German Scholars Research Articles

Glücksspiel oder ökonomisches Werturteil mit Folgen?

Abstract Despite his prominence in the socio-political debate on the German housing market before the First World War, Rudolph Eberstadt’s (1856-1922) concept of speculation is largely ignored today by German scholars of economics and economic history. Accordingly, speculative operations on markets are seen rather to determine economic values than to merely assess them. Through the channel of the prevailing institutions of credit and property, they determine future values as well as the modalities of how the real economy will produce their corresponding equivalents. Eberstadt’s conceptual works on the general notion of speculation rely on his institutional-economic investigation of the housing market in metropolitan areas. He conceives loan-financed speculative deals as a legally backed instrument of redistribution, which serves the private sector to realize capital gains from mere value assessments. His approach critically highlights the normative power of financial liabilities from a politicoeconomic perspective. The severe criticism that this approach evoked on the part of market-liberal economists may explain why academics largely ignore Eberstadt’s insights today.

German pathology professor Philipp Schwartz: His enduring life from Frankfurt to Istanbul during the Second World War era: A “forgotten savior”

Many scientists were forced to leave Germany mostly under challenging circumstances as a result of the pressure applied to anti-Nazi German scientists and artists (mostly from the medical field) who were or were not of Jewish origin before World War II. They emigrated primarily to the United States, Switzerland, Turkey and South America. Two eminent pathology professors, namely Prof. Philipp Schwartz (from Frankfurt) and Prof. Sigfried Oberndorfer (from Munich) came to Istanbul University. They regarded Turkey as their second homeland. They were obliged to leave Germany due to mounting pressure. Schwartz settled in his father-in-law's house in Zurich. Schwartz was an organizer. He established the “Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad” (Notgemeinschaft) to gather German scientists and artists in his situation. During the same period, the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk wanted to apply reforms at Istanbul University to make it attain a Western structure. He invited Swiss pedagogue Prof. Malche and asked him to prepare a report for this purpose. Malche highlighted the need for Western experts is advised. Contact was made with Schwartz's organization in Switzerland. Numerous scientists specialized in almost all fields of science starting with medicine as well as many artists came to Istanbul University and other public institutions. Schwartz established the Pathology Department at Istanbul University while Prof. Oberndorfer established the Department of Experimental Pathology at the same university.Schwartz enabled pathology to gain a contemporary identity in Turkey. Pathology was mostly focused on autopsy during those years. Schwartz attached importance to the pathology training of medical students. He initiated clinico-pathology classes and encouraged surgeons to take a biopsy for surgical pathology. He produced numerous publications. Schwartz worked in Turkey for 19 years and then moved to the US. Thus, a generation of pathologists following the footsteps of Schwartz was raised in Turkey. Frankfurt University, in which he was obliged to leave, erected a stele in his memory at the entrance of the main hospital building. Schwartz thus became an unforgotten savior.

The Slavdom and the West in History and Culture (to the Publication of “Historical Letters about the Relations of the Russian Nation to its Tribesmen” by V.I. Lamansky)

The article serves as the introduction into the publication of the “Historical Letter” by V.I. Lamansky. The authors consider the context of V.I. Lamansky’s discourse concerning the reciprocal relations between the Slavs and the Germans. Considering these relations as inimical, V.I. Lamansky substantiated this idea by references to the opinion of German scholars about the Slavs. He showed the malignancy of the German cultural and political influence on the Slavs, something which leads to the loss of their nationality, based on the example of Czech and, to some extent, Croatian history. It is not a coincidence that the essential part of the second “Historical Letter” is based on the material of the Hussite movement and Thirty Years’ War which caused the germanisation of the Czech people. Lamansky attached great importance to the Hussite movement, as he considered it one of the highest manifestations of the Slavic self-consciousness (or at least of the Western Slavs). Based on the letters of the scholar showing his attitude to the Czech people, F. Palacky and other leaders of the Czech Revival, the authors demonstrate that Lamansky had probably borrowed the notion of “the Greek-Slavic world” as against the German-Roman world from German historiological literature. Being an adherent of Slavophilism, Lamansky considerably contributed to it. Particularly, he tried to more definitely formulate Slavophile’s attitude to the “Slavic question,” on which the attention of the founders of the movement had paid little attention. His interpretation of Slavic history was best realized in his master’s thesis “On the Slavs in Middle Asia, Africa and Spain” (1859). The second “Historical Question” was likely written soon after finishing work on the thesis and was a step on the way to his other serious work, namely his doctoral thesis “On Historical Studies of the Greek-Slavic World in Europe” (1871), as both “Historical Letters” and the dissertation were written from similar historiographical positions.

Schlomo Dov Goitein’s “Political” Symbiosis in the Secrets of Simon Ben Yohai: A Qur’anic Reappraisal for a Jewish Apocalyptic Source on the Reflecting of an Early Islamic Background.

This paper examines the concept of symbiosis in Islamic history as developed by Schlomo Dov Goitein, the 20th-century Jewish German scholar in the area of Jewish and Arabic studies, and discusses its application to the identity sourcing of Prophet Muhammad in particular. The aim of the study is to review the historical outline briefly on the background and formation of “symbiosis” preceding and in the aftermath of Goitein’s conceptualization and context, following a qualitative research approach with an intertextual criticism to his references and discussing their possible philological aspects in his mindset. The study found that, while the Islamic historical sources presented the relations between Jews and Muslims in the Madina period of Islam as negative, in Goitein’s works, the Jewish perception of early Islamic history is positively grounded on a mid-eight century Jewish messianic-apocalyptical text, namely, The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai as traditionally understood in Judaism for describing Ishmaelites as the savior of Jews from Christian oppression. This finding seems to be in explicit contradistinction to the concept of innovative “creative symbiosis” with subversion of historical experience.

African Studies in Distress: German Scholarship on Africa and the Neglected Challenge of Decoloniality

This paper is a response to Matthias Basedau's article published in issue 55/2020 of the present journal. At a time when African Studies scholarship is rising beyond the flogging of dead horses, certain strands in the field in Germany seem to ignore much of the valuable scholarship and intellectual contributions by excellent African and non-African researchers alike. It is striking to see how Basedau falls prey to the same shortcomings that he draws our attention to, that is, the domination of African Studies by sources and figures outside the continent and the construction of Africa as a space of lack. This underscores the urgency of decolonizing African Studies at many levels, including liberating it from the straightjacket of area studies, interrogating purportedly objective scholarship, and opening it up to new theoretical perspectives. The restriction to comparative approaches will only ensure that these strands in African Studies remain stuck in their epistemological cul-de-sac.

Des itinéraires transnationaux entre États-Unis et Europe : les boursiers allemands de la Fondation Rockefeller dans l’entre-deux-guerres

In the interwar period, about 80 young German scholars went abroad as Rockefeller fellows to conduct a research project in social sciences. The European Fellowship Program’s design was transnational from the outset: the exchanges were not limited to a bi-national or unidirectional framework. This article aims both at studying the scientific exchanges resulting from the sending up of Fellows and at shedding light on the more personal dimension of their transnational experience, including heterogeneous expectations, mutual enrichment and transatlantic misunderstandings.

Partitive, genitive or nominative?

Abstract The object has two variants in Estonian: partial object (in partitive, the functionally unmarked variant) and total object (in genitive or nominative). We examine the variation in object case in Estonian texts from the 17th to the 20th century, focusing on the 19th century and regarding this variation as an indicator in assessing the sociolinguistic variation of Estonian in texts. The texts of Old Literary Estonian were written by German scholars for whom Estonian was a collective interlanguage. In the 19th century the development of written Estonian came gradually into the hands of native speakers, who were surrounded by a predominantly German-language cultural space. In the Estonian of Germans the total object was overused. The 19th-century texts written by native Estonians represent an amalgam of native language and earlier interlanguage, they show fluctuations, and overuse of the partial object. By the turn of the 20th century, object case usage has stabilized.

Biographical representation, from narrative to list: The evolution of curricula vitae in the humanities, 1950 to 2010

AbstractCurricula vitae (CVs) are a crucial device for the evaluation of academic personae and biographies. They play a key role in the competitive assessments that underpin the reproduction of the academic workforce. Drawing on 80 CVs which have been part of candidates’ applications for vacant professorships, our article provides a longitudinal study of the development of CVs used by German scholars in professorial appointment procedures in the disciplines of German studies and history between 1950 and the late 2010s. The analysis reveals the evolution of CVs by tracing their various morphological shifts. We distinguish four formats throughout the period of study: CVs initially had a (1) narrative format that develops into an (2) intermediary segmented form before CVs take on a (3) list form in which biographical information congeals into distinct categories. In the 2010s, the list form develops into a (4) hyper-differentiated list form in which coherent biographical representations are finally dissolved into almost eclectic accumulations of finely grained performance categories. Against the backdrop of this finding, the contribution concludes with three general observations: First, the evolution of CVs reflects changes in the institutional environment, not least the increased competitive pressures in academic careers. Second, the evolution of biographical representations also conveys a transformation of the academic persona throughout which boundaries between personal and professional biographies are established. Third, we propose a reactivity of current list form CVs through which academics are disciplined to live up to the categories that wait to be realized in their CVs.

Bridging the Baltic Sea

This article examines the international contacts of German medical historians in the first decade of the Cold War, using the example of Heinz Goerke (1917-2014), who worked as a physician and medical historian in Sweden in the 1950s. Using unpublished source material from Goerke’s estate, the article traces Goerke’s stay in Sweden and his interactions with Scandinavian and German scholars. The analysis of an extensive correspondence allows insights into the research network in which Goerke was embedded. The origins of this network lay in the pre-war period, when Goerke’s mentor Paul Diepgen (1878-1966) established the first connections to Scandinavia, from which Goerke benefited 20 years later. The article also reconstructs the motives for the move from Berlin to Sweden, Goerke’s research interests in medical history, and the influence of the Cold War on life courses and careers in the early postwar period.

The German Idea of Democracy

The German Idea of Democracy Gangolf Hübinger (bio) Robert E. Norton, The Crucible of German Democracy. Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2021), XV + 649pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-159828-9. €129.00. The theologian, philosopher, and politician Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) belonged, like Max Weber, to the classical thinkers of the modern age. Weber and Troeltsch were friends and rivals. For a time they lived in Heidelberg in the same house on Ziegelhäuser Landstraße. Their main works, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, are regularly compared.1 Politically, both were committed to liberal reforms to the German Empire, to a Verständigungsfrieden with the Entente powers, and to the introduction of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic. To this end, both scholars acted as prominent campaigners for the German Democratic Party (DDP).2 Far more research has been done on Max Weber's political profile than on Ernst Troeltsch's. It is therefore extremely welcome that Robert E. Norton has now penned a very detailed and thoroughly researched study on Ernst Troeltsch's understanding of democracy and his political activities during the First World War. Norton, a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Notre Dame, has written a widely [End Page 125] acclaimed biography of Stefan George.3 In his latest study of World War I, he evaluates an impressive array of contemporary writings, speeches, and manifestos in order to situate and highlight Troeltsch in the fierce controversies among German scholars and intellectuals over wartime goals and reforms of the political system. In many respects, he was able to draw on the Kritische Ernst Troeltsch Gesamtausgabe.4 Norton has not written a biography of the entire life span of the liberal theologian and philosopher of history as such. His intellectual biography is contextual and is guided by two theses. Modern German democracy emerged in the internal battles of ideas during the First World War, before the American President Woodrow Wilson exerted external pressure with his wartime goal 'to make the world safe for democracy'. And democracy in Germany was certainly not a result of the defeat in the war. Rather, there had been a 'process of social transformation' early after the beginning of the war, pushed by scholars such as Hugo Preuß, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze. Ernst Troeltsch occupied 'a preeminent place among them, in these wartimes debates'. Troeltsch, as an opinion leader of German 'self liberation' (11), requires an historical re-evaluation. Troeltsch's permanent struggle for 'the necessity of a democratic future for Germany' has been unjustly forgotten in German historical culture. With his monograph, Norton does not want to celebrate his protagonist as a 'hero', although he certainly was one in the sense of Dieter Thomä's book Why Democracies Need Heroes.5 Norton's Crucible of German Democracy comes at the right time. For some time now, there has been a fierce dispute in Germany about the opportunities and threats to democracy in the past and present. Is democracy, as the Western type of political rule, in a deep existential crisis today, and how, by comparison, did contemporaries in the World War and the Weimar Republic view and judge the crises of Germany's revolutionary reordering? Norton wants to set his own accent here and has chosen Ernst Troeltsch as a key figure for this purpose. In the obituaries in 1923, Troeltsch was compared to Albert Einstein, and Norton adopts the image of the 'Einstein of culture' for his introduction, bringing Troeltsch into new focus as the leading figure in German intellectual history. Norton is full of admiration for [End Page 126] Troeltsch's style of thinking: 'his almost alchemical talent for integrating vast and disparate amounts of information within a generous framework of dazzling subtlety and sophistication' (24f.). Troeltsch earned this reputation with his two major works, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches and the unfinished work Historicism and its Problems, but also through his more than 1,300 items of literary criticisms and reviews in the entire field of cultural studies.6 Troeltsch was able to transfer his authority as...

Should they stay or should they go? A case study on international students in Germany

International students are conceived as essential contributors to the development of their countries of origin after they finished their studies abroad. Political decision-makers of the countries of origin therefore take measures that students will eventually return to their home countries and bring back their gained knowledge and consequently contribute to development back home. However, is a return always the best way to contribute to development in the country of origin or can international graduates contribute equally from abroad or through their high mobility between different countries? This article aims to address this question on the basis of an intensive three years mixed-methods-based investigation in six countries – Germany as country of study and Colombia, Georgia, Ghana, Indonesia and Israel/Palestinian territories as countries of origin. We investigated a specific German scholarship program, which gives scholarships to international students from the Global South to study in Germany. Although a return to the country of origin is a precondition for the scholarship, our study indicates that not only return migration, but also remains and circular migration can create beneficial circumstances that former students practice diverse development-related functions and therefore contribute to the development in their country of origin in a specific way. Here, it is important to recognize that scholarship programs do not only offer the opportunity to fund studying abroad, but they can be also designed for the needs of scholars during, before and after their studies, which would also benefit their developmental contributions.

Joachim Jungius and the Transfer of Knowledge from Weaving to Mathematics in the 17th Century

Joachim Jungius, one of the most renowned German scholars in the first half of the 17th century, wrote between the 1620s and the 1640s a set of notes, later titled Texturæ Contemplatio (A contemplation of weaving). These unpublished notes, written in German and Latin, deal with weaving and other textile practices, and attempt to present various weaves mathematically and to investigate them scientifically. But what was the nature of this mathematization of weaving? How well did Jungius know the artisans and the artisanal practices he discussed? This paper aims to describe the encounter between weaving and mathematics in Jungius’s writings in order to examine the relations between the artisanal knowledge of textiles and its supposed mathematization during the first decades of the 17th century.

Wholeness and disruption

This essay examines how the poetry of the late Romantic Cyprian Norwid became a particularly appealing case for Polish structuralist analysis. Polish formalists, such as Manfred Kridl, laid the groundwork for a linguistic reading of Norwid. Two detailed analyses by Roman Jakobson (1963 and 1975 respectively) constitute the most radical expression thereof. Curiously, the Polish structuralists, such as Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska and Michał Głowiński as well as the major German scholar of Polish literature, Rolf Fieguth, only very partially followed Jakobson’s model. As this essay argues, they struggled with the total analytic integration and rationalization of all elements of a given poem that characterizes Jakobson’s grammatical and phonetic approach. What unites the structuralist readings of Norwid is that all, in different ways, address the problem of wholeness as posed both by Norwid’s poems and his aesthetic thought. Under the auspices of reader-response theory, the notion of wholeness became increasingly problematic to the structuralist interpreters but was never abandoned altogether.

On Certain Aspects of the Studies of the Greater German Idea of 1848–1866

A new interest in the era of the emergence of the German Empire is growing in Russian historiography. In this context, it is once again relevant to look at alternatives to the victorious Lesser German path of 1848–1866, above all at the Greater German Idea. The author attempts to outline some aspects of this historical phenomenon in the works of Russian and German scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, analysing the period of 1848–1866 from a predominantly Lesser German perspective: the history of Prussia, its conflict with Austria and the politics of Otto von Bismarck came to the fore. Highlighting the ambiguity of the term “Greater German” as well as the dual discrediting of the idea of the Greater German idea (first following Austria's defeat in the nineteenth century and then under the influence of the aggressive ideology of the Third Reich in the twentieth century), the author offers a new approach to the established understanding of the Greater German Path in Russian historical scholarship. In particular, he suggests that attention should be paid to the new wave of interest in the federalist aspect of the Greater German idea, which manifested itself in the policies of the “Third Germany” states, as well as to the legitimate and evolutionary nature of the Greater German path, which envisaged German unification as a progressive development of the German Confederation instead of the Bismarckian unification by “iron and blood”. By looking directly at the German research experience, the author aims to demonstrate the significance of the 1848–1866 Greater German Idea for modern scholarship as a foundation for the study of national and supranational federal state models.

Paul Fahr. Remonstration als Institution. Ein Beitrag zum Herrschaftsverstandnis im frühen chinesischen Kaiserreich (Remonstration as an Institution. A Contribution to the Concept of Rulership in Early Imperial China). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2021. 339 pp. ISBN-10 3447115815, ISBN-13 9783447115810.

Paul Fahr. Remonstration als Institution. Ein Beitrag zum Herrschaftsverst ändnis im frühen chinesischen Kaiserreich (Remonstration as an Institution. A Contribution to the Concept of Rulership in Early Imperial China). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, .  pp. ISBN- , ISBN- . The book under review here is the published version of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted at the University of Münster in . It is the first book-length study of the institution of remonstration in early imperial China, and it deserves attention because of the thorough research it provides. After a brief introduction, Fahr begins with a chapter on the theory and concept of institutions both in Western social sciences and in ancient Chinese terminology. As far as the latter is concerned, he discusses such terms as fadu 法度, zhidu 制度, guoti 國體, or jiuzhang 舊章 in order to show that ancient China had, indeed, several concepts at its disposal that are similar to the modern Western term “institution.” Fahr also understand the famous compound yi jia 一家 as an institutional term, following Gan Huaizhen’s idea that guojia actually means “the family that rules the state.” I have to confess that in this case I remain somewhat skeptical. To me, it still makes more sense to understand this compound as “the families (or family) of the capital,” because first there are also guoren 國人 who certainly do not belong to just one family, and second, branches of the ruling family usually had their bases in other cities. In this chapter, Fahr also shows that we should not understand documents (which he calls “Inserate” = insertions) contained in Chinese standard histories as direct quotations from original texts. In this he follows observations that have been made by two other young German scholars recently, namely, Kathrin Messing in her dissertation on the Sanguo zhi and Sebastian Eicher in his work on the Hou Han shu. The third chapter of Remonstration as an Institution is devoted to the word “to remonstrate” (jian 諫), and to the practice of remonstration as a sign of a close bond that existed between ruler and minister. Fahr shows that the office of remonstration officials was, indeed, already established in early Han times. Chapter  deals with official historiography as a historiography of institutions. It starts with “precedents” (gushi 故事) in pre-Han times and proceeds then to a discussion of the major historians of Han times in a chronological sequence, beginning with Sima Tan and Sima Qian and ending with Xun Yue. Fahr Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press understands Shiji and Hanshu as compilations of precedents for the future, an idea that, of course, can be traced back to the Gongyang zhuan and that is somewhat related to the Latin concept of historia magistra vitae. Fahr agrees with what this reviewer said in the introduction to his work on Shiji and Hanshu, namely, that the title of Hanshu is an expression of Ban Gu’s hope to continue the tradition of the Shang shu. Chapter  focuses on institutions and their preservation through remonstration. Here, Fahr gives examples of remonstrations from three different periods, namely, the Qin dynasty (Li Si is quoted), the reign of Han Wendi, and finally the famous episode when Liu He, the King of Changyi whose tomb has been opened recently (the Haihun hou tomb), was removed from the throne after only twenty-seven days. Fahr also shows in this chapter how important the role was that remonstration played in the education of the young heirs to the throne. The sixth and last chapter before the conclusion somehow looks like what could have been the starting point of the dissertation. Here, Fahr uses the example of chapter  of the Hanshu to demonstrate how remonstration was actually practiced by Liu Xiang. Somewhat similar to Sebastian Eicher’s work on the Hou Han shu, he explains that the “traditions” (zhuan 傳) of the five different persons dealt with in Hanshu  should actually better be understood as episodes, not as “biographies” as the term is conventially translated. This is certainly correct. This reader wonders, however, whether it is really wise to dispense with the term biography for ancient Chinese history. Chinese zhuan may not attempt to do the same what Roman authors such as Plutarch...

Денацифікація Німеччини в німецькому історіографічному та суспільному дискурсі (1945-2021 рр.)

Based on the analysis of published works of German scholars (historians, political scientists, philosophers) and public opinion leaders, the author aims to identify the main stages, trends and assessments in the study and coverage of the process of denazifi cation of Germany over the past 60 years. Denazifi cation had its specifi city in the British and French zones of occupation before the creation of Bisone, and later Trizonia, because there was no generalizing practice of Western democracies regarding the denazifi cation of West Germany. Denazifi cation first became a topic of family and, consequently, social debate in the 1960s, thus removing the public taboo on scholars’ research. Th e problem of denazifi cation remains one of the relevant topics of German historical discourse today, but the Ukrainian scientifi c community has not yet presented a separate analysis of German historiography, which determines the novelty of the proposed article. Based on the methods of historiographical analysis, problem-chronological and retrospective approaches, it was found that among the German academic community there were different approaches to the perception and evaluation of denazification, which infl uenced on the formation of three waves in social and historiographical discourse. It has been established that the fi rst wave was formed during the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the internal demand of public opinion leaders and the younger generation, without the involvement of professional scholars, when denazifi cation remained a very sensitive topic for society. In the second stage, which lasted until the mid–1990s, denazifi cation became the subject of special historical research, which revealed the specifi cs of responsibility for Nazi crimes, the issue of political stability and overcoming the past. Since the early 2000s, a third wave of historiographical discourse has emerged, representing modern approaches and assessments of denazifi cation: in–depth study of its aspects and analysis in the context of related political and legal processes, including clarifying the role of justice in the occupation period, guilt and personal responsibility for both recent and current political processes in the context of intensifying radical movements in Germany. The change of generations, the growing role of the media, unifi cation with the GDR, the collapse of the USSR – is not an exhaustive list of factors that infl uenced not only the revision of approaches to assessing the implementation of denazifi cation, but also the possible application of German experience abroad. The practice of public dialogue in the format of public discussions and research on sensitive historical topics determines the level of individual and collective responsibility for the political situation in Germany. Representatives of German historiography agree that denazifi cation was a component of interethnic reconciliation, but diff er in views on the methods of its implementation.

Cultural Heritage of Turkic-Speaking Peoples in World Collections: Historical Audio Recordings of The Berlin Phonogram Archive

In the countries of the Turkic world, for more than 100 years of using sound recording devices, a huge amount of various sound materials on the traditional musical art of the Turkic peoples have been accumulated, recorded by scientists from different countries, in different regions and on different media. The first historical sound recordings of the Turkic-speaking peoples, which are of significant historical, cultural and scientific value, are kept separately in various foreign archives and have not received a complete and comprehensive study. This article provides a brief presentation of the unique historical audio materials of the music of the Turkic-speaking peoples, which were collected by German scholars at the beginning of the 20th century and are stored in the Berlin Phonogram Archive.

Trumna mego narodu. Słowianie połabscy w wybranych narracjach historiograficznych długiego wieku XIX

The paper is a translation of Chapter 10 of the book Stopy zapomenutého lidu (“Traces of a forgotten people”), originally published in Czech in 2006. The author describes and analyzes different ways in which the history of Polabian Slavs was depicted in the works of Slavic and German scholars starting from the turn of the 19th century through the final years before the First World War. The paper traces the way in which the past has been (re)interpreted in the current political context and used to support cultural and social movements, notably, Pan-Slavist ideas on the one hand, and the unification of Germany on the other. The translator has complemented the text by adding a number of footnotes and bibliographic refe­rences not present in the original publication.

Estrada, Jorge. Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction.

Estrada, Jorge. <i>Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction</i>.

TheUtopiaCorrespondence of 1515

A thoroughly annotated and complete modern English translation and normalization of More’s correspondence has been needed for a long time. Many new letters have been uncovered in the 75 years since the publication of Elizabeth Roger’s still-indispensable edition, and intervening scholarship has prompted the reevaluation of important details of chronology and authorship. This article details the story of the work begun by a team of German scholars working under Hubertus Schulte-Herbrüggen in the 1980s towards bringing a new edition to fruition and offers introductions, notes, and translations to the so-called Utopia correspondence between Henry VIII and his ambassadors in the Low Countries as a sample of recently-renewed efforts to bring out a new edition of More’s correspondence.