Firchow reads this poem as a parable of what might have been, that is, the beauty of a potentially fruitful relationship between Britain and Germany, as told against the brutality of the actual case, ...not only in the period under consideration, 1910 to 1960, but also, as his introduction and conclusion suggest, in the early 21st century present when even British observers are puzzled by the degree of hostility towards Germany still expressed in, for instance, British mass media. Firchow's book does not offer a coherent narrative of Anglo-German cultural relations from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, but provides, as may already have become evident, a series of case studies, mostly based on articles which were first published in the 1980s and 1990s.
... the chapter on architecture uses Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius to reveal the central role of New Building as an agent of social change. ... the closing chapter makes clear that ...Weimar may have been destroyed by the alliance of rightwing groups or big business; but it was the precariousness of Weimar democracy that also made possible such cultural flourishing.
Because conference presentations are necessarily short, the individual papers tend to raise more questions than they answer, although the virtue of a collection is that in conversation with each ...other some interesting debates begin to emerge. Cynthia Wachtell complements this examination of official propaganda with an inquiry into literature produced by pacifists - "war opponents offered a form of counterpropaganda that emphasized the common humanity of the enemy" - and front-line soldiers, who used their direct experience to similarly personalize the enemy, empathizing and welcoming encounters with him (75).
In particular, Zweig's refusal to take a political stand and his ultimate suicide were harshly condemned. Since Zweig has been mostly neglected by critics in the second half of the 20th century, ...Liska welcomes recent trends in literary criticism and theory that start re-evaluating the role of the author.
