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Ghosts have made an unexpected reappearance in German literature since 1989. Catherine Smale reads this as symptomatic of writers' attempts to renegotiate their personal and collective identity in the wake of German reunification. Focusing on two major authors from the former GDR, Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann, Smale examines the ways in which their work adopts notions of haunting in its creative engagement with the double legacy of Socialism and National Socialism. The ghost has long been regarded as a vehicle for making manifest taboo or unauthorized memories. However, Smale goes further, demonstrating how the human subject is destabilized by the return of the phantom and is itself rendered insecure and spectral. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical reference, from the psychoanalytic concept of intergenerational phantoms to Derridean hauntology, Smale's study highlights the particular challenge which Wolf and Liebmann pose to the familiar understanding of how German writers have confronted their country's troublesome past.Catherine Smale is Lecturer in German at King's College London.
The Politics of Replacement explores current demographic conspiracy theories and their entanglement with different forms of racism and exclusionary politics such as sexism. The book focuses on population replacement conspiracy theories, that is, those imaginaries and discourses centered on the idea that the national population is under threat of being overtaken or even wiped out by those considered as “alien” to the nation and that this is the result of concerted efforts by “elites”. Replacement conspiracy theories are on the rise again: from Eurabia fantasies to Renaud Camus’ The Great Replacement, white supremacist discourses are thriving and increasingly broadcasting in mainstre...
Why is the linkage between cultural capital and economic capital growing so fast? What is favorable or not of corporate penetration and influence in the world of art? Is art just another venue of marketing? Survey and nuanced critique of this development. Sponsoring events, museums and lifestyles.
Over the course of the 20th century, Germans from virtually all walks of life were touched by two problems: forging a sense of national community and coming to terms with widespread suffering. Arguably, no country in the modern Western world has been so closely associated with both inflicting and overcoming catastrophic misery in the name of national belonging. Within this context, the concept and ideal of "sacrifice" have played a pivotal role in recent German political culture. As the seven studies in this volume show, once the value of heroic national sacrifice was invoked during World War I to mobilize German soldiers and civilians, it proved to be a remarkably effective way to respond to a wide variety of social dislocations. How did the ideals of sacrifice play a role in constructing German nationalism? How did the Nazis use this idea to justify mass killing? What consequences did this have for postwar Germany? This volume opens up discussions about the history of 20th-century German political life.
Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day. In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora. In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime’s fraught relationship with Jewry. Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former “land of the perpetrators.”
Life is not about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself: “A call to action for anyone who wants to consciously influence their own destiny” (Marci Shimoff, New York Times–bestselling author of Happy for No Reason). Whether it’s because of job loss, divorce, financial stress, relationship issues, or the state of society, life may have kicked you down. To which Jackie Ruka says, “It’s time to kick back and create your kick-butt life.” Upping your game calls for highly targeted tools, action steps, and imagination. By unleashing your inner creator you can change your life by choosing happiness first! This exuberant guidebook provides inspirational, proactive practices t...
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Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov was an intriguing figure whose religious path took him from Russian Orthodoxy to nihilism and subsequently Roman Catholicism, and finally back to Russian Orthodoxy. The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge is the earliest elaboration of the major ideas that occupied Solovyov throughout his life. Completed when he was only twenty-four, this wide-ranging, poetry-sprinkled treatise critically examines Western civilization and religion, proposing in its place a new model for faith and survivability, the integral spiritual knowledge attained by the Russian nation. / As a whole, Solovyov's philosophy offers a powerful defense of religion in both mystical and logical terms. Translator Valeria Z. Nollan skillfully brings out the nuances of Solovyov's rigorous writing in this first-ever English translation of his Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge.
"All Power to the Imagination!" is a history of the counterculture's immensely influential role in West German cultural and political life. Sabine von Dirke opens with an examination of nascent countercultural movements in West Germany during the 1950s. She then moves to a nuanced account of the student movement of the 1960s, describing its adaptation of the theories of Marcuse, Adorno, and Benjamin, then recounting its attack on "bourgeois" notions of the autonomy of art and culture. She next examines the subsequent development of a radical aesthetic and the effects of left-wing terrorism on Germany's political climate. Later chapters focus on die tageszeitung, the ecology movement, and the rise of the Green Party. Von Dirke concludes by asking whether the evolution that this book traces--from Marxist-influenced critiques of culture and society to more diverse, less doctrinaire left-wing positions--represents progress or a betrayal of radical ideals. An ambitious study of the German left, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of postwar European history.