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Adorno
Om den tyske filosof, sociolog, musikteoretiker og komponist Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969)
Eranos
Every year since 1933 many of the world's leading intellectuals have met on Lake Maggiore to discuss the latest developments in philosophy, history, art and science and, in particular, to explore the mystical and symbolic in religion. The Eranos Meetings - named after the Greek word for a banquet where the guests bring the food - constitute one of the most important gatherings of scholars in the twentieth century. The book presents a set of portraits of some of the century's most influential thinkers, all participants at Eranos: Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Martin Buber, Walter Otto, Paul Tillich, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, Joseph Campbell, Erwin Schrodinger, Karl Kereyni, D.T. Suzuki, and Adolph Portmann. The volume presents a critical appraisal of the views of these men, how the exchange of ideas encouraged by Eranos influenced each, and examines the attraction of these esotericists towards authoritarian politics.
The Strange Death of Marxism
The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet em...
The East German State and the Catholic Church, 1945-1989
From 1945 to 1989, relations between the communist East German state and the Catholic Church were contentious and sometimes turbulent. Drawing on extensive Stasi materials and other government and party archives, this study provides the first systematic overview of this complex relationship and offers many new insights into the continuities, changes, and entanglements of policies and strategies on both sides. Previously undiscovered records in church archives contribute to an analysis of regional and sectoral conflicts within the Church and various shades of cooperation between nominal antagonists. The volume also explores relations between the GDR and the Vatican and addresses the oft-neglected communist “church business” controversially made in exchange for hard Western currency.
Crime Stories
The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a crucial moment not only in German history but also in the history of both crime fiction and criminal science. This study approaches the period from a unique perspective - investigating the most notorious criminals of the time and the public’s reaction to their crimes. The author argues that the development of a new type of crime fiction during this period - which turned literary tradition on its head by focusing on the criminal and abandoning faith in the powers of the rational detective - is intricately related to new ways of understanding criminality among professionals in the fields of law, criminology, and police science. Considering Weimar Germany not only as a culture in crisis (the standard view in both popular and scholarly studies), but also as a culture of crisis, the author explores the ways in which crime and crisis became the foundation of the Republic’s self-definition. An interdisciplinary cultural studies project, this book insightfully combines history, sociology, literary studies, and film studies to investigate a topic that cuts across all of these disciplines.
The Frankfurt School Revisited
This volume is a collection of essays by Richard Wolin, a leading political theorist and intellectual historian. It is the follow up to Wolin’s two recent, widely acclaimed books: Heidegger’s Children and The Seduction of Unreason. In those books, he explored the legacy of Martin Heidegger and his impact on some of his most influential and notable students. He dealt particularly with the effect that Heidegger’s subsequent embrace of fascism and National Socialism had on these students. Delving further in his next book, Wolin explored the question of why philosophers and intellectuals have been drawn to antiliberal, antidemocratic fascism. The essays in this book are focused on European...
War and Democracy
War and Democracy presents a selection of essays and reviews by Paul Gottfried written from 1975 to the present. They cover a variety of topics, both historical and contemporary, ranging from Oswald Spengler and the Frankfurt School to the destruction of classical liberalism, the dumbing down of higher education and the increasing dominance of administration in democratic governments. Most crucially, Gottfried sees Western governments as engaged in a messianic fantasy of bringing democracy to the world, an imperialist endeavor that has only brought disaster to all nations concerned, while liberties at home are being gradually curtailed. A recurring theme is the transformation of the modern W...
Benjamin and Brecht
Germany in the mid 1920s, a place and time of looming turmoil, brought together Walter Benjamin-acclaimed critic and extraordinary literary theorist-and Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights. It was a friendship that would shape their writing for the rest of their lives. In this groundbreaking work, Erdmut Wizisla explores what this relationship meant for them personally and professionally, as well as the effect it had on those around them. From the first meeting between Benjamin and Brecht to their experiences in exile, these eventful lives are illuminated by personal correspondence, journal entries and private miscellany-including previously unpublished materials-detailing the friends' electric discussions of their collaboration. Wizisla delves into the archives of other luminaries in the distinguished constellation of writers and artists in Weimar Germany, which included Margarete Steffin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt. Wizisla's account of this friendship opens a window on nearly two decades of European intellectual life.
The Pen Confronts the Sword
During 1942, the decisive battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein raged and the Nazi genocide was at its lethal peak. The Pen Confronts the Sword examines the shared motives behind four remarkable texts German exiles began writing that year: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947); Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State (1946); Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Each identified a specific danger in Nazi ideology and mustered new theories, approaches, and sources to combat it. The books aimed to expose the encompassing catastrophes of German culture (Mann), politics (Cassirer), philology (Auerbach), and philosophy and sociology (Horkheimer and Adorno). Their scope, mastery, and sense of urgency constitute a comprehensive Kulturkampf (culture war) against Nazi barbarism. Avihu Zakai cogently analyzes each work, explains the context of its creation, and draws connections between these four landmark books in Western intellectual history.
The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience
American-born Cardinal Aloisius Muench (1889-1962) was a key figure in German and German-American Catholic responses to the Holocaust, Jews, and Judaism between 1946 and 1959. He was arguably the most powerful American Catholic figure and an influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and in West Germany after the war. In this carefully researched book, which draws on Muench’s collected papers, Suzanne Brown-Fleming offers the first assessment of Muench’s legacy and provides a rare glimpse into his commentary on Nazism, the Holocaust, and surviving Jews. She argues that Muench legitimized the Catholic Church’s failure during this period to confront the nature of its own comp...
