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A major new study of Robert Musil by one of the world's leading Musil scholars. Musil's extraordinary works, the study reveals, emerged from the problem of the "e;two cultures."e;The modern era is marked by the separate life of two cultures of understanding, one derived from art and its discourses, the other from science and its practices. This "e;problem of the two cultures"e; (as coined by C.P. Snow) describes the difficulty of bringing these distinct ways of understanding the world together. The works of the Austrian author Robert Musil (1930-33) represent the most distinguished treatment of this problem in the modern era. Nevertheless, doubts persist about Musil's true intentions. Did he maintain that the separation between art and science could be resolved? Or did he rise above the problem by advocating a new order of being or "e;other condition"e; that would dispense with it altogether? Mehigan's study moves these questions to center stage. He lends new clarity to the debate about Musil's position in regard to the two cultures by shining a light on ethical questions the author ultimately wished to clarify. It is the shape of a hard-won ethics, Mehigan argues, that provides the key to an effective response to the problem of the two cultures - an ethics, in the end, that can only be put forward as a new kind of art. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German and Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.The study of German-language culture has been rapidly diversifying to express the vibrant multiplicity of what it is now possible to research, and teach, under the rubric of "e;German Studies."e; Responding to these developments, German in the World explores what happens when the geographic, linguistic, and temporal boundaries that have traditionally been used to define German-language culture are questioned, and are placed alongside more global perspectives. Chapters consider the transformation of the German-language cultural canon through its engagement with the world, trace the value of German Studies as an interdisciplinary subject practiced across different global locations, and investigate the impact of both on the work of organizations and practitioners entirely beyond the academy. In questioning where German-language culture can be found across these different "e;worlds,"e; German in the Worldthus uncovers the continued value of German Studies as a field of critical cultural discourse within a globalized public sphere, placing that culture at the heart of debates on Transnational and World Literature. Ultimately, thecontributions to this innovative volume demonstrate how attempts to locate German Studies in its wider geographic and social contexts result not in a discipline undone, but in a discipline reinvigorated and transformed.Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Tobias Boes, Dirk Gottsche, James Hodkinson, Carlotta von Maltzan, Frauke Matthes, Ben Morgan, John K. Noyes, Emily Oliver, Kate Rigby, Benedict Schofield, Uwe Schutte, Carol Tully. James Hodkinson is Reader in German at Warwick University. Benedict Schofield is Reader in German at King's College London.

Shows German Science Fiction's connections with utopian thought, and how it attempts Zukunftsbewaltigung: coping with an uncertain but also unwritten future.Since its beginnings, German Science Fiction (or SF) has engaged with social change and technological progress, often drawing from utopian thought. The writer Kurd Lawitz challenged the authoritarian Wilhelmine order; later, filmdirector Fritz Lang provided a searing critique of Weimar society. Meanwhile utopian thinkers like Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse insisted on the possibility of hope, even in the face of totalitarianism. During the Cold War, German utopian writing and filmmaking were vital both as a warning and as a creative imagining of possible futures. More recently, as rapid scientific and technological advances have continued, literary and cinematic responses have become increasingly dystopian in outlook, reflecting fears connected with globalization, advances in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and persistent challenges like climate change, hunger, migration, and terrorism. This book explores German SF's responses to the question how humanity can match technological advances with social, ethical, and moral progress. It surveys German utopian thought and the German SF tradition-both literary andcinematic-providing close readings of selected works that paradoxically reflect boundless optimism for the possibility of change and increasing pessimism in its likelihood. English translations are provided throughout. Building onits rich tradition but now confidently entering the mainstream, German SF attempts Zukunftsbewaltigung: coping with an uncertain but also unwritten future. Ingo Cornils is Professor of German Studies at the University of Leeds.

Makes available twenty-two protest songs of the period up to and including the 1848 Revolution in Germany along with a reception history of the songs through their revival after 1945.The socially volatile period of the Vormarz (1830-1848) and the 1848 Revolution in Germany produced a wealth of political protest song. Songs for a Revolution makes available twenty-two prominent protest songs from that time, both lyrics (in German and English) and melodies. It also chronicles the songs' reception: suppressed after the revolution, they fell into obscurity, despite intermittent revivals by the workers' movement and later in the Weimar Republic, until they were appropriated as democratic cultural heritage by the folk and political song movements of East and West Germany after 1945. The songs reflect the new, oppositional political consciousness that emerged during the post-1830 period of restoration and led to the revolution. The book makes use of broadsides, songbooks, newspaper reports, and manuscripts to document the songs' transmission and shed light on the milieus in which they circulated. It also demonstrates how the appropriation of these songs by the German Liedermacher and folk scene shaped today's cultural memory of the 1848 period. It illuminates the functioning of political ideology in these reception processes, which in turn have given rise to myths that have influenced the discourse on the 1848 songs. ECKHARD JOHN is Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Popular Culture and Music at the University of Freiburg. DAVID ROBB is Senior Lecturer in Music at Queens University Belfast.

The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.Mountains have occupied a central place in German, Swiss, and Austrian intellectual culture for centuries. This volume offers the first scholarly English translations of thirteen key texts from the Germanophone tradition of engagement with mountains. The selected texts span over 450 years, ranging from the early modern period to the postmodern era, and encompass several discursive modes of the mountain experience including geographical descriptions, philosophical meditations, aesthetic deliberations, and autobiographical climbing narratives. Well-known figures covered in this translational sourcebook include Conrad Gessner, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Simmel, Leni Riefenstahl, and Reinhold Messner. Each text is accompanied by a critical introduction that places the translated text within a broader cultural context. The dual translational-interpretational approach offered in this volume is intended to stimulate new international and interdisciplinary dialogue on the cultural history of mountains and mountaineering. Contributors: Paul Buchholz, Sean Franzel, Gundolf Graml, Kamaal Haque, Harald Hobusch, Dan Hooley, Sean Ireton, Jennifer Jenkins, Jens Klenner, Martina Kopf, Seth Peabody, Caroline Schaumann, Christoph Weber, Wilfried Wilms. Sean Ireton (University of Missouri) and Caroline Schaumann (Emory University) are also the editors of Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012).

Illuminates how selected great works of literature arose, leading to deepened understanding of the works and harking back to what we still call the humanities.This monumental study seeks the roots of great literary works and the processes by which they arose. It first illuminates the process from idea and inspiration through intention, formulation, revision (and sometimes frustration) to publication and reception. The textual studies that follow range from single poems to epic and dramatic works, from the genesis of new genres to that of a whole career. T. J. Reed sets the scene by going back to Homer's epics and the Bible, refreshing familiar scholarly material with new insights. Two early modern chapters then treat Montaigne, the founder of a new self-confidence, and Shakespeare, the beginner shaped by and shaping history. In the book's second half Reed concentrates on his specialty, modern German literature: Goethe, Buchner, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Celan, and Christa Wolf. A sense of the origins of literary meaning in each case is a firm foundation for understanding, staying close to the quick of human communication. Against the depersonalized, skeptical, theory-laden readings of literature that have been dominant in recent decades, this study harks back to what we still call the humanities. T. J. REED is Taylor Professor of German Emeritus at Oxford University.

A new translation of Rilke's great work with close readings of each of the ten elegies elucidating how their poetic attributes constitute their meaning.Rilke continues to be the most read and discussed German poet of the modern period. The Duino Elegies, together with the Sonnets to Orpheus, remain his greatest achievement. The themes of the ten elegies - and the conceptual world unique to Rilke from which they emerge - can best be understood through their poetic form: their imagery and neologistic formations, their angular syntax, their abrupt changes of tone and linguistic register, their use of multiple personae and speaking voices, and the often-ironic self-presentation of the author. Commentators, however, have often treated these features as mere formal devices that we can somehow see through to get to what really matters, that is, to what Rilke has to say about the human condition or the meaning of life, to his philosophy or worldview. On the contrary, they are constitutive of meaning in the elegies, and understanding them is crucial to our experience of reading Rilke's work. The purpose of this book is to make such features visible and to explain them to the reader as clearly as possible. This is the first full-length book in English devoted to the elegies in over thirty years. It offers an entirely new translation of each elegy, paired with the original German text, and a close reading of each.

Demonstrates, contrary to conventional wisdom, that European modernism developed not only in the great metropolitan centers, but also in provincial cities such as Jena.The conventional wisdom is that the cultural sea change that was European modernism arose in urban centers like Berlin, Paris, Munich, and Vienna. Meike G. Werner's book, now in English translation, is a study of modernism in the provinces. Taking the small provincial city of Jena as a paradigmatic case, it re-creates the very different social and intellectual framework in which modernist experimentation occurred beyond the metropolitan centers. Invented traditions, social and spatial "liminality," and new ideas of social and aesthetic transformation combined in Jena to create a unique moment of cultural innovation.In the years leading up to the First World War, the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs envisioned and guided the development of this alternative modernism. Taken up by young writers including Diederichs's wife Helene Voigt-Diederichs, numerous intellectual outsiders from across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and members of the Free Student movement and of Jena's Sera Circle, this "other" modernism was above all a youth movement, full of energy and bold optimism. Figures such as Rudolf Carnap, Wilhelm Flitner, Hans Freyer, Karl Korsch, and Elisabeth Busse-Wilson emerged from this Jena paradigm. Werner pieces together the story of Jena's modernism in its full richness, complexity, and inner contradictions.

Shows that while the GDR is generally seen as - and mostly was - an oppressive and unfree country, from late 1989 until autumn 1990 it was the "freest country in the world": the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained.Stephen Brockmann's new book explores the year 1989/1990 in East Germany, arguing that while the GDR is generally seen as - and was for most of its forty years - an oppressive and unfree country, from autumn 1989 until the autumn of 1990 it was the "freest country in the world," since the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. That such freedom existed in the last months of the GDR and was a result of the actions of East Germans themselves has been obscured, Brockman shows, by the now-standard description of the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a triumph of Western democracy and capitalism.Brockmann first addresses the culture of 1989/1990 by looking at various media from that final year, particularly film documentaries. He emphasizes punk culture and the growth of neo-Nazism and the Antifa movement - factors often ignored in accounts of the period. He then analyzes three later semiautobiographical novels about the period. He devotes chapters to dramatic films dealing with German reunification made relatively soon after the event and to more recent film and television depictions of the period, respectively. The final chapter looks at monuments and memorials of the 1989/1990 period, and a conclusion considers the implications of the book's findings for the present day.

A collection of new essays bringing into view the push and pull of the national and the international in the German-language cultural field of the period.

Explores sonic events and auditory experiences in German-speaking contexts from the Middle Ages to the digital age, opening up new understandings.