has been written in recent years about the emergence of modernist culture in^w de siecle Europe a... more has been written in recent years about the emergence of modernist culture in^w de siecle Europe and the resistance it met from cultural traditionalists. The earliest clashes be? tween traditionalism and modernism usually occurred in the legal arena, where police censors sought to uphold traditional norms against the modernist onslaught. How successful was the state in combatting emer? gent modernist cultural movements? Arno Mayer, in a recent analysis ofthe persistence ofthe old regime in Europe before 1914, maintains that: "In the long run, the victory of the modernists may have been inevitable. In the short run, however, the modernists were effectively bridled and isolated, if need be with legal and administrative controls."1 In Germany, the first stirrings of modern literature?if perhaps not yet of full modernism?began with the naturalists, also called the "realists," the "youngest Germans," or simply "the Moderns."2 Naturalists Research for this essay was made possible by generous grants from the National En? dowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Uni? versity of Texas at Arlington Organized Research Fund. A preliminary draft was pre? sented at the Western Association for German Studies Conference, October 1983. i. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981), 190. 2. Some literary scholars consider naturalism to be the beginning of literary modern? ism, while others see it as pre-or only quasi-modernist; still others interpret modernism as a conscious rejection of naturalism. Those who stress the many modernist features of naturalism include: Helmut Kreuzer, "Zur Periodisierung der 'modernen' deutschen These articles are revised versions of papers presented at a session ofthe Western Association for German Studies (now the German Studies Association) in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1983.
This is a welcome, thoroughly researched, persuasively argued, and highly illuminating account of... more This is a welcome, thoroughly researched, persuasively argued, and highly illuminating account of the Third Reich's efforts to exercise book censorship to implement Nazi cultural policy. We have long known that, for all its totalitarian aspirations, in practice the Third Reich was polycratic, unsystematic, and disorganized. When it came to book censorship, Lewy shows, egregious jurisdictional conflicts between a multiplicity of state and party organizations 'resulted in a less than orderly, not to say chaotic, outcome' (x). Censorship regulating 'trashy' books and films already existed in the Weimar Republic; indeed, they did before 1914. These laws, supplemented by presidential emergency decrees after 1930, meant that by January 1933 much groundwork had already been laid for the Nazis' more repressive measures. The first of such measures, beginning in March, culminating dramatically on May 10, but lasting into October, were initially spontaneous, then increasingly organized, 'purgings' and book burnings. Conducted in 70 German cities by Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, the SS, the Deutsche Studentenschaft, and Rosenberg's Kampfbund fu¨r deutsche Kultur, these book purges targeted leftist publishers, school, university, and public libraries, and commercial lending libraries especially. The goal was to proactively remove from public circulation 'un-German' books by Jewish, Marxist, 'subversive' and 'corrosive' authors. As the new regime took shape, multiple state and party agencies, headed by ambitious party functionaries pushing different agendas and given ambiguous, sometimes overlapping purviews, competed for control of books: the Ministries of Propaganda and Education, the Reichsschrifttumkammer, the Gestapo and SD, the Parteiamtliche Pru¨fungskommission zum Schutze des nationalsozialistischen Schrifttums and the Beauftragter des Fu¨hrers fu¨r die U¨berwachung des gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Erziehung der NSDAP. These agencies, furthermore, had subsidiary offices on the state, district and local levels that often acted on their own initiative. Lewy delights in showing these feuding fiefdoms working at cross purposes, quarrelling over jurisdiction, encroaching on each other's territory, overriding rivals' decisions, and sometimes issuing contradictory lists of banned or permitted publications. 'In few other areas of government was the resulting disarray more extensive than in regard to the censorship of books' (145). There was broad consensus about what types of works or authors must be banned ('Jewish' books and authors, 'traitorous' e´migre´s, Marxists, pornography and sexually explicit fiction), but no uniform standards, and some materials (e.g., scientific publications) were generally exempt from censorship. About other
This collection of original essays examines various ways in which cultural trends and social deve... more This collection of original essays examines various ways in which cultural trends and social developments have influenced each other in modern German history. Each contribution explores some aspect of either "high" (elite) or "low" (popular) culture. A thoughtful introduction by Leonard Krieger draws together many of the common themes and important questions raised in the individual studies: the interplay of ideas and social forces in German history; the response of the German elite to the emergence of modern social relations and mass culture; and the relation between elite and popular culture. David King presents a broad interpretation of Germany's resistance to modern Western cultural values and social institutuions and offers a new perspective on Germany's divergence from the Western core of modern civilization. Charles McClelland examines the values and subculture of Germany's academic elite during the nineteenth century and explains why the leadership of that elite declined as Germany modernized. David Gross traces the evolution of theories and critiques of everyday German culture in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Gary Stark analyzes the growth of the cinema in Germany before the First World War and the response of the nation's political and cultural elite to this new form of popular culture. Vernon Lidtke's essay examines the use of music and song by the Nazi movement, finding the Nazi music mirrored the eclectic origins, broad social appeal, and emotional dynamism of National Socialism and became an effective means of mobilizing and socializing the German masses after 1933. Collectively, the essays in this volume yield new insights into modern German culture by revealing its social dimensions.
In Thomas Mann's famous short story of 1903 about the artist's problematic relation to bourgeois ... more In Thomas Mann's famous short story of 1903 about the artist's problematic relation to bourgeois society, the aspiring young writer Tonio Krfiger, after an absence of thirteen years, returns to his hometown for a brief visit. There he is confronted by a policeman who, suspecting Kifiger to be a swindler wanted by the law, questions him about his identity and occupation. Kr6ger, although recognizing that this guardian of civic order is within his rights, is nevertheless reluctant to reveal who he is. Unable to provide the requisite identity papers, he finally shows the policeman proof-sheets of a story of his that is about to be published. The officer is not entirely convinced the young writer is not the wanted criminal, but in the end he lets the matter drop and allows Kr6iger to leave the country. This unsettling confrontation with a representative of the German state drives home to Kroger his social isolation, his uneasy existence between two seemingly incompatible worlds: that of his bohemian artist friends, who regard him as a bourgeois, and that of the bourgeois, who try to arrest him. It also reinforces his long-standing aversion to his hometown and his eagerness to return soon to his self-imposed exile in the more hospitable south. Tonio Kr6ger's situation is symbolic of that of many fin de sikcle German writers. As numerous scholars have noted, many late nineteenth and early twentieth century German literati shared three distinct but interrelated characteristics: an acute self-consciousness; a sense of alienation from bourgeois society; and an "unpolitical" withdrawal from the pressing social and political problems of the day. During the nineteenth century, but especially since Nietzsche, German writers became increasingly conscious of their existence as ,a distinct, semi-independent social group and were increasingly preoccupied with questions about the role of art in the modern world, the unique nature of
Pornography, Society, and the Law In Imperial Germany GARY D. STARK IN recent years, the popular ... more Pornography, Society, and the Law In Imperial Germany GARY D. STARK IN recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cul? tural historians, as has the response ofthe social elite to this form of popular culture.1 Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the his? tory of what must surely be one ofthe most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially I wish to thank the University of Texas at Arlington Organized Research Fund, which made possible the research for this project, and Konrad Jarausch and Leslie Page Moch, who offered helpful suggestions and criticisms. A preliminary draft of this paper was
Presses universitaires de Rennes eBooks, Jun 7, 2018
Censorship in imperial Germany was an inherently ironic undertaking, producing unanticipated effe... more Censorship in imperial Germany was an inherently ironic undertaking, producing unanticipated effects quite different from what was originally intended. Institutionalized censorship created a vested interest in the existence of nonconformist expressions; it advertised the materials it sought to suppress; it often magnified their effect and social significance; it sometimes discouraged the very types of expressions it sought to defend and promote; and censors made claims about literature we would expect from writers, while writers made claims we would expect from censors.La censure en Allemagne impériale était une entreprise intrinsèquement ironique, produisant des effets très différents de ceux voulus par les autorités. La censure institutionnalisée encourage l’intérêt pour les expressions non-conformistes ; elle promeut les matériaux qu’elle cherchait à supprimer, magnifie leur effet et leur importance sociale, décourage les types d’expressions qu’elle cherche à défendre. Enfin, les censeurs traitent la littérature comme s’ils étaient des auteurs, tandis que les écrivains agissent en censeurs
theorists of the time, Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Paret's expertise on the subject all... more theorists of the time, Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Paret's expertise on the subject allows him a skillful brief discussion of the writings of both authors on the war of 1806-1807. For him Clausewitz is the one with the more adequate theoretical approach, because he was an "unusually searching observer of a new phase of European and soon world history" who understood the interconnectedness of war, politics, society, and culture (p. 142). The same can be said about Peter Paret, who in this book, as in his earlier work, analyzes military and war in their interconnectedness to politics, society, and culture. For sure, experts of the subject and readers of Paret's earlier works will not find many new insights in this short book, but for them and for everybody who is interested in the subject, it offers an excellent and elegantly written overview on Prussia in 1806 and the responses to the defeat of its army.
The tendency, especially among intellectuals reared in the idealist tradition, to worship culture... more The tendency, especially among intellectuals reared in the idealist tradition, to worship culture and private self-fulfillment, but to deprecate politics and political involvement, has been a major theme in German cultural history. In a pathbreaking essay now thirty five years old, Fritz Stern explored the baneful political consequences of those cultivated but "unpolitical" German intellectuals who assumed culture could substitute for power and whose vulgarized idealism transformed spirit into a cloak for a politics of irresponsibility and callousness. Since the late 1960s, Gordon Craig, in a number of essays about individual German writers, artists, and scholars, has also investigated many of the same issues: the lack of a political element in traditional German Bildung and the political immaturity of many cultured Germans; the tradition of Innerlichkeit that fosters retreat from the real world and its problems into a private aesthetic sphere; the erratic swings of many German intellectuals between political neutrality or withdrawal on the one hand and a vehement, if often irresponsible political engagement and activism on the other.
Page 1. Essays on the Family and Historical Change By David Levine Leslie Page Moch Louise A. Til... more Page 1. Essays on the Family and Historical Change By David Levine Leslie Page Moch Louise A. Tilly John Modell Elizabeth Pleck Introduction by Leslie Page Moch Edited by Leslie Page Moch and Gary D. Stark Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. ...
has been written in recent years about the emergence of modernist culture in^w de siecle Europe a... more has been written in recent years about the emergence of modernist culture in^w de siecle Europe and the resistance it met from cultural traditionalists. The earliest clashes be? tween traditionalism and modernism usually occurred in the legal arena, where police censors sought to uphold traditional norms against the modernist onslaught. How successful was the state in combatting emer? gent modernist cultural movements? Arno Mayer, in a recent analysis ofthe persistence ofthe old regime in Europe before 1914, maintains that: "In the long run, the victory of the modernists may have been inevitable. In the short run, however, the modernists were effectively bridled and isolated, if need be with legal and administrative controls."1 In Germany, the first stirrings of modern literature?if perhaps not yet of full modernism?began with the naturalists, also called the "realists," the "youngest Germans," or simply "the Moderns."2 Naturalists Research for this essay was made possible by generous grants from the National En? dowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Uni? versity of Texas at Arlington Organized Research Fund. A preliminary draft was pre? sented at the Western Association for German Studies Conference, October 1983. i. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981), 190. 2. Some literary scholars consider naturalism to be the beginning of literary modern? ism, while others see it as pre-or only quasi-modernist; still others interpret modernism as a conscious rejection of naturalism. Those who stress the many modernist features of naturalism include: Helmut Kreuzer, "Zur Periodisierung der 'modernen' deutschen These articles are revised versions of papers presented at a session ofthe Western Association for German Studies (now the German Studies Association) in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1983.
This is a welcome, thoroughly researched, persuasively argued, and highly illuminating account of... more This is a welcome, thoroughly researched, persuasively argued, and highly illuminating account of the Third Reich's efforts to exercise book censorship to implement Nazi cultural policy. We have long known that, for all its totalitarian aspirations, in practice the Third Reich was polycratic, unsystematic, and disorganized. When it came to book censorship, Lewy shows, egregious jurisdictional conflicts between a multiplicity of state and party organizations 'resulted in a less than orderly, not to say chaotic, outcome' (x). Censorship regulating 'trashy' books and films already existed in the Weimar Republic; indeed, they did before 1914. These laws, supplemented by presidential emergency decrees after 1930, meant that by January 1933 much groundwork had already been laid for the Nazis' more repressive measures. The first of such measures, beginning in March, culminating dramatically on May 10, but lasting into October, were initially spontaneous, then increasingly organized, 'purgings' and book burnings. Conducted in 70 German cities by Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, the SS, the Deutsche Studentenschaft, and Rosenberg's Kampfbund fu¨r deutsche Kultur, these book purges targeted leftist publishers, school, university, and public libraries, and commercial lending libraries especially. The goal was to proactively remove from public circulation 'un-German' books by Jewish, Marxist, 'subversive' and 'corrosive' authors. As the new regime took shape, multiple state and party agencies, headed by ambitious party functionaries pushing different agendas and given ambiguous, sometimes overlapping purviews, competed for control of books: the Ministries of Propaganda and Education, the Reichsschrifttumkammer, the Gestapo and SD, the Parteiamtliche Pru¨fungskommission zum Schutze des nationalsozialistischen Schrifttums and the Beauftragter des Fu¨hrers fu¨r die U¨berwachung des gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Erziehung der NSDAP. These agencies, furthermore, had subsidiary offices on the state, district and local levels that often acted on their own initiative. Lewy delights in showing these feuding fiefdoms working at cross purposes, quarrelling over jurisdiction, encroaching on each other's territory, overriding rivals' decisions, and sometimes issuing contradictory lists of banned or permitted publications. 'In few other areas of government was the resulting disarray more extensive than in regard to the censorship of books' (145). There was broad consensus about what types of works or authors must be banned ('Jewish' books and authors, 'traitorous' e´migre´s, Marxists, pornography and sexually explicit fiction), but no uniform standards, and some materials (e.g., scientific publications) were generally exempt from censorship. About other
This collection of original essays examines various ways in which cultural trends and social deve... more This collection of original essays examines various ways in which cultural trends and social developments have influenced each other in modern German history. Each contribution explores some aspect of either "high" (elite) or "low" (popular) culture. A thoughtful introduction by Leonard Krieger draws together many of the common themes and important questions raised in the individual studies: the interplay of ideas and social forces in German history; the response of the German elite to the emergence of modern social relations and mass culture; and the relation between elite and popular culture. David King presents a broad interpretation of Germany's resistance to modern Western cultural values and social institutuions and offers a new perspective on Germany's divergence from the Western core of modern civilization. Charles McClelland examines the values and subculture of Germany's academic elite during the nineteenth century and explains why the leadership of that elite declined as Germany modernized. David Gross traces the evolution of theories and critiques of everyday German culture in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Gary Stark analyzes the growth of the cinema in Germany before the First World War and the response of the nation's political and cultural elite to this new form of popular culture. Vernon Lidtke's essay examines the use of music and song by the Nazi movement, finding the Nazi music mirrored the eclectic origins, broad social appeal, and emotional dynamism of National Socialism and became an effective means of mobilizing and socializing the German masses after 1933. Collectively, the essays in this volume yield new insights into modern German culture by revealing its social dimensions.
In Thomas Mann's famous short story of 1903 about the artist's problematic relation to bourgeois ... more In Thomas Mann's famous short story of 1903 about the artist's problematic relation to bourgeois society, the aspiring young writer Tonio Krfiger, after an absence of thirteen years, returns to his hometown for a brief visit. There he is confronted by a policeman who, suspecting Kifiger to be a swindler wanted by the law, questions him about his identity and occupation. Kr6ger, although recognizing that this guardian of civic order is within his rights, is nevertheless reluctant to reveal who he is. Unable to provide the requisite identity papers, he finally shows the policeman proof-sheets of a story of his that is about to be published. The officer is not entirely convinced the young writer is not the wanted criminal, but in the end he lets the matter drop and allows Kr6iger to leave the country. This unsettling confrontation with a representative of the German state drives home to Kroger his social isolation, his uneasy existence between two seemingly incompatible worlds: that of his bohemian artist friends, who regard him as a bourgeois, and that of the bourgeois, who try to arrest him. It also reinforces his long-standing aversion to his hometown and his eagerness to return soon to his self-imposed exile in the more hospitable south. Tonio Kr6ger's situation is symbolic of that of many fin de sikcle German writers. As numerous scholars have noted, many late nineteenth and early twentieth century German literati shared three distinct but interrelated characteristics: an acute self-consciousness; a sense of alienation from bourgeois society; and an "unpolitical" withdrawal from the pressing social and political problems of the day. During the nineteenth century, but especially since Nietzsche, German writers became increasingly conscious of their existence as ,a distinct, semi-independent social group and were increasingly preoccupied with questions about the role of art in the modern world, the unique nature of
Pornography, Society, and the Law In Imperial Germany GARY D. STARK IN recent years, the popular ... more Pornography, Society, and the Law In Imperial Germany GARY D. STARK IN recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cul? tural historians, as has the response ofthe social elite to this form of popular culture.1 Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the his? tory of what must surely be one ofthe most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially I wish to thank the University of Texas at Arlington Organized Research Fund, which made possible the research for this project, and Konrad Jarausch and Leslie Page Moch, who offered helpful suggestions and criticisms. A preliminary draft of this paper was
Presses universitaires de Rennes eBooks, Jun 7, 2018
Censorship in imperial Germany was an inherently ironic undertaking, producing unanticipated effe... more Censorship in imperial Germany was an inherently ironic undertaking, producing unanticipated effects quite different from what was originally intended. Institutionalized censorship created a vested interest in the existence of nonconformist expressions; it advertised the materials it sought to suppress; it often magnified their effect and social significance; it sometimes discouraged the very types of expressions it sought to defend and promote; and censors made claims about literature we would expect from writers, while writers made claims we would expect from censors.La censure en Allemagne impériale était une entreprise intrinsèquement ironique, produisant des effets très différents de ceux voulus par les autorités. La censure institutionnalisée encourage l’intérêt pour les expressions non-conformistes ; elle promeut les matériaux qu’elle cherchait à supprimer, magnifie leur effet et leur importance sociale, décourage les types d’expressions qu’elle cherche à défendre. Enfin, les censeurs traitent la littérature comme s’ils étaient des auteurs, tandis que les écrivains agissent en censeurs
theorists of the time, Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Paret's expertise on the subject all... more theorists of the time, Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Paret's expertise on the subject allows him a skillful brief discussion of the writings of both authors on the war of 1806-1807. For him Clausewitz is the one with the more adequate theoretical approach, because he was an "unusually searching observer of a new phase of European and soon world history" who understood the interconnectedness of war, politics, society, and culture (p. 142). The same can be said about Peter Paret, who in this book, as in his earlier work, analyzes military and war in their interconnectedness to politics, society, and culture. For sure, experts of the subject and readers of Paret's earlier works will not find many new insights in this short book, but for them and for everybody who is interested in the subject, it offers an excellent and elegantly written overview on Prussia in 1806 and the responses to the defeat of its army.
The tendency, especially among intellectuals reared in the idealist tradition, to worship culture... more The tendency, especially among intellectuals reared in the idealist tradition, to worship culture and private self-fulfillment, but to deprecate politics and political involvement, has been a major theme in German cultural history. In a pathbreaking essay now thirty five years old, Fritz Stern explored the baneful political consequences of those cultivated but "unpolitical" German intellectuals who assumed culture could substitute for power and whose vulgarized idealism transformed spirit into a cloak for a politics of irresponsibility and callousness. Since the late 1960s, Gordon Craig, in a number of essays about individual German writers, artists, and scholars, has also investigated many of the same issues: the lack of a political element in traditional German Bildung and the political immaturity of many cultured Germans; the tradition of Innerlichkeit that fosters retreat from the real world and its problems into a private aesthetic sphere; the erratic swings of many German intellectuals between political neutrality or withdrawal on the one hand and a vehement, if often irresponsible political engagement and activism on the other.
Page 1. Essays on the Family and Historical Change By David Levine Leslie Page Moch Louise A. Til... more Page 1. Essays on the Family and Historical Change By David Levine Leslie Page Moch Louise A. Tilly John Modell Elizabeth Pleck Introduction by Leslie Page Moch Edited by Leslie Page Moch and Gary D. Stark Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. ...
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