Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Amsterdamer Beitrage Zur Neueren Germanistik, 79)

This volume illuminates the vexed treatment of violence in the German cultural tradition between two crucial, and radically different, violent outbreaks: the French Revolution, and the Holocaust and Second World War. The contributions undermine the notion of violence as an intermittent or random visitor in the imagination and critical theory of modern German culture. Instead, they make a case for violence in its many manifestations as constitutive for modern theories of art, politics, identity, and agency. While the contributions elucidate trends in theories of violence leading up to the Holocaust, they also provide a genealogy of the stakes involved in ongoing discussions of the legitimate uses of violence, and of state, individual, and collective agency in its perpetration. The chapters engage the theorization of violence through analysis of cultural products, including literature, museum planning, film, and critical theory. This collection will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Gender Studies, History, Museum Studies, and beyond. Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction. Violence, Culture, Aesthetics: Germany 1789–1938 I. The Other Side of Modernity: War and the French Revolution Sara’s Pain: The French Revolution in Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf (1795–1796) The Father in Fatherland: Violent Ideology and Corporeal Paternity in Kleist Fractured Histories: Heine’s Responses to Violence and Revolution II. Imagining the Primitive; the Return of the Repressed The Curse of Enthusiasm: William Lovell and Modern Violence Communion at the Sign of the Wild Man Constructing the Fascist Subject: Violence, Gender, and Sexuality in Ödön von Horváth’s Jugend ohne Gott III. Violence in the Age of Globalization; German Culture and Its Others From the Emancipation of the Jews to the Emancipation from the Jews: On the Rhetoric, Power and Violence of German-Jewish “Dialogue” The Negro Who Disappeared: Race in Kafka’s Amerika Performing Violence: Joe May’s Indian Tomb (1921) IV. Modernism, Modernization, and Representation The Violence of the Aesthetic Montage and Violence in Weimar Culture: Kurt Schwitters’ Reassembled Individuals Preserving the Bloody Remains: Legacies of Violence in Austria’s Heeresgeschichtliches Museum Index