Bøker i German and European Studies-serien

The Convergence of Civilizations will be an important tool for meeting the current global challenges being faced by nation-states as well as those in the future.

Motivated by a theology that declared missionary work was independent of secular colonial pursuits, Protestant missionaries from Germany operated in ways that contradict current and prevailing interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary work. As a result of their travels, these missionaries contributed to Germany's colonial culture. Because of their theology of Christian universalism, they worked against the bigoted racialism and ultra-nationalism of secular German empire-building. Heavenly Fatherland provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of missionaries, mission societies, mission intellectuals, and missionary supporters.Combining cases studies from East Africa with studies of the metropole, this book demonstrates that missionaries' ideas about race and colonialism influenced ordinary Germans' experience of globalization and colonialism at the same time that the missionaries shaped colonial governance. By bringing together religious and colonial history, the book opens new avenues of inquiry into Christian participation in colonialism. During the Age of Empire, German missionaries promoted an internationalist vision of the modern world that aimed to create a multinational, multiracial "e;heavenly Fatherland"e; spread across the globe.

Disruptive Power examines a surprising revival of faith in Catholic miracles in Germany from the 1920s to the 1960s. The book follows the dramatic stigmata of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth and her powerful circle of followers that included theologians, Cardinals, politicians, journalists, monarchists, anti-fascists, and everyday pilgrims. Disruptive Power explores how this and other similar groups negotiated the precariousness of the Weimar Republic, the repression of the Third Reich, and the dynamic early years of the Federal Republic.Analyzing a network of rebellious traditionalists, O'Sullivan illustrates the divisions that characterized the German Catholic minority as they endured the tumultuous era of the world wars. Analyzing material from archives in Germany and the United States, Michael E. O'Sullivan investigates the unsanctioned but very popular visions in several rural towns after World War II, providing micro-histories that illuminate the impact of mystical faith on religiosity, politics, and gender norms.

The Mediterranean region of Liguria, where the Maritime Alps sweep down to the coasts of northwest Italy and southeast France, the Riviera, marks the intersection of two of Europe’s major cultural landscapes. Remote, liminal, compact, and steep, the terrain has influenced many international authors and artists. In this study, Martina Kolb traces Liguria’s specific impact on the works of three seminal German-writing modernists – Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Gottfried Benn – whose encounters with Ligurian lands and seas led to an innovative geopoetic fusion of word and world.Kolb examines each of these authors’ acquired affinities with Ligurian and Provençal landscapes and seascapes, revisiting and reassessing the long tradition of northern longing for a Mediterranean south. She also shows how Freud and Benn followed in the footsteps of Nietzsche in his most prolific years, a topic which has received little critical attention to date. Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria offers a fresh approach to these writers’ groundbreaking literary achievements and profound interest in poetic expression as cathartic self-liberation.

Lyrical, mysterious, and laden with symbolism, Franz Kafka’s novels and stories have been translated into more than forty languages ranging from Icelandic to Japanese. In Transforming Kafka, Patrick O’Neill approaches these texts through the method he pioneered in Polyglot Joyce and Impossible Joyce, considering the many translations of each work as a single, multilingual “macrotext.”Examining three novels – The Trial, The Castle, and America – and two short stories – “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” – O’Neill offers comparative readings that consider both intertextual and intratextual themes. His innovative approach shows how comparing translations extends and expands the potential meanings of the text and reveals the subtle differences among the hundreds of translations of Kafka’s work. A sophisticated analysis of the ways in which translation shapes, rearranges, and expands our understanding of literary works, Transforming Kafka is a unique approach to reading the works of a literary giant.

Fighter, Worker, and Family Man explores how German-Jewish men tried to maintain their understandings of masculinity under Nazi rule.

This edited collection explores memories and experiences of genocide, civilian casualties, and other atrocities that occurred after the Second World War.

The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered explores the legacy and consequences of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

The Long Century's Long Shadow explores what is cinematic about the developments in literature, art, and aesthetic thinking that emerged in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

(Re)Visualizing National History is a unique and interdisciplinary volume that offers insights on the dilemmas of present-day European culture, manifestations of nationalism in Europe, and the debates surrounding museums as sites for the representation of politics and history.

Exploring notions of justice and morality, this book offers a new interpretation of everyday life in the ghettos during the Second World War.

Marked by a period of massive structural change, the 1970s in Europe saw the collapse of traditional manufacturing. The essays in this collection question aspects of the narrative of decline and radical transformation.

Taylor's exploration and insight into the debates around national identity and the privilege of citizenship challenges our understanding of nationality in the postwar period.

In The Necessity of Music, Celia Applegate explores the many ways that Germans thought about and made music from the eighteenth- to twentieth-centuries.

Sex and the Weimar Republic shows how, in Weimar Germany, the citizen's right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.

Drawing on underutilized archival materials, To Forget It All and Begin Anew reveals a nuanced mosaic of like-minded people who worked against considerable odds to make right the wrongs of the Nazi era.

Affecting Grace examines the importance of Shakespeare's poetry and plays within German literature and thought after 1750 - including its relationship to German classicism, which favoured unreflected ease over theatricality.

These essays do not assume the primacy of national allegiance. Instead, by using the 'sense of place' as a prism to look at German identity in new ways, they examine a sense of 'Germanness' that was neither self-evident nor unchanging.

Through impressive primary and archival research, Wilson demonstrates that in addition to uniting Germans, the forest as a national symbol could also serve as a vehicle for protest and strife.

A meticulous and careful analysis of the career of the twentieth century's most controversial pope, The Pope's Dilemma argues that Pius XII's refusal to condemn Nazi Germany and its allies was driven by the desire to keep Catholics within the Church.

Retallack reveals the complex and contradictory nature of the Second Reich, presenting Imperial Germany as it was seen by outsiders and insiders as well as by historians, political scientists, and sociologists ever since.

Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS, by Amy Carney, is the first work to significantly assess the role of SS men as husbands and fathers. These families contributed to the transformation of the SS into a racially-elite family community that was poised to serve as the new aristocracy of the Third Reich.

Urban Transformations delves into the ecology, sociology, politics, and architecture at the root of Berlin's urbanization.

Justice behind the Iron Curtain is the first work to showcase communist Poland's judicial confrontation with the legacy of the Nazi occupation and its oppressive regime.

The Seduction of Youth offers a new perspective on the history of the Weimar Republic by exploring the intersection between the homosexual movement, print culture, and homophobic fears about the seduction of young boys.

Turkish Guest Workers in Germany tells the post-war story of Turkish "guest workers," whom West German employers recruited to fill their depleted ranks.

Theatre of Anger examines contemporary transnational theatre in Berlin through the political scope of anger, and its trajectory from Aristotle all the way to Audre Lorde and bell hooks.

In Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism, John K. Noyes plumbs the connections between Herder's anti-imperialism, often acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, and his epistemological investigations.