Wheatland describes his method as a "social history of ideas" rather than a conventional intellectual history, but this methodological shift does not explain why he fails to follow the Frankfurt ...School to its second American home in Los Angeles, where Horkheimer moved in 1941. Because it omits Horkheimer and Adorno's formative decade in Southern California, Wheatland's book should have been titled, more accurately, The Institute of Social Research in New York.
The past decade has seen renewed interest in Grass, occasioned by his 1999 Nobel Prize, his treatment of German wartime suffering in Im Krebsgang (2002), the belated revelation of his participation ...in the Waffen-SS, and the subsequent publication of his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006). Thorough yet concise, the essays Uluminate the development of themes across Grass's prose fiction as well as his poetry, graphic art, drama, cinematic collaborations, and poütical engagement.
Born on October 29, 1929, in the then-German province of Lower Silesia to a lower middle-class family, Mahlendorf paints a luscious picture of place without sentimentality and describes in rich ...detail her childhood, youth, and early adulthood during tumultuous times and the long-lasting effects of the traumatic events she experienced. Following her family's fall into poverty in the Weimar Republic and her father's membership in the NSDAP, her father 's death in 1 935, her mother 's struggle to support her family with her meager earning as a seamstress, the author does not fail to question her memory regarding the Jewish population of Strehlen (now Strzelin) and she honestly reflects on her participation and rise to leadership positions in the Hitler Youth.
The first section, documenting media reactions to the novel prior to and upon the occasion of its publication, contains some of the more notorious assessments, such as the joint characterization of ...the novel by eminent critics Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Hellmuth Karasek, presented on the ZDF television program Literarisches Quartett just days before the book's release, as "ein 'schlechtes' und 'unmenschlich langweiliges Buch' ohne eine Spur handwerklichen Könnens" (qtd. 26). Labroisse's reading of the novel is distinguished from others by his close analysis of its complex narrative structure, his careful attention to its collective narrative voice - a shifting group of coworkers in the Fontane Archive which Labroisse calls the "Archiv-Wir," and his sensitivity to Grass's critique of the Treuhand, the agency formed in 1990 to bring about the privatization of East German industry and business.
According to Braun, references to this ambiguity have been lacking in much secondary literature devoted to Grass, and throughout her monograph she refutes scholar after scholar in making her central ...argument. In her discussion of Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang in Chapter 6, Braun interprets the various new narrative voices that Grass has introduced into these later works as attempts to place "at the heart of authorship an ironic aesthetics of replacement" that critiques readers' reduction of them to the essence of their writings and thus to figures whose works can be emulated ( 1 75) . Because Grass's latest autobiographical text, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, was published while Braun was revising her dissertation into this monograph, it unfortunately only receives cursory treatment in the Conclusion.
... viewing Berlin Dada works through the cyborg reveals that this movement, generally understood as destructive, can be viewed as a constructive exploration of new forms of hybrid identity and not ...simply an aesthetic dismantling of authoritarian figures and other familiar targets. ... Biro's analysis of the cyborg successfully allows him to make the claim that avant-garde art did not do away with the contextual meanings of its individual parts.
In his virtuosic introduction, Norton exemplarily shows that depictions of Bertram's book as the template for fascism's appropriation of Nietzsche were based on basic errors: in actual fact, the book ...is thoroughly researched (a feature on which, Norton emphasizes, George insisted) and sources are quoted from standard editions (albeit without exact references; Norton provides them now in his valuable Notes); Bertram is aware of the fragmentary nature of Nietzsche's philosophy and situates every quote in its proper context. ... this is an important book and a masterful translation.
In 1978, an international team of scholars began working on German critical editions of Kakfa's works, based on painstaking research into Kafka's original manuscripts and notes. In addition to adding ...sub-titles reflecting Kafka's original title, Der Verschollene, both Hofmann and Harman made corrections in details of spelling and wording, restored Kafka's long paragraphs, cut Brod's added chapter titles and divisions, and added the amusing missing segment "Brunelda's Departure," which, in an extreme concern for accuracy, both concluded with the unfinished sentence, "She ..."
Whereas previously, in the Imperial era, the city was the site of both a bourgeois culture that celebrated individuality and subj ectivity and an equally distinct working-class culture, the 1 920s ...saw the rise of the Angestellten who could not be understood in traditional class terms, since they shared the economic dependency of workers and the social and cultural aspirations of the bourgeoisie. ... Hake seeks to reintroduce the category of "class" into the discussion of Weimar culture.
