte and Roland Quinault The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy. Edited by D. George Boyce and Alan O'Day John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty. By Peter D. G. Thomas Modern Europe, 1789–1989. By Asa Briggs and Patricia Clavin Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930. By Barry Reay Europe after Napoleon: Revolution, Reaction and Romanticism, 1814–1848. By Michael Broers Escape from the Market: Negotiating Work in Lancashire. By Michael Huberman Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth‐Century England. By Aled Jones Before the Famine Struck: Life in West Clare, 1843–1845. By Ignatius Murphy A Starving People: Life and Death in West Clare, 1845–1851. By Ignatius Murphy The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor. Edited by Bertrand Taithe Medical Services and the Hospitals in Britain, 1860–1939. By Steven Cherry The Austro‐Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866. By Geoffrey Wawro Disraeli: A Brief Life. By Paul Smith Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad‐Doctoring Trade. By Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey A New History of Ireland, Volume VI: Ireland Under the Union, II: 1870–1921. Edited by W. E. Vaughan The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914. By E. H. H. Green Britannia's Children: Reading Colonialism through Children's Books and Magazines. By Kathryn Castle Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. By Sandra Stanley Holton The Politics of Pessimism: Albert de Broglie and Conservative Politics in the Early Third Republic. By Alan Grubb French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere. By Kenneth H. Tucker The Agony of the Russian Idea. By Tim McDaniel Poverty is not a Vice: Charity, Society and the State in Imperial Russia. By Adele Lindenmeyr Histoire du Royaume‐Uni au XXe siècle. By Fran¸ois‐Charles Mougel A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996. By John Charmley France and Britain, 1900–1940: Entente and Estrangement. By P. M. H. Bell Wilhelm II. Volume 2: Emperor and Exile, 1900–1941. By Lamar Cecil The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales. By Bernard Harris Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. By Barbara Winslow Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe 1914–1940. By Anthony Adamthwaite Aspects of British Political History 1914–1995. By Stephen J. Lee Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War. By Gerard J. De Groot Tickled to Death to Go: Memoirs of a Cavalryman in the First World War. Edited by Richard van Emden Republican and Fascist Germany: Themes and Variations in the History of Weimar and the Third Reich 1918–1945. By John Hiden Feminism and the Third Republic: Women's Political and Civil Rights in France, 1918–1945. By Paul Smith The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition. Edited by Mike Cronin Personalities and Power: Stanley Baldwin and the Search for Consensus. By Duncan Watts Red Tempest: The Life of a Surgeon in the Gulag. By Isaac J. Vogelfanger Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation. By David Dutton Britain in the Second World War: A Social History. By Harold L. Smith Voices of D‐Day: The Story of the Allied Invasion, Told by Those Who Were There. Edited by Ronald J. Drez The War for the German Mind: Re‐educating Hitler's Soldiers. By Arthur L. Smith The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Edited by David S. Wyman Britain and European Integration since the Second World War. Edited by Sean Greenwood The Great Alliance: Economic Recovery and the Problems of Power 1945–1951. By Jim Phillips The Conservative Governments 1951–1964. By Andrew Boxer Winston Churchill's Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War 1951–1955. By John Young Spain: Democracy Regained. Second Edition. By E. Ramón Arango Britain in the 1970s; The Troubled Economy. Edited by Richard Coopey and Nicholas Woodward

Book Review: The War for the German Mind. Re-educating Hitler's Soldiers

Book Review: The War for the German Mind. Re-educating Hitler's Soldiers

Reviews : The War for the German Mind. Re-educating Hitler's Soldiers. By Arthur L. Smith, Jr. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996. Pp. x + 214. £28.00

Reviews : The War for the German Mind. Re-educating Hitler's Soldiers. By Arthur L. Smith, Jr. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996. Pp. x + 214. £28.00

Une croisade de purification culturelle. Les Autodafés du solstice d’hiver dans l’Alsace annexée (1940)

Auto-Da-Fé. On the second of December 1940, during the winter solstice, in the main cities of Alsace, such as Erstein, Drusenheim, Molsheim, Mertzwiller... the following event took place. The pernicious and deleterious works of French, Jewish and Marxist writers, as well as those of German emigrants, were burnt at the light of flaming torches. The New Man can be re-bom by destroying all which is foreign to the German mind. “We want to be the torchbearers of a new spirit” cried out the Hitler Youth during the auto-da-fé of Saveme. In Colmar, the participants are exhorted to draw from the flames the energy for action and combat. The vibrant call “Germany asks for action”, surged over “the entire champ de Mars” and all the participants “in a strong voice” took up again “this song of combat”. “Our life belongs solely to liberty”. In Strasbourg, three thousand people gathered in the park of the Orangerie to celebrate the winter solstice. The theme of regeneration and the beginning of new times predominated. Alsace takes up again, for the first time, a ceremony which evokes the faith of the ancestors’ in the ever-renewing forces of life, a ceremony whose spititual dimension had been lost under the French yoke. A remarkable Amnesia. We shall attempt to understand why the auto-da-fé of December 1940 has left so few marks on the memory of the Alsatians we have questioned, and why doesn’t this auto-da-fé remain inscribed as a significant and serious occurence of a totalitarian “régime”. Few witnesses seemed to realize that where books were burnt, it wouldn’t be long before men were burnt, just as Heine had predicted with lucidity. A great part of the population was indifferent and resignedly put up with the law of the strongest, and accepted it. In contrast, the spirit of resistance induced a minority to go against the orders of the occupying forces.

Tragic thought: Romantic nationalism in the german tradition

Thus I came among the Germans... It is a severe word, but I will say it, because it is true. I can think of no people more torn than the Germans. You see craftsmen, but no human beings, xhinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, masters and slaves, youths and elders, but no human beings--is it not like a battle field where hands and arms and all severed limbs lie about while the life blood flows into the sand? --from Hrlderlin's Hyperion And all this at a time when the German mind, which, not so very long ago, had shown itself capable of European leadership, was definitely ready to relinquish any aspirations of this sort and to effect the transition to mediocrity, democracy, and modern ideas--in the pompous guise, to be sure, of empire building. The intervening years have certainly taught me one thing if they have taught me nothing else: to adopt a hopeless and merciless view toward that 'German temper', ditto toward German music, which I now recognize for what it really is: a thoroughgoing romanticism, the least Greek of all art forms and, over and above that, a drug of the worst sort, especially dangerous to a nation given to hard drinking and one that vaunts intellectual ferment for its power both to intoxicate the mind and to befog. --from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Why, in the context of an epistolary novel from the late 18th century, does Hrlderlin inscribe his tirade against the Germans? Or, more specifically, why does he set up the opposition between Greeks and Germans? Why are the Greeks the 'opposite' of the Germans? The novel, Hyperion, in conjunction with the 'Vaterl~indlische Hymne', set up the opposition between Greek and German art that Hrlderlin tries to reconcile. Hegel contemplates the relationship between aesthetic education and the responsibility of the 'citizen' in the state. Later, at perhaps the culmination of romantic thought, Nietzsche, in the ruminations about tragedy, feels compelled to excoriate German music and statehood together. To answer the questions that relate the aesthetics of romanticism to the roots of German nationalism, one must take into account a tradition of philosophical speculation about the relationship between the self and the other, if it is indeed a relationship at all, and the totalising power of the dialectic that gained full force during the period we refer to as German romanticism. The reception of romanticism for nationalistic purposes has become notorious since World War II, when the Nazis exploited the obsession with German roots. The later condemnation of romanticism in the G.D.R. for its rampant