The Western tradition of excluding women from leadership and disparaging their ability to lead has persisted for centuries, not least in Germany. Even today, resistance to women holding power is embedded in literary, cultural, andhistorical values that presume a fundamental opposition between the adjective "female" and the substantive "leader." Women who do achieve positions of leadership are faced with a panoply of prejudicial misconceptions: either considered incapable of leadership (con...

Enlightened War investigates the multiple and complex interactions between warfare and Enlightenment thought. Although the Enlightenment is traditionally identified with the ideals of progress, eternal peace, reason, and self-determination, Enlightenment discourse unfolded during a period of prolonged European warfare from the Seven Years' War to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe. The essays in this volume explore the palpable influence of war on eighteenth-century thought and arg...

Since the appearance of its first edition in Germany in 1979, A History of German Literature has established itself as a classic work used by students and anyone interested in German literature.The volume chronologically traces the development of German literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Throughout this chronology, literary developments are set in a social and political context. This includes a final chapter, written for this latest edition, on the conseque...

German education plays a huge role in the development of education sciences and modern universities internationally. It is influenced by the educational concept of Bildung, which defines Germany ‘s theoretical and curricular ventures. This concept is famously untranslatable into other languages and is often misinterpreted as education, instruction, training, upbringing and other terms which don’t encompass its cultural ambitions. Despite this hurdle, Bildung is now being ...

Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of fundamental shifts in German cultural memory. Focusing on the resurgence of family stories in fiction, autobiography and in film, this study challenges the institutional boundaries of Germany's memory culture that have guided and arguably limited German identity debates. Essays on contemporary German literature are complemented by explorations of heritage films and muse...

Why did some of the "best and brightest" of Weimar intellectuals advocate totalitarian solutions to the problems of liberal democratic, capitalist society? How did their "radical conservatism" contribute to the rise of National Socialism? What roles did they play in the Third Reich? How did their experience of totalitarianism lead them to recast their social and political thought? This biography of Hans Freyer, a prominent German sociologist and political ideologist, is a case study of int...

This book consists of essays on the Vienna School’s impact on Central European art history, Walter Benjamin’s move from transhistoricism to historical relativism, Jacob Burckhardt’s legacy and its metamorphoses, two competing conceptions of the social history of art, and Ernst Gombrich’s life long struggle against metaphysics. All share a common denominator: concern with the trajectories of art historical ideas and their ideological instrumentality. However, the author’s aim in analysing t...

In this book, Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth explores the effects of ideology on the English-to-German translation of children’s literature under the socialist regime of the former German Democratic Republic. Giving prominence to extra-textual factors, the study undertakes a close investigation of the East German censorship machinery, showing that there was a close correlation between the socialist ideology propagated by the regime and the book selection process itself. Through an analysis of the...

The Euro crisis has served as a stark reminder of the fundamental importance of Germany to the larger European project. But the image of Germany as the dominant power in Europe is at odds with much of its recent history. Reluctant Meister is a wide-ranging study of Germany from the Holy Roman Empire through the Second and Third Reichs, and it asks not only how such a mature and developed culture could have descended into the barbarism of Nazism but how it then rebuilt itself withi...

Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany explores the world of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the female section within the Hitler Youth that included almost all German girls aged 10 to 14. The BDM is often enveloped in myths; German girls were brought up to be the compliant handmaidens of National Socialism, their mental horizon restricted to the "three Ks" of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, and church).Dagmar Reese, however, depicts another picture of life in the BDM...

German writers, from Luther and Goethe to Heine, Brecht, and Günter Grass, have had a profound influence on the modern world. This Very Short Introduction presents an engrossing tour of the course of German literature from the late Middle Ages to the present, focussing especially on the last 250 years. Emphasizing the economic and religious context of many masterpieces of German literature, it highlights how they can be interpreted as responses to social and political changes with...

It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as bac...