German Spirit Research Articles

Nihilism, Modernity and the “Jewish Spirit”: Margarete Susman’s Transvaluation of a Fin-de-Siècle Trope

Margarete Susman’s reflections on that evocative metaphor known as the “Jewish spirit” begin with the disconcerting identification of Jewishness with nihilism and modernity. This troubling association underlies the anti-Jewish tirades of numerous fin-de-siècle thinkers such as Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Marr. Despite the term’s overridingly negative connotations, Susman grapples with the “Jewish spirit” in her essays from the 1930s for the constructive purpose of articulating her unique vision of German Jewry’s cultural and intellectual legacy. Her reworking of this metaphor represents a unique form of Jewish self-affirmation that differs from both the Zionist and liberal responses to antisemitism. She does not seek to turn the “Jewish spirit” into a resource for collective self-identification, but to undo the very logic that posits this figure as an antithesis of the “German spirit.” In the process of rethinking Jewishness, Susman destabilizes the völkisch conception of Germanness. Not only does her account of the “Jewish spirit” subvert a prevalent antisemitic fantasy, but it also forms a pointed polemic against the identity politics of cultural Zionism. Responding to the reductive essentialism she attributes to both the German völkisch and Jewish-national ideals of collective identity, Susman’s notion of the “Jewish spirit” constitutes a poetically and politically imaginative attempt to interweave German Jewry’s particularistic heritage into the larger story of European modernity.

Offenbach, Wagner, Nietzsche: the Polemics of Opera

By the early 1870s, the term ‘filth’ had become Wagner’s shorthand for Offenbach. He attacked his fellow composer both publicly and privately and sought to establish a polarity between the two, confining Offenbach to the realm of frivolous and materialistic popular folk culture while casting his own work as exemplary of the new German spirit. Laurence Senelick’s close analysis of Wagner’s writings, including his notorious 1869 essay ‘Jewishness in Music’, shows this critique to be fuelled by jealousy, cultural imperialism, and his growing anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is included here as a counterpoint, challenging his former mentor and celebrating Offenbach as the exemplar of Jewish genius. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent books include Soviet Theater: A Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky) and the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015). This article is taken from his forthcoming The Offenbach Century: His Influence on Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press).

Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele by Norbert Christian Wolf

Reviewed by: Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele by Norbert Christian Wolf Caroline A. Kita Norbert Christian Wolf, Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele. Salzburg and Vienna: Jung und Jung, 2014. 319 pp. Since its establishment in 1920, the Salzburg Festival has emerged as one of Europe’s premiere cultural events and today has come to solidify Austria’s reputation as center of artistic, musical, and dramatic innovation. As Michael Steinberg’s 1990 study demonstrated, the history of the festival’s founding ideology remains deeply intertwined with the dynamics of interwar politics. Drawing upon an “invented tradition” that linked Austria’s theatrical heritage to the Catholic Baroque, the Salzburg Festival came to play a defining role in the development of a distinct Austrian national identity in the volatile early years of the First Republic. Norbert Christian Wolf’s most recent contribution to festival literature, Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele, sets out with a familiar premise: to question the validity of the festival’s popular “European-pacificist-cosmopolitan” image. Whereas Steinberg’s study focused primarily on placing the festival in the larger context of Austrian cultural history, Wolf stays close to the source texts. In the first two sections of his work, Wolf at empts a comprehensive documentary history of the development of the festival’s founding ideology. In addition to the programmatic texts by Hofmannsthal, Wolf also focuses on the writings of other lesser-known architects of the festival vision, such as Viennese salonnière Berta Zuckerkandl. In the third and fourth chapters, Wolf reflects on the genesis and performance history of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann and Das Salzburger große Welttheater, examining these works in the context of festival ideology as well as the poet’s broader political and artistic Weltanschauung. Through this rich and detailed examination of the festival’s founding documents, Wolf convincingly challenges contemporary myths of the festival’s ideology as a static and fixed concept, revealing a variety of conflicting visions and pragmatic choices that made the festival the cultural landmark that it is today. Wolf’s close reading draws attention to the variety of discourses that came to shape Hofmannsthal’s program for the festival. For example, the elision of the historical influence of the Josephenian Enlightenment on Mozart’s operas in Hofmannsthal’s essay Deutsche Festspiele zu Salzburg, bills Don Juan and Die Zauberflöte, along with the plays of Raimund and Grillparzer, as part of an Austrian theatrical tradition directly descended from the world theater [End Page 106] of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare. Yet at the same time, Hofmannsthal conjures up a vision of the festival as the artistic realization of an imagined Bavarian-Austrian folk community. Despite the fact that the poet employs a rhetorical style reminiscent of the writings of the literary historian Josef Nadler, Wolf appears determined to distance the poet from nationalist politics. Instead, he identifies Hofmannsthal’s appeal to a German spirit as a defensive tactic against the critical reactions of the anti-Semitic press to his Jewish heritage. By highlighting Hofmannsthal’s engagement with international aesthetic discourses, Wolf further calls into question connections between Hofmannsthal’s program for the festival and völkisch ideology. In the litle-known Wiener Brief, writ en in 1923 for a planned performance of Das Salzburger große Welt heater in the United States, Hofmannsthal eschews such nationalist language, describing the festival vision instead through references to the poetry of Walt Whitman, the trends of modern art, and the philosophy of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Wolf’s in-depth analyses of Jedermann and Das Salzburger große Welt heater sheds light on a variety of surprising contradictions between Hofmannsthal’s artistic vision for these works in their original contexts and in their defining roles in the development of Salzburg’s ideology. Wolf’s discussion of Jedermann is particularly insightful, illuminating the text as a reflection of the modern “crisis of conscience” under capitalism, drawn from Hofmannsthal’s study of the philosophy of Georg Simmel. The transformation of Jedermann into a defining work of the festival’s Catholic ideology appears...

Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment by T. J. Reed

T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. xi + 284 pp.This lucid study aims to shed light on a ostensibly shrouded in obscurity. Yet in question is in fact mainstream thought: Kant, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, with briefer discussions of figures like Herder, Wieland, Georg Forster, Karl Philipp Moritz, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Alexander von Humboldt. In Reed's understanding, this vibrant and vital corpus of thought remains to educated nonspecialists and historically literate people for many reasons (2). The first is a moral darkness that retroactively pervades Germany's history: the atrocities of twentieth century cast a long shadow over its whole political and cultural past (here Reed raises, but does not address in any depth, controversial concept of a Sonderweg [1]). The second reason that thought remains in dark, as it were, is impenetrability of its philosophical writing: It can be difficult for light to break through thickets of a sentence (1), Reed observes. No wonder, then, that Enlightenment, [i]f people have even heard of such a thing, has been outshone to point of invisibility by what went on elsewhere in Europe and America (2). Finally, there are attacks on from within culture itself: a right-wing rejection of and its thought in favor of a more profoundly German spirit, dating from Romantics; a neglect, and indeed erasure, of by certain historians of ideas (Friedrich Meinecke serves as an exemplar); and much overrated sniping from Left (Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was directed at modern phenomena that have questionable connection to Enlightenment and which has licensed iconoclasm from any quarter [3]). Hence, Reed sets out to reclaim an unknown and demonstrate its profound relevance to present, maintaining that subtitle of his study is only a slight exaggeration (2).If Reed overstates his case in introduction, he succeeds admirably well in providing concise, instructive, eminently readable overviews of select seminal writings in their historical, political, and cultural contexts. Kant forms backbone of study. The opening chapters are largely devoted to excellent discussions of An Answer to Question: What Is Enlightenment? …

RICHARD WAGNER AND THE GERMAN NATION

ABSTRACTRichard Wagner's relationship with the German nation was inconsistent and often contradictory, veering between pride and distaste. One constant feature, however, was his intense hostility to the German princes. He held them responsible for the decline of German culture after the Reformation and, more especially, after the Thirty Years War. Their imitation of Italian and French models amounted to cultural treason in his view. The great revival of the ‘German spirit’ in the eighteenth century, he asserted with characteristic vehemence, came from the common people. It was they too who rose in revolt against Napoleonic tyranny in the great ‘War of Liberation’ of 1813–15. Yet once again the princes betrayed them, restoring despotic rule once the French yoke had been removed and resuming the patronage of French plays and Italian operas. In forming this narrative, Wagner was strongly influenced by Friedrich Schiller, who ranks with Shakespeare and Beethoven in his rather limited pantheon. It found its way into several of his music dramas, most explicitly in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, whose political message has often been misunderstood.

“World domination or ruin”. Friedrich von Bernhardi and German militarism before World War I

The paper analyzes the role of militarism in the political life of Germany before WWI. By pointing out the roe of militarism in the political life of Germany at the start of the 20th century, the paper puts an emphasis on the writing of Friedrich von Bernhardi titled Germany and the next war, published in 1912. Bernhardi sought to prove the inevitability of “preemptive war” and territorial annexations in order to provide for the economic and political interests of Germany as a global force. Bernhardi legitimized his opinion by calling on social-Darwinist arguments as well as the tradition of German idealist philosophy, and claiming that war is the only means by which it is possible to sustain German culture as the highest form of “German spirit” and its most valuable contribution to humanity. Considering the high rank which Bernhardi held as a general in the German military, as well as how his attitudes fell in with German foreign policy of the period, Bernhardi’s writing represents, in a condensed fashion, an expression of militaristic ideas present in German society before WWI.

Toda música (séria) é alemã? – Prelúdio de uma geopolítica da música

A partir da análise do formalismo de Adorno e do espírito trágico de Nietzsche, em suas respectivas considerações teóricas sobre a música, levanta-se a hipótese de que estas tracem linhas de força expressivas, imanentes ao contexto territorial e cultural de sua produção e escuta, desenhando uma geopolítica que poderia resultar na proposição de uma matriz epistemológica espacial na construção de sentido estético. As evidências que sustentariam essa hipótese encontram-se nas constantes inferências que esses autores fazem ao caráter universal da música supostamente contido no “espírito alemão”, confundindo suas posições epistemológicas com as fronteiras territoriais de suas culturas.
 
 Palavras-Chave
 Estética. Epistemologia. Cultura.

Inhumanities: Nazi interpretations of Western culture

Introduction Part I. Foundations of Nazi Cultural History: 1. The 'Germanic' origins of western culture 2. Voxvolkish 3. The western tradition as political and patriotic 4. The western tradition as anti-Semitic 5. The archenemy incarnate Part II. Blind to the Light: 6. Classicism romanticized 7. Intolerance toward enlightenment 8. Forging steel romanticism 9. Romantic music as 'our greatest legacy' Part III. Modern Dilemmas: 10. Realist paradox and expressionist confusion 11. Nordic existentialists and volkish founders 12. Music after Wagner Part IV. 'Holy' War and Weimar 'Crisis': 13. Heralds of the front experience 14. Weimar culture wars i: defending German spirit from 'circumcision' 15. Weimar culture wars ii: combating 'degeneracy' Part V. Nazi 'Solutions': 16. 'Honour your German masters' 17. The Nazi 'Renaissance' 18. Kultur at war Conclusion.

<em>After all of this, I will have to muster all of my “courage for the mundane”</em>: On Leah Goldberg's Paradigmatic Temperament

“The courage for the mundane” became idiomatic in research on Leah Goldberg, a kind of code phrase capturing her singularity among the poets of her generation. The essay “The Courage for the Mundane” (1938) is a potential guide, confessional and theoretical, into the poet’s world, a key to examine her poetic positions. This essay scrutinizes the ways the notion stands in relation to the historical and biographical conditions of its conception and reflects her psychological, ideological, philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural paradigms. The mundane versus the exalted, the particular versus the universal, Realism versus Romanticism, nationalism versus humanism, the European homeland and the homeland in Palestine/Eretz Israel, the German spirit as opposed to its Jewish counterpart—these are some of the antithetical categories for which Leah Goldberg, against all odds, seeks to find a synthetic, pre-structural redemption. I argue that “the courage for the mundane” reflects an experience of inherent non-resolution and a necessary, constant, and painful condition of dialectical oscillation. Many questions concerning the poet’s aesthetical and ideological views, as well as her special place in Hebrew culture, are likely to find a fuller answer by means of an in-depth understanding of this concept: the preference for a position that brings together the paragon of totality with a commitment to the ordinary, even if this involves a shade of self-deception.

Sports Diplomacy

IntroductionSports diplomacy is when sport is used as a political tool for enhancement, but which sometimes, worsens diplomatic relations between two countries. Sports diplomacy has been defined as 'the whole range of international contacts and competitions that have implications for the overall relations between the nations concerned' (Peppard & Riordan, 1993, 2). Even though this definition draws attention to issues and relations between states and within a single state, it also provides scope for analysing the actions of domestic and international non-state actors, and how the use of sport as a tool of diplomacy is applied in relation to the target state or states concerned. By its nature, sport is a highly sensitive, conditional, contextual and ambivalent means of communication. The inherent unpredictability of results in sports diplomacy is one of the risks taken by those who initiate or sponsor it (Peppard & Riordan, 1993, 6). The attraction of sports diplomacy is that it is a relatively lowcost, low risk but high profile tool of foreign policy, by which states and non-state actors are able to publicise their views on the actions and policies of others (Houlihan, 1994). The coexistence of sport and politics dates from the 9th century BC, when the institution of the truce or Ekecheiria, was established in ancient Greece by the signing of the international treaty by three Kings- Iphitos of Elis, Cleosthenes of Pisa and Lycurgus of Sparta. Close on their heels, all the other Greek cities ratified this agreement which recognised the permanent immunity or the sanctuary of sports persons at Olympia. By this agreement sports persons could travel to take part in sports events held at different places with protection from the authorities. However, for many centuries after that sport was overlooked, and it only regained importance in the 19th century.Sport was rediscovered by politics in the early 20th century, when the Olympic Games were revived in 1896. Within a short time the Games had developed into platforms for national competition and political leverage. Olympics are a leading example of using sports for diplomatic purposes. Other sports like cricket, table tennis and association football too, are being used in the global arena.OlympicsGoing far back as the 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler used it as a stage to promote Aryan superiority for Germany with his ideological belief of racial supremacy (Bachrach, 1936).The Olympics were used as a means of hardening the German spirit and instilling unity among the German youth. The global stage of the Olympics in 1968 was to highlight to the world the plight of the African-American struggle during the civil rights movement in their home country. In 1972, the Israeli Olympics team was massacred in an attack by Palestinian gunmen that started at the Olympic village and resulted in the death of 17 people. In 1980, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a boycott of the Moscow Games by the Western powers and their allies in protest of Russian actions. In the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984, the Soviet Bloc led a retaliatory boycott of the Games.Table TennisThe most important and well recognised instance of sports-meets-politics is the famous 1971 table tennis game between host China and the United States, often dubbed 'ping-pong diplomacy'. This match led to a thaw in Sino-American relations and finally to US President Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China.CricketCricket too has a role to play in sporting diplomacy. Cricket tours between India and Pakistan were revived in 2004 in the wake of diplomatic steps to bury half a century of mutual hostility. Both sides relaxed their tough visa regulations, allowing thousands of fans to travel across the border (Field, 2010). In order to replicate cricket diplomacy of the past, General Pervez Musharraf, ex-President of Pakistan, had come to India in 2005 for a cricket match which ended on the note of a Summit. …

German Spirit and Holy Ghost--Treitschke's Call for Conversion of German Jewry: The Debate Revisited

German Spirit and Holy Ghost--Treitschke's Call for Conversion of German Jewry: The Debate Revisited

Gordon J. Horwitz . Ghettostadt: Łodź and the Making of a Nazi City . Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press . 2008 . Pp. 395. $29.95.

On 9 November 1939, following several weeks of debate and deliberation among Nazi occupation authorities, the industrial city of Łodź and its environs were incorporated into Reichsgau Wartheland, the largest of Germany's new eastern provinces carved from the remains of the vanquished Polish Republic. The annexation of Łodź to the Reich demanded, according to National Socialist theories of race and space, the comprehensive Germanization of the city. Demographically, economically, and aesthetically, Łodź was to become a German metropolis, permanently integrated within the structure of the ethno-territorial German nation-state. What this vast makeover entailed for the city and its roughly 650,000 inhabitants, particularly its population of more than 200,000 Jews, is the subject of Gordon J. Horwitz's richly detailed new study. Horwitz explores two parallel but inexorably linked processes, one “constructive,” the other decidedly destructive, aimed at transforming Polish-Jewish Łodź into the thriving German city of Litzmannstadt. A German city obviously required Germans. Exact population statistics are impossible to determine—the last prewar Polish census was conducted in 1931—but we can deduce that ethnic Germans constituted less than ten percent of Łodź's residents on the eve of World War II. Many more were needed to give Łodź a predominantly German character, and to this end, tens of thousands of ethnic Germans were resettled in the city during the Nazi occupation. They were not only resettled; they were resettled according to a plan. Within his investigation of “constructive” Germanization, Horwitz examines the many facets of Nazi urban planning, from the physical placement of Germans (and others) within the city to the modernization of its economy and infrastructure and the beautification of its streets and parks. The sowing of German Kultur was also an essential component of Nazi Germanization efforts, and Horwitz describes at length the range of cultural events staged by the occupiers to reinforce “the German lifestyle and German spirit” of Litzmannstadt (p. 104). Through this composite of initiatives, the Nazi regime sought to construct an unassailable outpost of German settlement in the East and to make Litzmannstadt unambiguously German for all time.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the politics of history

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and translations Introduction Part I. The Failure of Neohumanism: 1. Philologists, liberals, and the nation 2. The Austro-Prussian War in Leipzig 3. The demands of history 4. Toward a cautious materialism 5. Teleology and the laws of history Part II. The Formation of Imperial Germany, Seen from Basel: 1. Intellectual culture in Basel 2. The practice of cultural history 3. The need for philosophical education 4. The 'German Spirit' and the Franco-Prussian War Part III. The Crisis of Historical Culture: 1. The crisis of historicism 2. What is orientation in history? 3. The political mobilization of myth 4. 'The Soul of the Antiquarian' 5. The impossible critical historian Part IV. Political Lessons from Cultural Anthropology: 1. The view from outside 2. Lessons from anthropology 3. Metaphor, myth and cultural reality 4. 'Survivals': religion and the state 5. Political realism and the 'Free Spirit' Part V. Geneology, Naturalism and the Political: 1. The path to geneology 2. A natural history of moral communities 3. Sovereign individuals and the ethic of responsibility 4. The task of geneology 5. 'To translate humanity back into nature' Part VI. The Idea of Europe and the Limits of Geneology: 1. 'The creation of the European individual' 2. Beyond the modern nation state 3. Political realities in Imperial Germany 4. Modernity and the limits of geneology.

Decentring the German Spirit: The Weimar Republic's Cultural Relations with Latin America

This article analyses the Weimar Republic's cultural relations with Latin America. Based on diplomatic correspondence and the writings of Latin American intellectuals who visited Weimar Germany, the article combines an exploration of the goals and methods of Germany's official foreign cultural policy towards the region with a brief examination of the varied ways in which the supposed recipients of these policies approached German culture. The key argument is that the limited capacities of official cultural policy created space for a large number of actors who pursued divergent interests when appropriating or trying to spread German ideas in Latin America.

Hungarian Nationalism, Gottfried Semper, and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesHungarian Nationalism, Gottfried Semper, and the Budapest Museum of Applied ArtRebecca HouzeRebecca Houze Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 16, Number 2Spring-Summer 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/652503 Views: 97Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in Studies in the Decorative Arts (1993-2009), which is continued by West 86th (2011-present). © Copyright 2009 by The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and CulturePDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Matthew Rampley “German Industriousness, German Spirit, German Energy, and German Persistence”: Habsburg Cultural Politics and the Moravian Design Museum, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 24, no.22 (Jan 2018): 201–229.https://doi.org/10.1086/696999

“Let his Memory be Holy to Us!”: Jewish Interpretations of Martin Luther from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust

In 1883, Emil Gustav Hirsch (1851–1953), rabbi of the Sinai Reform Congregation in Chicago, one of the formative figures in modern, socially engaged liberal American Judaism at the end of the nineteenth century,1 triggered a huge scandal amongst the Jewish public in the USA. Hirsch had been given the honour (inconceivable in Germany for a representative of the rabbinate) of giving the speech in Chicago's Central Music Hall on the occasion of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Luther's birth—an indication of the good relations between the Reform congregation and the German Lutherans in the city. Two days later, in a sermon to his congregation, he painted an unusually positive picture of the reformer, praising his Bible translation as a “cornerstone of modern German literature”, an “outstanding, eternal monument to the German spirit”, and calling upon his...

Влияние Канта на русскую мысль

The text is devoted to the influence of Kants personality and philosophical ideas on the Russian thought. Kant considered as the great philosopher, who was the bright spokes of German spirit, the creative genius and genius loci of Konigsberg, which has been the town of dramatic historical fate.

The Dialectic of the German Spirit

Here, Simmel claims that German intellectual history shows that the ideal German is the ''complete German' and at the same time its other, its supplement. In his view, the 'German essence' involves a yearning, a reaching out beyond home. In this way both Holderlin and Hegel are quintessential German figures, in that both express a German craving for antithesis, where everything seeks its opposite and only in becoming its opposite does each thing come to completion. According to Simmel, this seems to demonstrate the origins of German individualism, that Germans yearn to distinguish themselves from others by drawing on an unlimited plethora of materials and possibilities of individual life.

Brahms and the German Spirit (review)

Brahms and German Spirit. By Daniel Beller-McKenna. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. [xi, 243 p. ISBN 0-674-01318-2. $49.95.] Illustrations, music examples, index, notes. Daniel Beller-McKenna has set out to correct what he sees as deficiency in Brahms scholarship of post-World War II period, namely failure to acknowledge composer's patriotism-his Germanness-because of fear that his reputation and reception of his music might be tainted with Nazi-style nationalism; thus universalistic assessments of his compositions are strategy (p. 4) to separate him from German culture. Beller-McKenna's approach is to situate Brahms's life and work in context of German romantic and cultural nationalism, and to emphasize role played by folk music and religion in this larger context. In introduction, Beller-McKenna not only explains his reasons for writing book, but deals with concept of the Volk as source of German culture-high and low, but one in which our modern perception might be blurred by distinct brand of volkisch nationalism that emerged from new racist theories and ideologies during late nineteenth (p. 11). He illustrates Brahms's romanticized view of Volk and his use of old materials in an analysis of Geistliches Wiegenlied, op. 91 no. 2, which couples old tune Josef, lieber Josef mein with Emanuel Geibel's translation of Spanish poem (also set by Hugo Wolf), demonstrating that for Brahms the archaic and volkisch cannot be separated from religious (p. 29). In chapter 2, Religion, Language, and Luther's Brahms is described as a typical product of post-Romantic secularization of German culture (p. 31), who strongly identified with [the] secularized and cultural brand of Lutheranism (p. 32). Beller-McKenna summarizes earlier nineteenth-century historiography of German language, and relationship between language and Luther's translation of Bible. He describes Brahms's own copy of Bible, in which he made copious annotations, suggesting that details of sacred texts composer later set may have been influenced by details of this edition, and continues with detailed account of notebook into which Brahms copied number of Biblical texts, portions of which he later set in opp. 74 no. 1, 109, 110, no. 1, and 121. Beller-McKenna concludes that for Brahms, all of these texts bound up with (p. 64); in particular he emphasizes those that refer to house as metaphor for Solomon's temple, which is in turn metaphor for nation. This chapter is valuable for its wealth of primary information; readers will find plenty of food for thought, even if they might not accept author's conclusions. The third chapter is centered on Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45, first on texts and music that emphasize themes of comfort and nostalgia usually associated with work. However, Beller-McKenna argues that it also to small group of Brahms's sacred works that access major vein of religiously inspired political thinking of day: apocalyptic anticipation of new German Reich (p. 77). His analysis of sixth movement concludes that the C major fugue . . . marks apocalyptic moment in [the work]. It belongs neither to earthbound time nor to divine eternity; it is pure state of transition between two (p. 93). But Brahms is expressing not Christian apocalypse but rather deep sense of arrival that was part of German national spirit in years leading up to 1871 (p. 94). In this discussion in particular, notwithstanding historical apparatus and perceptive musical analyses, author seems to be reaching for new-and ultimately unconvincing-explanation for work. The Triumphlied, op. 55 has had an unfortunate history: begun in 1870 at outbreak of Franco-Prussian War, and enthusiastically performed in Germany after victory of 1871, its fate in twentieth century was understandably that it be ignored, if not suppressed. …

Brahms and the German spirit

Brahms and the German spirit