Making Bodies, Making History

Making Bodies, Making History
Author: Leslie A. Adelson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803210363

In West German literature in the 1970s and 1980s bodies functioned not as victims of history nor as allegories for the nation but as sites of contested identities. Focusing on conflicts about identity in present-day Germany and on literary texts in which the body is an aesthetic construct, Leslie A. Adelson reformulates questions of embodiment and historical agency—questions that continue to haunt culture studies in general and German studies and women's studies in particular. This interdisciplinary study of history, race, gender, and nationality offers rich readings of three contemporary prose texts that challenge the suppositions of prevalent literary theory—Anne Duden's Übergang, TORKAN's Tufan: Brief an einen islamischen Bruder, and Jeanette Lander's Ein Sommer in der Woche der Itke K. Adelson's discussion of heterogeneous identities in contemporary German culture boldly explores accountability and innovation in historical process.

The Conquest Of Nature

The Conquest Of Nature
Author: David Blackbourn
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2011-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1448114217

The modern idea of 'mastery' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. By investigating how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power, The Conquest of Nature explores how over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. From Frederick the Great of Prussia to Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century to Otto Intze, 'master dambuilder' of the years around 1900, to the Nazis who set out to colonise 'living space' in the East, this groundbreaking study shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it has often come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.

The Origins of the Modern Jew

The Origins of the Modern Jew
Author: Michael A. Meyer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1972-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814337546

An excellent overview of the intellectual history of important figures in German Jewry. Until the 18th century Jews lived in Christian Europe, spiritually and often physically removed form the stream of European culture. During the Enlightenment intellectual Europe accepted a philosophy which, by the universality of its ideals, reached out to embrace the Jew within the greater community of man. The Jew began to feel European, and his traditional identity became a problem for the first time. the response of the Jewish intellectual leadership in Germany to this crisis is the subject of this book. Chief among those men who struggled with the problems of Jewish consciousness were Moses Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, and Heinrich Heine. By 1824, liberal Judaism had not yet produced a vision of it future as a separate entity within European society, but it had been exposed to and grappled with all the significant problems that still confront the Jew in the West.

Identities

Identities
Author: Heidrun Friese
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571814746

"Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.

Gay Berlin

Gay Berlin
Author: Robert Beachy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307473139

Winner of Randy Shilts Award In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

Belonging

Belonging
Author: Nora Krug
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1476796637

* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).

Mobilizing Black Germany

Mobilizing Black Germany
Author: Tiffany N. Florvil
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2020-12-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252052390

In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.

Sources of the Self

Sources of the Self
Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 628
Release: 1992-03-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521429498

Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis.

Failure, Nationalism, and Literature

Failure, Nationalism, and Literature
Author: Jing Tsu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804751766

How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.