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One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York—and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School—Veronika Fuechtner traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, she illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, she explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.

[Alice] had a younger sister, Louise, and two younger brothers, Georgie and [Louis] - known to his family as 'Dickie'. He grew up to become Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy of India, Admiral of the Fleet and self-appointedsurrogate father to Alice's son, [Philip]. He travelled to London to talk to Alice's mother, Lady Milford Haven, to whom the family invariably turned in crises. She suffered an agony of doubt, but took the advice of a Heidelberg professor, Karl Wilmanns, who suggested that Alice be sent to a private sanatorium on Lake Constance. Alice remained in a low condition for some time, believing that she was on the point of dying. On Boxing Day, her mother came to visit her, bringing Philip. They stayed for a few days at a nearby hotel. Alice had longed to see her son and the visit passed off well.

This dissertation argues that the 1960s witnessed the emergence of a form of aesthetic and political thought in Europe that took religiosity as the locus of anticapitalist resistance. It situates this emergence in the wider context of both a renewal of Marxism (with the New Left's attempt to rethink Marxism in non-economic terms, moving the revolutionary project from class struggle to the realm of culture) and a renewal of the Catholic Church (with the progressive papacy of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council). The mode of thought examined herein may be deemed Romantic to the extent that its critique of capitalism is inspired by a nostalgia for the past—one which, in this particular case, takes sacred or religious form, understood not in transcendent or dogmatic terms but rather as a reservoir of humanist, trans-individual, and non-instrumental values. Three case studies anchor my arguments: the writing of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, the interdisciplinary oeuvre of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the films of Robert Bresson. Examining these thinkers' development of comparably modernist, anti-naturalist conceptions of aesthetic realism, I analyze their respective radical critiques of bourgeois abstract rationality by way of a return to religiosity. In this sense, the dissertation explores the intersections between aesthetics, metaphysical and religious outlooks, and politics, arguing how each of these realms connects to and illuminates the others. To what extent may these authors’ politics be considered progressive, even in their ‘Romantic,’ potentially regressive tendencies? This dissertation tackles this question head on while exploring these individuals' concrete political consequences for 1960s culture, particularly the dialogue between Marxism and Christianity, the emergence of the New Left, the student movement, and the birth of liberation theologies in Latin America.

During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918-33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics--such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger--emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection,Weimar Thoughtpresents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource,Weimar Thoughtprovides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.

In 1934 Walter Benjamin gave a peculiar address in Paris that has been preserved for readers as “Der Autor als Produzent.” In this speech, Benjamin outlines the radical political responsibility of an author, particularly a German author, in that era to inculcate a revolutionary ethos in the public. Among the strategies he outlines for achieving this goal, Benjamin highlights the newspaper as the embodiment of that age’s conditions and a means of subverting bourgeois forms and consciousness. Benjamin fails to mention, however, that his friend Siegfried Kracauer had striven for years during his tenure as an editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung’s feuilleton section to effect precisely that end through his journalistic writing. Understanding the project Kracauer tried to achieve elucidates an often overlooked front in the struggle for the German conscience and consciousness that played out in the feuilleton sections of both leftist and centrist periodicals during the Weimar Republic. By exploring Kracaeur’s journalistic program in its historical context as well as in context of the work of other leftist Weimar feuilletonists, this essay hopes to elucidate how, despite ultimately failing to effect a revolution in the bourgeois worldview that might have prevented the fascists’ rise to power, the work of Kracauer and his contemporaries nevertheless expanded the possibilities for culture writing and redrew the boundaries of political discourse within German journalism.

Su intención es, en palabras del autor, \"extraer, en primer lugar, las propuestas de Heine del curso de la historia, y establecer con ellas una constelación que nos permita arrojar mejor luz sobre las reflexiones de Kracauer y Benjamin en torno al intelectual\" (14). En este sentido, tener como mascarón de proa a Heine es decisivo para entender lo que el autor de los Cuadros de viaje denomina \"conciencia desgarrada\": una homología entre la fragmentación del mundo y la fragmentación interna del escritor; se trata de una categoría clave para comprender la situación del intelectual moderno y su condición de \"desamparo trascendental\", para usar una expresión del Lukács de Teoría de la novela. Muestra la línea de continuidad existente entre el pionero ensayo de 1927, \"La fotografía\", y la Teoría del cine (1960) de Kracauer; también indica de qué modo la reflexión sobre este medio homogéneo específico muda, de manera que la fotografía pasa a ser una interlocución de vital importancia para la reflexión del teórico de la historia.

This thesis examines selected poems from the German author Bertolt Brecht. It critically investigates the claim that expressionist art can be held responsible for opening the door to fascism in Germany. It will place Brecht’s own expressionistic works and his counterfactual approach to traditional church hymns in the context of the Expressionism debate. In 1933 Brecht wrote a collection of songs and poems entitled “Lieder, Gedichte, Choere” during his exile in Paris. Brecht realized early on that with Hitler’s rise, society as he knew it was coming to an end. Because of his sharp and satirical anti-war poetry after WWI, his name was prominent on the black list of the Fascists, and in order to escape prosecution he had to leave Germany in 1933. However, he did not stop criticizing Fascist ideology and especially its re-appropriation of Christian rhetoric.

\"Shakespearean Futurism\" calls for a revaluation to utopian speculation in an era of left melancholy and political realism, returning to the Renaissance origins of the genre to revitalize the exhausted imagination that characterizes our historical moment. As geographical spaces of possibility and difference, utopias bind their reformist agendas to modes of spatial organization, environmental engineering, urbanism, and landscape architecture. Although Shakespeare never envisioned an ideal city, I nevertheless recruit him as a utopian thinker, mining his built, lightly built, and unbuilt environments as fields of potential that might be mobilized to outfit scenes of thinking, making, and doing. \"Shakespearean Futurism\" presses Renaissance literature for its forward-dawning moments of utopian conjecture in search of experimental protocols for place-making, probing the normative and radical valences of sound as a device for formatting space in The Tempest; tracking the ribbons of desire lines that score the grounds of the Forest of Arden in the wake of the young exiles' psychogeographical games in As You Like It; and witnessing the anticipatory collapse of the monumental architecture of empire under waves of swarming forms of life in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare's dramatic works are everywhere concerned with the futures of the city, the spatial poetics that nest speech, action, and labor within the topology of the built environments from the intimate quarters afforded by closets, boudoirs, and confessionals to the sharply public scenes staged on the Rialto or upon the walls of Flint Castle. Drawing on recent critical work in Shakespearean studies including attention to affect, ecologies, and materialisms, my dissertation attends to the moments in which Shakespearean scenes summon environments to the stage, not merely as backdrops for action, but as vibrant, vital agents in the drama.

In this study I investigate the early work of the German writer Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) in relation to contemporary discourses of religious revival and secularization. Kracauer was one of the most renowned journalists of Weimar Germany. By the time he fled to Paris in 1933, he had written hundreds of articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung and other periodicals; he also had written sociological works and a novel. In this variegated collection of writing, Kracauer outlined a critique of mass culture that in some respects anticipated both the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the concerns of cultural studies in our own day. His subsequent work, written after his emigration to the United States in 1941, contributed to the early development of film studies, and it is for this work that he is primarily known. My dissertation explores the prehistory of Kracauer's critique of mass culture, in particular, the origins of this critique in his writing prior to 1926. In this period, he closely observed and participated in contemporary philosophical debates on questions of religion and secularism. I argue that these issues occupy a position of fundamental importance in Kracauer's idea of criticism. Between the collision and collusion of discourses concerning the religious and the profane, Kracauer defined a space for critical practice, a space that accepted a theologically influenced view of the secular age as an age of crisis. Even after Kracauer turned, later in his career, towards a more positive valuation of secular modernity, the modern remained for him a crisis-ridden state that required the mediating efforts of the critic. His critical practice, moreover, was informed by his attempt to secularize theological concepts, in terms of both substance and rhetorical strategy. Messianic and Gnostic traditions within Judaism influenced Kracauer, but his approach to this issue was ultimately eclectic, responding to a wide array of sources including the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Though previous studies have pointed out that metaphysical impulses informed Kracauer's work, an extensive analysis of his engagement with contemporary religious movements is still needed. This dissertation situates Kracauer within these movements and discusses how his criticism evolved in relation to the claims of these competing discourses. Using Kracauer as a case study, I argue that the confrontation between the religious and the profane was a common reference point for intellectual debate, and that this conflict was pervasive in the bitterly contested cultural politics of the Weimar Republic, preparing the ground for National Socialism.

This dissertation analyzes the early work of Walter Benjamin (ca. 1916 – 1926). The period under consideration falls between Benjamin’s break from the German Youth Movement (which also coincides with the beginning of the Great War) and his turn to Marxism. Benjamin’s life and work during this period is characterized by, on the one hand, an intensified interest in theological concepts and, on the other hand, the apparent refusal of concrete political engagement. It is the claim of the dissertation that what Benjamin elaborates – in the absence of a concrete political program and with the aid of theological concepts – is a metaphysical conception of politics: what I call a metapolitics of decay. This metapolitics is informed by a certain theological understanding of transience: the decay that attends to a creation which has “fallen” from its original condition. While Benjamin’s metapolitics is oriented towards redemption – to the lossless consummation of historical life – it pursues this goal, not by circumventing transience, but by concentrating on the decay of nature – and by extension, of history. The metapolitical limit upon concrete politics, however, does not foreclose the possibility of the latter. In 1919, in a text posthumously named the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” Benjamin does in fact spell out what I call a politics of transience. One of the major historical and conceptual trajectories that the dissertation traces, therefore, is the movement from the metapolitics of decay to the politics of transience. The political significance of transience and decay reveals itself in the profane and melancholic fixation upon the decay of nature and of history. And yet it is only with the concept of happiness that both the metapolitical and the political dimensions of Benjamin’s work become most clear. Happiness (Glück), which is manifestly not the bliss (Seligkeit) of the prelapsarian condition, is no escape from the melancholy situation of historical life. It remains definitively profane and capable of taking an “elegiac” form. But it is precisely by way of its profanity and its melancholy that happiness comes to signify the idea of redemption. The will to happiness, for Benjamin, is a (weak) messianic force.