German Philhellenism

German Philhellenism
Author: D. Valdez
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2014-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137293152

Philhellenism the fascination with the art, politics, religion and society of ancient Greece- is a powerful and compelling phenomenon in German culture and intellectual history, creating a language and a series of key ideas that were to exert a continuous influence on German thought, aesthetics and politics well into the twentieth century. In this book Valdez examines the first generation of German Philhellenes from Winckelmann to Goethe. He shows how German Philhellenism was torn between the search for a historical whole which could explain and encompass Greek excellence, and the desire to incorporate individual aspects of Greece in a wider ethical and artistic enterprise, and finally, to give it a place in the history of freedom itself. Valdez also shows that German philhellenic ideas grew out of a dialogue with French and British ideas and historiography. He charts how the fascination with Greek antiquity was reflected in theatre and literature and how the longings and idealisation of Philhellenes clashed with the more critical and sober historians of the Enlightenment. The book also explains how the search for the historical reality of philhellenic ideals created intense emotional and ideological conflicts about the unique nature of male friendship in ancient Greece and about the position of women in ancient Athens.

German Philhellenism

German Philhellenism
Author: D. Valdez
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2015-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781349451081

This book is an account of the modern German fascination with the art, politics and religion of ancient Greece from Winckelmann to Nietzsche's generation.

Down from Olympus

Down from Olympus
Author: Suzanne L. Marchand
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2020-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400843685

Since the publication of Eliza May Butler's Tyranny of Greece over Germany in 1935, the obsession of the German educated elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted, if severely underanalyzed, cliché. In Down from Olympus, Suzanne Marchand attempts to come to grips with German Graecophilia, not as a private passion but as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope. The book argues that nineteenth-century philhellenes inherited both an elitist, normative aesthetics and an ascetic, scholarly ethos from their Romantic predecessors; German "neohumanists" promised to reconcile these intellectual commitments, and by so doing, to revitalize education and the arts. Focusing on the history of classical archaeology, Marchand shows how the injunction to imitate Greek art was made the basis for new, state-funded cultural institutions. Tracing interactions between scholars and policymakers that made possible grand-scale cultural feats like the acquisition of the Pergamum Altar, she underscores both the gains in specialized knowledge and the failures in social responsibility that were the distinctive products of German neohumanism. This book discusses intellectual and institutional aspects of archaeology and philhellenism, giving extensive treatment to the history of prehistorical archaeology and German "orientalism." Marchand traces the history of the study, excavation, and exhibition of Greek art as a means to confront the social, cultural, and political consequences of the specialization of scholarship in the last two centuries.

That Greece Might Still be Free

That Greece Might Still be Free
Author: William St. Clair
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 1906924007

When in 1821, the Greeks rose in violent revolution against the rule of the Ottoman Turks, waves of sympathy spread across Western Europe and the United States. More than a thousand volunteers set out to fight for the cause. The Philhellenes, whether they set out to recreate the Athens of Pericles, start a new crusade, or make money out of a war, all felt that Greece had unique claim on the sympathy of the world. As Byron wrote, 'I dreamed that Greece might Still be Free'; and he died at Missolonghi trying to translate that dream into reality. William St Clair's meticulously researched and highly readable account of their aspirations and experiences was hailed as definitive when it was first published. Long out of print, it remains the standard account of the Philhellenic movement and essential reading for any students of the Greek War of Independence, Byron, and European Romanticism. Its relevance to more modern ethnic and religious conflicts is becoming increasingly appreciated by scholars worldwide. This new and revised edition includes a new Introduction by Roderick Beaton, an updated Bibliography and many new illustrations.

Placing Modern Greece

Placing Modern Greece
Author: Constanze Guthenke
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008-02-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191528307

Placing Modern Greece is about literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke claims that the imagining of and attitude towards Greece was shaped by a fascination with the material, and by the highly conceptualized tension between the ideal on the one hand, and the material on the other. Her study focuses on nature and landscape imagery as vehicles of representation, on their specific inner workings, and on their dynamic, which conditions how and whether Greece as a modern entity in the making can be represented at all. Offering readings from German and contemporaneous Greek authors, Guthenke supplies a commentary on the translation and crossings of representational models and their limits.

The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860–1930

The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860–1930
Author: Martin A. Ruehl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316298655

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Germany's bourgeois elites became enthralled by the civilization of Renaissance Italy. As their own country entered a phase of critical socioeconomic changes, German historians and writers reinvented the Italian Renaissance as the onset of a heroic modernity: a glorious dawn that ushered in an age of secular individualism, imbued with ruthless vitality and a neo-pagan zest for beauty. The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination is the first comprehensive account of the debates that shaped the German idea of the Renaissance in the seven decades following Jacob Burckhardt's seminal study of 1860. Based on a wealth of archival material and enhanced by more than one hundred illustrations, it provides a new perspective on the historical thought of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and the formation of a concept that is still with us today.

The German Invention of Race

The German Invention of Race
Author: Sara Eigen
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791482073

In The German Invention of Race, historians, philosophers, and scholars in literary, cultural, and religious studies trace the origins of the concept of "race" to Enlightenment Germany and seek to understand the issues at work in creating a definition of race. The work introduces a significant connection to the history of race theory as contributors show that the language of race was deployed in contexts as apparently unrelated as hygiene; aesthetics; comparative linguistics; anthropology; debates over the status of science, theology, and philosophy; and Jewish emancipation. The concept of race has no single point of origin, and has never operated within the constraints of a single definition. As the essays in this book trace the powerful resonances of the term in diverse contexts, both before and long after the invention of the scientific term around 1775, they help explain how this pseudoconcept could, in a few short decades, have become so powerful in so many fields of thought and practice. In addition, the essays show that the fateful rise of racial thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was made possible not only by the establishment of physical anthropology as a field, but also by other disciplines and agendas linked by the enduring associations of the word "race."

Greeks, Romans, Germans

Greeks, Romans, Germans
Author: Johann Chapoutot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292979

Much has been written about the conditions that made possible Hitler's rise and the Nazi takeover of Germany, but when we tell the story of the National Socialist Party, should we not also speak of Julius Caesar and Pericles? Greeks, Romans, Germans argues that to fully understand the racist, violent end of the Nazi regime, we must examine its appropriation of the heroes and lessons of the ancient world. When Hitler told the assembled masses that they were a people with no past, he meant that they had no past following their humiliation in World War I of which to be proud. The Nazis' constant use of classical antiquity—in official speeches, film, state architecture, the press, and state-sponsored festivities—conferred on them the prestige and heritage of Greece and Rome that the modern German people so desperately needed. At the same time, the lessons of antiquity served as a warning: Greece and Rome fell because they were incapable of protecting the purity of their blood against mixing and infiltration. To regain their rightful place in the world, the Nazis had to make all-out war on Germany's enemies, within and without.

European Investment in Greece in the Nineteenth Century

European Investment in Greece in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Korinna Schönhärl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2020-09-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000191540

Banking historiography often does not sufficiently take into account bankers’ deliberations of their decision making, but rather limits investigation to considerations of profit maximisation. This book shows that the decision-making processes of nineteenth-century bankers contemplating high-risk financial markets like Greece are just as complex as present-day investment decisions. The book, now published in English after a first German edition, offers in-depth studies of decision making in concrete historical situations, considering political and economic circumstances and also the individual background of the actors concerned, including a reflection on the influence of cultural movements such as Philhellenism. Employing methodological inspirations from the field of behavioural finance, the book analyses a broad range of published and unpublished English, French, Greek, German and Swiss sources on European investment in Greece between 1821 and the Balkan wars. Additionally, rich insights into Greek economic history, the economic integration of the country into Europe and long-lasting European stereotypes of Southern Europe and Greece are provided; this furthers understanding of the historical background of the Greek financial crisis after 2009. In combining the perspectives of financial, economic, political and cultural history, this book is primarily significant for students of various fields of historiography. Due to its strong awareness of methodological questions, it is also of great interest to academic historians. In addition, the strong public interest in the Greek financial crisis after 2009 and its consequences for Europe will, thirdly, attract the interest of a broader public.

Tragedy's Endurance

Tragedy's Endurance
Author: Erika Fischer-Lichte
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199651639

This volume sets out a novel approach to theatre historiography, presenting the history of performances of Greek tragedies in Germany since 1800 as the history of the evolving cultural identity of the educated middle class throughout that period. Philhellenism and theatromania took hold in this milieu amidst attempts to banish the heavily French-influenced German court culture of the mid-eighteenth century, and by 1800 performances of Greek tragedies had effectively become the German answer to the French Revolution. Tragedy's subsequent endurance on the German stage is mapped here through the responses of performances to particular political, social, and cultural milestones, from the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolution of 1848 to the Third Reich, the new political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. Images of ancient Greece which were prevalent in the productions of these different eras are examined closely: the Nazi's proclamation of a racial kinship between the Greeks and the Germans; the politicization of performances of Greek tragedies since the 1960s and 1970s, emblematized by Marcuse's notion of a cultural revolution; the protest choruses of the GDR and the subsequent new genre of choric theatre in unified Germany. By examining these images and performances in relation to their respective socio-cultural contexts, the volume sheds light on how, in a constantly changing political and cultural climate, performances of Greek tragedies helped affirm, destabilize, re-stabilize, and transform the cultural identity of the educated middle class over a volatile two hundred year period.