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Customer Reviews (7)

This book is not for beginners.
I actually do like this book, but I would not recommend it to a beginner.

This book is hopeless for beginners in German.
This book is not a first German reader, do not buy it if you are new to German! (Try Asterix comic books in German). To me it's a waste of money, a year ago it was far to too hard to read in German, and now after a year learning German and living in Germany it's still too hard and irrelevant to modern German. The root problem is that it was written in 1964, probably for school German lessons. The material it draws from are very deep and would tax most native English English speakers in English! (e.g. 'Now I am many an hour's distance from that place....', '....descends into the fearful arena....','...man must meet nothing with resolution....' and so on). The corresponding German is equally academic and complex.

If you could learn even some of this German, imagine the laugh when you said in conversation 'Vor dem Handeln, im Handelm hat er alle Ursache, den Versatand beweglich zu erhalten', which in English is 'Before acting, in acting, he has every reason for keeping his intelligence mobile....'.

Good but not perfect for a FIRST german reader.
I don't claim to have great knowledge of the German language, which is why I purchased this book.I was expecting stories at say the middle school range of language. But this is definitely college reading level (in English) and therefore much more difficult than I expect for the German.

Love the concept, but to try and read text from German philosophers (in german) as a FIRST reader, is very challenging.

Ilo

Ein gutes Buch, aber nicht unbedingt fuer Anfaenger geeignet
Wie man schon mehrfach in den anderen Rezensionen beschrieben hat, sind die Texte, wenn auch hoher Qualitaet, recht anspruchsvoll.

Wenn man seine Sprachkenntnisse mit einem heitereren Text vertiefen moechte, empfehle ich das Buch Der, die, was? So lernt man eine Menge ueber die deutsche Sprache und hat viel Spass dabei!

Not a beginner's book!
Although there does appear to be a concise accompanying translation of each item, I would not call this a "beginners" book.The text and language is for the most part esoteric and complicated making translations of little value to the beginner reader.A beginners book is one tht begins with simple langage and concepts and slowly grows in complixity, terminology, tenses, and cases.Such is defintely not the case here.But if you like German literature and/or are at a more advanced stage in your study, then its okay. ... Read more

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This volume of fresh essays by leading scholars develops a new approach to expressionist film. For nearly half a century Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen have shaped the understanding of the cinema of this period. However, fifty years on, there is a growing awareness that a new account is overdue. This attempt to rewrite the story of expressionist cinema begins with a fundamentally new interpretation of Dr. Caligari, and together with fresh views of other expressionist classics, offers new perspectives on important alternative film styles and genres that emerged in films by such eminent directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, Karl Grune, F. W. Murnau, and E. A. Dupont. In pursuing such variety, the book strives for a picture of the cinema in the early years of Weimar that in thematic as well as stylistic terms reflects the vibrant, multifaceted cultural and political developments of the period. The book is a joint venture of the Centre for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. ... Read more

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This volume of sharply focused essays by an international team of scholars deals not only with the most significant literary, philosophical, and cultural aspects of German Romanticism -- one of the most influential, albeit highly controversial movements in the history of German literature -- but also with the history and status of scholarship on the literature of the period. The introduction and first section establish an overall framework by placing German Romanticism within a European context that includes its English counterpart. Goethe and Schiller are considered, as are the Jena Romantics. The second section is organized according to the traditional distinctions between epic, dramatic, and lyric modes of writing, while realizing that particularly in the Romantic novel, there was an attempt to blend these three. A final group of essays focuses on German literary Romanticism's relation to other aspects of German culture: folklore studies, politics, psychology, natural science, gender presentation and representation, music, and visual art. Contributors: Gerhard Schulz, Arnd Bohm, Richard Littlejohns, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Ulrich Scheck, Claudia Stockinger, Bernadette Malinowski, Fabian Lampart, Klaus Peter, Gabriele Rommel, Martha B. Helfer, Kristina Muxfeldt, Beate Allert, Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, Nicholas Saul /I>Dennis F. Mahoney is Professor of German and Director of the European Studies Program at the University of Vermont. ... Read more

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A history of German film dealing with individual films as works of art has long been needed. Existing histories tend to treat cinema as an economic rather than an aesthetic phenomenon; earlier surveys that do engage with individual films do not include films of recent decades. This book treats representative films from the beginnings of German film to the present. Providing historical context through an introduction and interchapters preceding the treatments of each era's films, the volume is suitable for semester- or year-long survey courses and for anyone with an interest in German cinema.BR> The films: The Student of Prague - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - The Last Laugh - Metropolis - The Blue Angel - M - Triumph of the Will - The Great Love - The Murderers are Among Us - Sun Seekers - Trace of Stones - The Legend of Paul and Paula - Solo Sunny - The Bridge - Young Törless - Aguirre, The Wrath of God - Germany in Autumn - The Marriage of Maria Braun - The Tin Drum - Marianne and Juliane - Wings of Desire - Maybe, Maybe Not - Rossini - Run Lola Run - Good Bye Lenin! - Head On - The Lives of Others ... Read more

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Islam has been a rich topic in German-language literature since the middle ages, and the writings about it not only reveal much about Islamic culture but also about the European "home" culture. Many of the early essays in this chronologically arranged volume uncover fresh evidence of how German writers used images of Islam-as-other to define their individual subject positions as well as to define the German nation and the Christian religion. The perspectives of many contemporary writers are, however, far removed from such a polar opposition of cultures. Their experience of the German-Islamic encounter is complicated by a crucial factor: many of them emerge from Muslim migrant communities such as the German-Turkish community. The culturally hybrid origins of these writers and their expression of experiences and ideologies that cross boundaries of East and West, Christendom and Islam, strongly affect the findings of the essays as the volume moves toward the present. The texts discussed include travelogues and other firsthand encounters with Islam; reports for colonial authorities; aesthetic treatises on Islamic art; literary, essayistic, and theological writing on Islamic religious practice; the incorporation of characters, situations, and settings from the Islamic world into fiction or drama; and fictional and autobiographical writing by Muslims in German. ... Read more

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This book of new essays by widely-published scholars from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Austria examines the artistic, social, political, and historical continuities and discontinuities in Viennese literature during the periods around 1900 and 2000. It takes its impetus from the idea that both turns of the century are turning points in the development of Austrian literature and history. The essays show that in both periods literature not only reflects societal conditions and political issues, but also serves to criticize them. Ernst Grabovszki's introduction sets the context of literature in Vienna in 1900 and 2000, and is followed by essays exploring the following topics bearing on the city's literature across the two periods: writing about Vienna (Janet Stewart); art and architecture (Douglas Crow); psychoanalysis and the literature of Vienna (Thomas Paul Bonfiglio); poetry in Vienna from Hofmannsthal to Jandl (Rüdiger Görner); Austrian cinema culture (Willy Riemer); Austrian-Jewish culture (Hillary Hope Herzog and Todd Herzog); Austrian women's writing (Dagmar C. G. Lorenz); Karl Kraus and Robert Menasse as critical observers of their times (Geoffrey C. Howes); and Venice as mediator between the Viennese metropolis and the provinces (John Pizer). The figures treated range from Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, Franz Grillparzer, Joseph Roth, Bertha von Suttner, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach in the earlier fin de siècle to Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, Josef Haslinger, Ernst Jandl, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and Marlene Streeruwitz in the current period. Ernst Grabovszki teaches at the University of Vienna. James Hardin is professor emeritus of German at the University of South Carolina. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Book Prize Winner
Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1924 was a co-winner of the 2003 AAASS/Orbis Books Prize for Polish Studies awarded annually for the most outstanding English-language book
on any aspect of Polish affairs.

The other winner was Jolanta T. Pekacz's Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 (University of Rochester Press).

The Prize committee - Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood, Andrzej Tymowski, and Halina Filipowicz - wrote the following about the winning volumes:

Both books are exemplary monographs based on meticulous archival research. Both provide an important point of entry for exploring a lost symbolic world in a rather out-of-the-way place, at least in geopolitical terms: the multiethnic province of Galicia in the Habsburg Monarchy. Ezra Mendelsohn's elegantly written book concentrates on the work of Maurycy Gottlieb, a founding father of modern Jewish art, who was born in a small town known in Polish as Drohobycz, now associated primarily with the internationally acclaimed writer Bruno Schulz. Jolanta T. Pekacz's study addresses an understudied area - popular music genres in nineteenth-century Galicia - within a well-informed historical framework. In examing their topics, both Mendelsohn and Pekacz also tell us much about the multiethnic society of nineteenth-century Galicia - about its social tensions, divisions, and hierarchies, and about about its strength and fragility.

Mendelsohn's and Pekacz's studies not only expand our knowledge and understanding of the social and symbolic world of old Galicia, but they also challenge our tendency to think of culture - any culture - as a static and homogeneous entity (if only to make it possible to talk about it). To do justice to the complexity of their project, both Mendelsohn and Pekacz keep alive several perspectives, chief among them the perspective of cultural studies. They show that, contrary to a common misconception, cultural studies are not primarily concerned with banal populism. They agree that all forms of cultural production need to be studied - not as self-contained and independent entities, knowable apart from their own time and place, but rather in their particular historical contexts. They also agree that the perspective of cultural studies offers fresh insights into the underlying importance of literature and the arts in the formation of national identities.

Ezra Mendelsohn's Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art and Jolanta T. Pekacz's Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 are highly original studies on the cutting-edge of several disciplines: social history, history of ideas, cultural studies, Jewish studies, Polish studies, and Polish Jewish studies. Both books offer the rare intellectual pleasure that goes with disentangling intricate historical patterns behind the mythologized image of Galicia as a land of pride and tears, where good men and women were busy shaking the dead hand of the past.

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A striking feature of today's German literature is the survival of an East German subculture characterized by its authors' self-reflexive concern with their own lives, not only in texts labeled as autobiography but also those in the more ambiguous territory of what Christa Wolf has called "subjective authenticity." Dennis Tate provides the first detailed account of this phenomenon: its origins in the 1930s' exile debates, its evolution during the GDR's lifespan, and its manifestations in the work of five East German authors still widely read today: Brigitte Reimann, Franz Fühmann, Stefan Heym, Günter de Bruyn, and Christa Wolf. Tate shows how the preoccupation with self arose from the unusually turbulent circumstances in which this generation has lived. Having succumbed early to the temptation to simplify their life stories for misguided educational purposes, these authors have repeatedly reconstructed their personal and political identities as their perspectives on the past have shifted. Tate shows the importance of viewing their autobiographical writing as a multilayered historical process, exposing problems with canonical accounts of East German literature and enabling texts published under GDR censorship to be properly appreciated for the first time. ... Read more

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Examines the works of contemporary German writers and the changing contexts of German literature from the 1960s to the 1970s.
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The 13th-century poet who used the pseudonym Der Stricker (The Knitter) is one of the earliest known composers of fables, sermonettes and parables in the German language. This volume contains a collection of The Stricker's short narratives in English translation. ... Read more

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An apparently nomadic diaspora nation of Indian provenance, the Gypsies are present with notable frequency in Germanic literatures from Wolzogen and Brentano to Stifter, Keller, Storm, Raabe, Jensen, Saar and Thomas Mann. Against the background of the still officially unacknowledged Romany Holocaust, Saul analyses in a series of close interpretations the stations of the literary construction of the Gypsy prior to the human disaster. The book's synthesis of scholarship in cultural, social and institutional history, the history of ideas and literary history will appeal to the scholarly community across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and will also serve as a valuable introduction for students from diverse fields. ... Read more

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The beginnings of psychology are usually dated from experimental psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century. Yet the period from 1700 to 1840 produced some highly sophisticated psychological theorising that became central to German intellectual and cultural life, well in advance of similar developments in the English-speaking world. Matthew Bell explores how this happened, by analysing the expressions of psychological theory in Goethe's Faust, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and in the works of Lessing, Schiller, Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann. This study pays special attention to the role of the German literary renaissance of the last third of the eighteenth century in bringing psychological theory into popular consciousness and shaping its transmission to the nineteenth century. All German texts are translated into English, making this fascinating area of European thought fully accessible to English readers for the first time. ... Read more

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For the first time in English, a contemporary and friend of Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig gives us the definitive portrait of a woman lost on the margins of modern life.Aloisia Schmidt is an ordinary secretary with a burning question: am I a redundant human being? She’s neither pretty nor ugly (though she wishes she were hideous: at least that would be something), has no imagination, and is forced to live vicariously through “borrowed” fantasy—fantasy, that is, borrowed from books, plays, even other people’s lives. She loves to hate herself, and loves for other people to hate her too. In one final, guilt-ridden, masturbatory, self-obsessed confession, Aloisia indulges her masochistic tendencies to the fullest, putting her entire life on trial, and trying, through telling her story (a story, she assures us, that’s “so laughably mundane” it’s really no story at all), to transform an ordinary life into something extraordinary. ... Read more

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This new edition of Mary and Henry Garland's classic Oxford Companion to German Literature substantially revises and extends its coverage, making an invaluable reference work available to a new generation of readers. Designed to be a reliable source of information on the whole sweep of literature from German-speaking countries from the eighth century onwards, the Companion now comes right up to the mid-1990s, including such recent works as Gunter Grass's controversial novel about the unification of East and West Germany, Ein weites Feld (1995). The entries, arranged in a single alphabetical sequence, cover authors and their major works, as well as historical, intellectual, and cultural backgrounds. For this new edition much of the original material has been thoroughly reworked in the light of up-to-date scholarship, and many completely new entries have been added, allowing improved coverage of the twentieth century, general topics, and women writers of all periods.

The Companion's unrivalled historical coverage and depth of information--on subjects as various as Kafka and Kleist, Werther and Christa Wolf, Nietzsche and the Nibelungenlied, Jung and Jelinek, Rilke and Die Reformation--makes it an indispensable reference book for everyone with an interest in the literature and literary culture of the German-speaking world. ... Read more

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This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of nineteenth-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. The volume is introduced by essays considering the impact of Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effects of major movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the changing cultural scene. The second section of the book presents overviews of the principal movements of the time (Junges Deutschland, Vormärz, Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. Among the writers discussed are Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Adalbert Stifter, Franz Grillparzer, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Gottfried Keller, Richard Wagner, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gerhart Hauptmann, Theodor Fontane, and Frank Wedekind. The final section of the book provides bibliographical resources in the form of a critical bibliography and list of primary sources. Contributors to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature, culture, and history from North America and Europe: Andrew Webber, Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau, Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer.Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at theUniversity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is associateprofessor of German at the same institution. ... Read more

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At long last a new, readable history of German literature. Each epochof German literature is treated against its historical and sociologicalbackdrop by experts in the literature of that period. Vivian'sConcise History of German Literature to 1900 provides amuch-needed reference work that is clear, incisive, and based on themost recent research here and abroad. It is written in a way intendedto appeal to the general reader, the student (both graduate andundergraduate), and to the German major. Even specialists in Germanliterature will find tidbits of information, connections, and judgmentsthat place aspects of German literary history in a new, informativelight. ... Read more

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The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements. ... Read more