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Time, history, and literature : selected essays of Erich Auerbach
Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. This book presents a selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world.
Book
Tangled Paths
An intimate biography of an eminent historian of art and culture, exploring his life both within and away from the academy. Tangled Paths tells the life story of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), one of the most influential historians of art and culture of the twentieth century. It also tells the story of a man who, throughout his life, struggled to assert his place in the world. Charting Warburg's many projects and identities—groundbreaking historian, public intellectual, ethnographer, shrewd academic administrator, and founder of a library—the book explores not only the vagaries of an academic career but also the personal demons of a man who relentlessly sought to live up to his own expectations. In this biography—the first in English in over fifty years—Hans C. Hönes presents an evocative and richly detailed portrait of Warburg's personality and career, and of his attempts to make sense of the tangled paths of his life.
eBook
Rage and Denials
In Rage and Denials, philosopher and architectural historian Branko Mitrovi? examines in detail the historiography of art and architecture in the twentieth century, with a focus on the debate between the understanding of society as a set of individuals and the understanding of individuals as mere manifestations of the collectives to which they belong. The conflict between these two views constitutes a core methodological problem of the philosophy of history and was intensely debated by twentieth-century art historians—one of the few art-historical debates with a wide range of implications for the entire field of the humanities. Mitrovi? presents the most significant positions and arguments in this dispute as they were articulated in the art- and architectural-historical discourse as well as in the wider context of the historiography and philosophy of history of the era. He explores the philosophical content of scholarship engaged in these debates, examining the authors' positions, the intricacies and implications of their arguments, and the rise and dominance of collectivist art historiography after the 1890s. He centers his study on the key art-historical figures Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, and Hans Sedlmayr while drawing attention to the writings of the less well known Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov. Rage and Denials offers a valuable window onto how key aspects of modern research in the humanities took shape over the course of the twentieth century.
eBook
The Brecht-brand and German Theatre in South Korea
When German-language drama reached colonial Korea via Japan in the early twentieth century, reception first adhered to then common notions of “Western civilization.” Bertolt Brecht was first mentioned amongst other authors of German literature in newspaper articles in the 1930s. Along with his plays and theories, Brecht, then, experienced an interesting career in post-war South Korea, from countercultural idol of academics and forbidden fruit of theatre practitioners to modern classic, on the one hand, inspiration for experimentation, on the other. This essay explores Korean-German theatre relations by tracing the twists and turns in the reception of Brecht. The image of a distant yet timely author worth studying was cemented by scholars of German literature amidst Cold War censorship, decades before the first officially sanctioned production in 1988. Headed by a German guest-conductor and billed as a musical, this Korean premiere of the Threepenny Opera reached wider audiences but let down Brecht scholars. Responses to this and other productions showed that the newly attained liberty to stage, adapt and appropriate Brecht’s work had limits, imposed by the overarching “brand” Brecht had become. Recently, works by directors of different backgrounds show attempts of rebranding and reclaiming Brecht, though, from combinations with Korean tradition to playful remixes commenting on post-COVID society. Their implications, put in perspective with discourses on “German” culture at large, contribute to a mapping of performative exchanges between Korea and Germany, including the underlying imaginaries. The changing Brecht-brand, focal point of this essay, furthermore, offers a critical perspective on the cultural capital attached to his name, the use-value of his writings and the aspirations of his affiliates.
Journal Article
Schnecken, Schlitzmonger, and Poltergeist Andy Warhol in German - translations and cultural context
Judging by the art-historical and art-critical reception in the 1960s, it is fair to say that the West German fascination with Andy Warhol was not solely with his work but also with his persona-by way of his published statements.1 From the beginning, he was quoted in the West German press and art-historical literature. The German translations of Warhol's texts mirror the evolution of the critical reception he and his art experienced in West Germany over the course of several decades. His most famous interviews did not need to be translated to be understood. His first two books to be rendered in German, on the other hand, posed unique challenges, and were advertised as American avant-garde literature. The titles he is best known for today appeared in translation only after his death.The way West Germans perceived and discussed contemporary art in the 1960s-the conception even of what qualified as contemporary art-was shaken in its foundations by the appearance of Pop art and, in its wake, of pop culture. From the beginning, Pop art's most controversial American protagonist was Andy Warhol, who divided the West German public on the question of whether his art, films, persona, and statements were critical or affirmative of consumer culture.
Journal Article
Socialism from the Right? Aesthetics, Politics and the Counter-Revolution in Weimar Germany
The early years of the Weimar period in Germany (1918-33) saw radical right paramilitaries and other activists engage in a violent struggle to roll back the post-war advances of the revolutionary left. This article examines the writings of Ernst Jünger and a number other writers
from the period, arguing that their work elaborated a violently misogynist pedagogy of the body and subjectivity designed to engineer these counter-revolutionary fighters. What is frequently missed in commentary on these writers, however, is the extent to which their work was not simply about
the repression of the left, but involved the production of a radical right 'socialism' whose powerful dynamic was crucial in breaking down the left socialist project over the course of the Weimar years; this dynamic was recognized at the time by critics like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.
Drawing on the work of these theorists, this paper traces the logic of fascist mobilization, arguing that the appropriation of the revolutionary energies of a left in crisis shaped the trajectory of the radical right, and drove their production of a masculinist, aestheticized 'state of total
mobilization' (Jünger).
Journal Article
Magic flutes & enchanted forests
Drawing on hundreds of operas, singspiels, ballets, and plays with supernatural themes, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests argues that the tension between fantasy and Enlightenment-era rationality shaped some of the most important works of eighteenth-century musical theater and profoundly influenced how audiences and critics responded to them. David J. Buch reveals that despite—and perhaps even because of—their fundamental irrationality, fantastic and exotic themes acquired extraordinary force and popularity during the period, pervading theatrical works with music in the French, German, and Italian mainstream. Considering prominent compositions by Gluck, Rameau, and Haydn, as well as many seminal contributions by lesser-known artists, Buch locates the origins of these magical elements in such historical sources as ancient mythology, European fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, and the occult. He concludes with a brilliant excavation of the supernatural roots of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, building a new foundation for our understanding of the magical themes that proliferated in Mozart’s wake.
eBook
August Halm
In the early 1900s, August Halm was widely acknowledged to be one of the most insightful and influential authors of his day on a wide range of musical topics. Yet, in the eighty years since his untimely death at age 59 (in 1929),Halm-the author of six wid
eBook