The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany

The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany

Author: Michael Geyer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2001-12-17

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 9780226289861

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The German Democratic Republic has become the subject of novels, memoirs and films, and the backdrop for general debates over the power of intellectuals in contemporary media and society. This collection considers the demise of the GDR and its impact on the place of intellectuals.


German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal

German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal

Author: Sean A. Forner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-10-23

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1107049571

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This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.


The Responsibility of Intellectuals

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Author: Noam Chomsky

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1620973642

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Selected by Newsweek as one of “14 nonfiction books you’ll want to read this fall” Fifty years after it first appeared, one of Noam Chomsky’s greatest essays will be published for the first time as a timely stand-alone book, with a new preface by the author As a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in 1947, Noam Chomsky was deeply affected by articles about the responsibility of intellectuals written by Dwight Macdonald, an editor of Partisan Review and then of Politics. Twenty years later, as the Vietnam War was escalating, Chomsky turned to the question himself, noting that "intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments" and to analyze their "often hidden intentions." Originally published in the New York Review of Books, Chomsky's essay eviscerated the "hypocritical moralism of the past" (such as when Woodrow Wilson set out to teach Latin Americans "the art of good government") and exposed the shameful policies in Vietnam and the role of intellectuals in justifying it. Also included in this volume is the brilliant "The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux," written on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which makes the case for using privilege to challenge the state. As relevant now as it was in 1967, The Responsibility of Intellectuals reminds us that "privilege yields opportunity and opportunity confers responsibilities." All of us have choices, even in desperate times.


German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past

German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past

Author: A. Dirk Moses

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9780511354670

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West German intellectuals have debated the Nazi past and democratic future of their country in increasingly polarized arguments.


Memory Traces

Memory Traces

Author: Silke Arnold-de Simine

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9783039102976

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This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the context of several debates on German literature during the 1990s the discussion revolved not only around the adequate aesthetic representation of the historical and cultural heritage but even more so around the role of literature itself in that process. The contributions look at different discourses that were and still are concerned with reinterpreting and creating new collective symbols and narrative patterns in relation to Germany's past. The volume focuses on the effects of the characteristic discourses of the press, literature and its different genres, film, the internet and memorials on the depiction and performance of memories.


Cinema in Service of the State

Cinema in Service of the State

Author: Lars Karl

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1782389970

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The national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.


German Scholars in Exile

German Scholars in Exile

Author: Axel Fair-Schulz

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2011-05-26

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0739150480

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German Scholars in Exiledeals with intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany and found refuge in either the United States or in American Services in Great Britain and post-WWII Germany. The volume focuses on scholars who were outside the commonly known Max Horkheimer-Hannah Arendt circles, who are less well-known but not less important. Their experiences ranged from an outstanding career at an Ivy-League university to a return to the German Democratic Republic and a position as an economic advisor to East Berlin's party leadership. None had actual political power, but many asserted some degree of influence. Their intellecutal legacies can still be seen in today's political culture.


Searching for a New German Identity

Searching for a New German Identity

Author: Theresa M. Ganter

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9783039110483

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Theresa M. Ganter investigates Heiner Muller's use of the Geschichtsdrama as a tool in his search for post-World War II and post-reunification German identity in 'Germania Tod in Berlin' (1956/1971) and 'Germania 3 Gespenster am Toten Mann' (1996), respectively.


Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic

Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic

Author: Nicole Moore

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2016-06-19

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1783085258

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An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain and illuminates multiple ironies for the GDR as a ‘reading nation’. This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.


German History in Modern Times

German History in Modern Times

Author: William W. Hagen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1316025225

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This history of German-speaking central Europe offers a very wide perspective, emphasizing a succession of many-layered communal identities. It highlights the interplay of individual, society, culture and political power, contrasting German with Western patterns. Rather than treating 'the Germans' as a collective whole whose national history amounts to a cumulative biography, the book presents the pre-modern era of the Holy Roman Empire; the nineteenth century; the 1914–45 era of war, dictatorship and genocide; and the Cold War and post-Cold War eras since 1945 as successive worlds of German life, thought and mentality. This book's 'Germany' is polycentric and multicultural, including the multinational Austrian Habsburg Empire and the German Jews. Its approach to National Socialism offers a conceptually new understanding of the Holocaust. The book's numerous illustrations reveal German self-presentations and styles of life, which often contrast with Western ideas of Germany.