1064 Reviews Wendewelten: Paradigmenwechselin der deutschenLiteratur-und Kulturgeschichte nach ig45. By Frederick A. Lubich. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2002. 206 pp. ?30. ISBN 3-8260-2089-8 (pbk). Followers of this prolific author will have cause both to welcome and to regret his latest compilation. Although it brings together several essays, assorted interviews, and a poem, provocatively entitled 'Berlin-Babylon 2000', there is little that has not already seen the light of print in English- and German-language academic outlets, newspapers, and Web-based media. The formal diversity of what is effectively an extended Selbstzitat endows the volume with postmodern credentials. These are enhanced by a perspective on German letters that could be described as belonging to the 'back-to-the-future' school of criticism: for Lubich the poet, 'Berlin' just has to rhyme with 'Meneh-Tekel-U-Pharsin'. The accent is on post-war points of change, but not without reference to a remoter past. The twin turnabouts of 1945 and 1989 are by no means central to this volume, but the Berlin-as-Babylon template is pervasive. In part one of the book, six essays concern Thomas Mann, Max Frisch (both subjects of full-length books by Lubich), Bernward Vesper, Gunter Grass, and the wider themes of literary daughters and Ger? man Jews. These 'Fallstudien zur deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur' take us no closer to the present than Grass's Kopfgeburten. A more loosely structured second part surveys topics that range from retranslating Mann to US-German-Jewish relations. The question whether these essays, interviews, and glosses sit any more happily together than the items depicted on the book's cover, a Superman graffitoon one side and Durer's Melancholia on the other, with Auschwitz outlined in the centre ('nach einer Vorlage des Autors'), is not peculiar to this instance ofthe Sammelband culture. Yes, there are common preoccupations and shared themes, but strategies vary from unashamed journalese ('Ist Hitler deutscher Zufall oder deutsche Notwendigkeit?'? answer in four sentences) to sustained academic debate. Contributions are in German and English, in prose, dialogue, and verse. Jean-Paul Sartre is quoted in English within a German-language essay. This is a multi-faceted, multi-lingual product; see especially 'Berlin-Babylon 2000', which reads like an extended post-Wende counterblast to Eliot and Pound. The concluding item brings us perforce into the here and now while demonstrating the risks of Lubich's associative method. A link is suggested between Der Zauberbergand Al-Qaida terrorism via Naphta as 'Zauberberg-Gelehrter und Kiindiger des heiligen Terrors'. It may be unreasonable to expect one thousand words to evaluate correspondences between a fiction, however prophetic, of 1924 and the structures of present-day international terrorism. The contention that Mann accurately anticipated , in the rantings of a suicidal Rosicrucian Jesuit Knight Templar, the contem? porary fundamentalist agenda that produced the attacks on America in 2001 ignores at least one datum that should have been obvious to an author steeped in a holistic mind-set: that the Muslim world, no less than the Christian and Jewish, experienced its own convulsive and still largely unacknowledged 'Wendewelt' in consequence of 1939-45. The equation of Naphta's intellectual baggage with that of the Muslim Brotherhood has an undeniable topical allure, but it also signals a need for limits to the pursuit of historical morphology. University of Kent Osman Durrani ...