Goethe Centennial Celebration

In this, the second volume of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle covers the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution, which turned his life upside down, and of the German philosophical revolution which ushered in the periods of Idealismand Romanticism. It was also a period dominated by two intense personal relationships: with Schiller, Weimar's other great poet, philosopher, and dramatist, and with Christiana Vulpius, the mother of his son. Goethe was a poet of supreme intelligence and sensitivity living through political andintellectual changes which have shaped the modern world. The transition into modernity is the theme of this volume: Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars; the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which he absorbed and adapted and which for ten years made Jena theintellectual capital of Europe; the political upheaval initiated by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in which Goethe had grown up, and with it the cultural role he had envisaged for Jena and Weimar. Boyle vividly narrates both the large-scale events and the personal dramas of thisexciting time, to give lucid accounts of important thinkers whom English readers have hitherto found inaccessible, and to analyse in new ways Goethe's works of the period, notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust.

Building a National Literature boldly takes issue with traditional literary criticism for its failure to explain how literature as a body is created and shaped by institutional forces. Peter Uwe Hohendahl approaches literary history by focusing on the material and ideological structures that determine the canonical status of writers and works. He examines important elements in the making of a national literature, including the political and literary public sphere, the theory and practice of literary criticism, and the emergence of academic criticism as literary history. Hohendahl considers such key aspects of the process in Germany as the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the delineation of the borders of German literature, the idea of its history, the understanding of its cultural function, and the notion of a canon of major and minor authors.

Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar’s creative lights, transforming the onetime artists’ utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. Kater’s richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Schweitzer was one of the best-known figures on the world stage. Courted by monarchs, world statesmen, and distinguished figures from the literary, musical, and scientific fields, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, cementing his place as one of the great intellectual leaders of his time. Schweitzer is less well known now but nonetheless a man of perennial fascination, and this volume seeks to bring his achievements across a variety of areas—philosophy, theology, and medicine—into sharper focus. To that end, international scholars from diverse disciplines offer a wide-ranging examination of Schweitzer’s life and thought over the course of forty years. Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action gives readers a fuller, richer, and more nuanced picture of this controversial but monumental figure of twentieth-century life—and, in some measure, of that complex century itself.

A critical history of physiognomic thought in German-speaking Europe that traces the roots of twentieth-century racial profiling to the Enlightenment.