Unwrapping Goethes Weimar

The contributors have uniformly retooled their perspective on Weimar to take into account the pressing concerns of class, gender, and sexuality. As a result, readers will continue to appreciate Weimar culture circa 1800 as a splendidly dynamic place, rich with social, political, and artistic energy, and still revolving around Goethe. At the same time, however, they will be made aware of the class and gender inequities that were a condition for Weimar's flourishing high and hybrid culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Goethe and Zelter spent a staggering 33 years corresponding or in the case of each artist, over two thirds of their lives. Zelter's position as director of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin and Goethe's location in Weimar resulted in a wide-ranging correspondence. Goethe's letters offer a chronicle of his musical development, from the time of his journey to Italy to the final months of his life. Zelter's letters retrace his path as stonemason to Professor of Music in Berlin. The 891 letters that passed between these artists provide an important musical record of the music performed in public concerts in Berlin and in the private and semi-public soir? of the Weimar court. Their letters are those of men actively engaged in the musical developments of their time. The legacy contains a wide spectrum of letters, casual and thoughtfully composed, spontaneous and written for publication, rich with the details of Goethe's and Zelter's musical lives. Through Zelter, Goethe gained access to the professional music world he craved and became acquainted with the prodigious talent of Felix Mendelssohn. A single letter from Zelter might bear a letter from Felix Mendelssohn to another recipient of the same family, reflecting a certain community in the Mendelssohn household where letters were not considered private but shared with others in a circle of friends or family. Goethe recognized the value of such correspondence: he complains when his friend is slow to send letters in return for those written to him by the poet, a complaint common in this written culture where letters provided news, introductions, literary and musical works. This famous correspondence contains a medley of many issues in literature, art, and science; but the main focus of this translation is the music dialogues of these artists.

New essays providing an account of the shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values of Weimar Classicism.

Late 18th-century German literature was dominated by men. Women were discouraged from reading and scorned as writers. This study combines archival research, literary analysis, and statistical evidence to give a sociological-historical overview of the conditions of women's literary production.

One of the most prolific and versatile writers of all time, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) made an impact that continues to extend far beyond his native Germany. The variety of human questions and experiences treated in his works is arguably without parallel. He also had (for his era) an unusually long life, which spanned the French Revolution, the end of the Holy Roman Empire and subsequent reshaping of the German-speaking world, and the rapid onset of industrial modernity. In thirty-seven short essays, leading international scholars explore Goethe's life and times, his literary works, his activity in the realms of art, philosophy and natural science, his reception of – and indeed by – other cultures, and, finally, the resonance of his work in our time. The aim of this collection is to open as many windows as possible onto Goethe's wide-ranging intellectual and practical activity, and to give a sense of his ongoing importance.

Carefully focused essays on major aspects of one of the most significant German literary movements, the Storm and Stress.

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a small but significant number of German actresses, including Sophie Albrecht (1757-1840), Marianne Ehrmann (1755-1795) and Elise BYrger (1769-1833), began to publish poetry, autobiography, drama and short fiction under their own names. These 'actress-writers' came of age at a time when the status of the actress was beginning to be radically redefined in accordance with Enlightenment aesthetics and the cult of sensibility, as the model of the enterprising actress-director in the tradition of Caroline Neuber gave way to an idealizing view of the actress as sentimental heroine. The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism, is an exploration of this generation of actress-writers, their significance for German literary and cultural history, and their attempts to come to terms with the new image of the actress through literature and performance. In their texts and performances, Albrecht, Ehrmann and BYrger articulated an entirely new sense of what it meant to be an actress and a woman writer. They identified themselves with the cult of sensibility, with the theater reform movement, and above all with an image of the actress as GefYhlsschauspielerin or 'actress of emotion,' which emerged in the mid-1770s in response to the death of the Hamburg tragedienne Charlotte Ackermann (1757-1775). While some scholars have described this generation as a silent one, forced to submit to increasingly passive ideals of domesticity, actress-writers of the era defied this trend by using the image of the GefYhlsschauspielerin as a passport to literary activity. Their close relationship to theater and the nascent genre of 'paratheatrical literature' provided them with a public voice, access to literary circles and a language with which to articulate their identity as actresses and as writers. More importantly, it provided them with a space from which to critique contemporary notions of gender and virtue. Drawing on the methodologies of New Historicism and discourse analysis, The Mask and the Quill engages in readings of a broad spectrum of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century texts and cultural practices, from autobiographical fiction and lyric poetry to funeral rites and tableaux vivants. Through readings of diverse source material, it sheds light on an underrepresented group whose lives and works resist conventional notions about women's cultural contributions to the Goethezeit and beyond.

A Different Germany looks at German film, popular literature, theatre, garden culture, and popular music as examples of how people of German-Turkish descent, women and culture writ large are thriving in a Germany that is, for all of the struggles this entails, already a country of great diversity. Germany, the authors argue in their own particular contexts, is much more than the few tropes that circulate through the Cold War lens in much of the English-speaking world.

Traces how the German middle class created a unique form of domestic culture that fused consumption with high culture in fashionable forms of entertainment. Entertainment, defined as occasions for creating pleasure, added an important dimension to the lifestyle and self-definition of the German middle class around the turn of the nineteenth century. Modern forms of culture and consumption appearing around this time not only enhanced pleasure in physical sensations but also enabled imaginary sensations in the absence of actual stimuli. Desiring, rather than having, became an important mode of cultural consumption, linking products and practices with self-image, serving to express social identity in an increasingly more anonymous society--a society where the modern freedom of choice brought with it a loss of tradition and the stability attached to it. Fabricating Pleasure traces the creation of this unique form of domestic culture, showing how the bourgeoisie of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany fused consumption with high culture. Author Karin Wurst illuminates the sociohistorical context and the emergence of the modern middle class, its differentiation, and its conception of culture. In her thoughtful analysis, Wurst reconstructs the roles of Empfindsamkeit (sensibility) and the new love paradigm, examining the change in mentality they fostered through the reconceptualization of pleasure and entertainment. The book also discusses the relationship between print culture (using Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden as its prime example) and an increase in social mobility. From art and music to fashion and travel, Wurst places these popular forms of entertainment and pleasurable diversion in their social and historical contexts and also shows how they have remarkable bearing on present-day debates on cultural literacy.