Journal of European Studies articles from December 1997

Journal of European Studies archives from December 1997

German literature and the scientific world-view in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
December 1, 1997... In 1975, Martin Selge wrote that in his opinion the history of the relationship between science and literature had yet to be written.(1) Selge's statement is still true today, in spite of some admirable contributions to the study of science and...

Idioms for the unrepresentable: post-war fiction and the Shoah.
December 1, 1997... 'If art persists it is entirely different, outside of taste, devoted to delivering and liberating this nothing.' J-F. Lyotard, Heidegger and 'the jews' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 44. 'Philosophical reflection and...

Jacob Burckhardt and nineteenth-century realist art. (Swiss historian in the 19th century)
December 1, 1997... Although the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) is best remembered today for his innovative cultural histories, his reputation during his lifetime derived in large part from his distinguished work in the field of art...

A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy: 1701-1800.
December 1, 1997... Just weeks before I got round to writing this review, I was making a modest circuit from Milan, via Bergamo, Mantua, Parma, and Verona. My Little Tour's epicentre was Gargnano on Lake Garda, where I attended a conference on Petrine Russia and...

Studying British Cultures: An Introduction.
December 1, 1997... Central to the discipline of cultural studies, at least in its initial form, was the idea of a great conspiracy. Its official founding fathers, enumerated by Susan Bassnett in her Introduction to Studying British Culture, were all men of the...

Roland Barthes.
December 1, 1997... Central to the discipline of cultural studies, at least in its initial form, was the idea of a great conspiracy. Its official founding fathers, enumerated by Susan Bassnett in her Introduction to Studying British Culture, were all men of the...

The French in Love and War: Popular Culture in the Era of the World Wars.
December 1, 1997... Central to the discipline of cultural studies, at least in its initial form, was the idea of a great conspiracy. Its official founding fathers, enumerated by Susan Bassnett in her Introduction to Studying British Culture, were all men of the...

Pierre Courtade: The Making of a Party Scribe.
December 1, 1997... Pierre Courtade (1915-1963) wrote six novels (two unpublished), two volumes of short stories, half a dozen political essays and an immense number of articles (said by Flower to run into thousands), principally for the communist press. The larger...

Les Enfants du Paradis.
December 1, 1997... This entry in the series of brief studies of great 'Film Classics' published by the British Film Institute deals with what the author calls - quoting, with obvious approval, an earlier assessment - 'the greatest film ever made' (p. 9). In...

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of the French Culture.
December 1, 1997... The speed of French post-war modernization is the key theme of this book, which focuses on the period from the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the Evian accords in May 1962 officially announcing Algeria's independence. The author...

Engagierter Journalismus: Wilhelm Herzog und 'Das Forum,' 1914-1929.
December 1, 1997... Wilhelm Herzog (1888-1960) is one of the dozen or so major literary-political entrepreneurs who were active in Germany between 1900 and 1933, whose papers went wholly or largely missing during the Nazi period, and who are now being rediscovered...

Marchen und Moderne: Fallbeispiele einer intertextuellen Relation.
December 1, 1997... Recent years have seen an expansion of scholarly interest in the Marchen of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, there remains a lack of book-length publications on this topic and thus this volume is of immediate interest. According to the editor,...

The Ironic Dissident: Frank Wedekind in the View of His Critics.
December 1, 1997... It has become a sad cliche to start articles on Wedekind by lamenting the sorry state of research about him. Although with new editions by Vincon and the impressive 1996 bibliography by Jones and Shaw, Wedekind can now be brought 'into sharper...

Lukacs After Communism: Interviews with Contemporary Intellectuals.
December 1, 1997... Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of a business class (or at least a mafia) in former Eastern bloc states, why read Lukacs today? Moreover, why was he ever read at all, and what...

German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 1.
December 1, 1997... This is the first of four projected volumes of a history of the Jews of German-speaking Europe sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute under the general editorship of Michael A. Meyer. The project aims to provide both a history of Jewish life (its...

The Practical Imagination. The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century.
December 1, 1997... Leonard Krieger once defined the central strand in the German political tradition from the sixteenth century onwards as the absorption by successive generations of the various claims to human freedom into the structure of monarchical government...

National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918-1922.
December 1, 1997... One of the most intriguing aspects of the Peace of Versailles was the stipulation that plebiscites should be held under the administration of international commissions in certain border areas to determine whether they should remain German or be...

Why Hitler? The Genesis of the Nazi Reich.
December 1, 1997... This book is ill-served by its dust-jacket. We are promised an answer to the question of why 'the Germans - a people who produced Goethe, Bach, Schiller and Beethoven' - elected Hitler chancellor of Germany. This is billed as 'the whole sordid...

Elfriede Scholz, geb. Remark. Im Namen des deutschen Volkes. Dokumente einer justitiellen Ermordung.
December 1, 1997... It is a commonplace that the fate of a single human being can make more impact than the collective fate of many: Anne Frank's personality has an impact that statistics do not have. This volume presents the story of a different but also...

The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm.
December 1, 1997... 'No Evidence of Murder. No Motive for Suicide. The Mystery is complete.' Thus did the French newspaper Le Journal headline its report of the death of two German political refugees, the former SPD Reichstag deputy Mathilde Wurm and the writer and...

Germany in Europe in the Nineties.
December 1, 1997... In June 1994 Chancellor Kohl explained the German dilemma as follows: 'Because Germany has most neighbours, has most inhabitants, has the strongest economy, has the most industrious people and further is best organized' she is 'not necessarily...

Understanding Contemporary Germany.
December 1, 1997... Stuart Parkes has produced an excellent guide to contemporary Germany. His account stands out among the many that are currently available both for its balance and clarity and for the unusual range of topics considered. In addition to extremely...

The Body and Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg's 'Meditations.'
December 1, 1997... This is an irritating book on many counts, not least because the title is misleading. (It is 'based on' a dissertation entitled, more accurately: 'Physicality and Women's Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg's "Andachtige...

Critical Approaches to Goethe's Classical Dramas: 'Iphigenie,' 'Torquato Tasso,' and 'Die Naturliche Tochter.'
December 1, 1997... Irmgard Wagner's book is another very welcome addition to a now established and growing series. It is a lucid and lively account of the criticism of Goethe's classical plays and does all the spadework for anyone still bold enough to enter the...

Essays on Goethe.
December 1, 1997... Irmgard Wagner's book is another very welcome addition to a now established and growing series. It is a lucid and lively account of the criticism of Goethe's classical plays and does all the spadework for anyone still bold enough to enter the...

Tracing Subversive Currents in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
December 1, 1997... Any study of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre which sets itself against the dominant interpretative model of the Bildungsroman is treading on dangerous ground indeed. But John Blair insists 'one must actively work against its perceptual implications to...

Oskar Wilde in Deutschland und Osterreich: Untersuchungen zur Rezeption der Komodien und zur Theorie der Buhnenubersetzung.
December 1, 1997... Whatever one thinks about Post-modernism as a global concept, it has taught us many lessons, one of which is that any given text has multiple meanings. This particularly applies to plays, where texts may have to be filtered through the minds of...

Entre critique et rire: 'Le Disparu' de Franz Kafka. Kafkas Roman 'Der Verschollene.' Actes du colloque international de montpelier 10-11 janvier 1997.
December 1, 1997... This handsomely produced book contains fourteen articles on Kafka's first novel, Der Verschollene, originally published by his friend and executor, Max Brod, under the title Amerika. The volume is divided into three sections: 'Kafka 1912', the...

Shadow Lines: Austrian Literature from Freud to Kafka.
December 1, 1997... The fin-de-siecle exerts an enduring fascination. The particular form the phenomenon took in the Austria of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has come to be seen as a paradigm, where the cultural historical anxieties and...

Russian Society and the Greek Revolution.
December 1, 1997... Tsar Alexander I resolved the dilemma which the Greek crisis of 1821 presented to Russia's Orthodox sensibilities by opting to uphold the Concert of Europe and Metternichean order: any fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire along ethnic or religious...

An Ethnic History of Russia: Pre-Revolutionary Times to the Present.
December 1, 1997... Soviet policies fostered Russia's national diversity, at the level of folk culture, whilst maintaining tight political control over any ambitions towards national self-determination. Statistics about the different languages and ethnic groups...

Stalinism and Nazism.
December 1, 1997... This collection of 13 essays is the belated product of a conference, principally organized by Moshe Lewin, which took place in September 1991. Whilst the conference sought to explore the similarities and differences in development of Russia and...