German Language, Literature, and Culture

"In the history of German cinema, film directors have developed unique visual and narrative responses to the anxieties and excesses of their own times and those of Germany’s past. German Cinema is the first English-language volume to provide a comprehensive historical overview of German film from the silent era to the present, as well as close readings of individual films."

"Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars."

"This collection of essays by leading German scholars from Britain, Germany, and the United States covers German literature, culture, and politics from the Middle Ages to the present day. Literary analysis is combined with approaches derived from sociology and cultural studies; historical assessment of literature and writers is accompanied by close linguistic criticism of texts. Essays on intellectual history, the continuing impact of the Third Reich on literature, parody, the tension between high and low literature, and the special case of cultural production, including fine art, in the former German Democratic Republic are balanced with discussion of the impact of dictatorship and Anglo-Saxon Liberalism on German society, the revival of Jewry since 1945, and the legacy of "1968" on contemporary German Politics. The result is a fascinating, if electic, introduction to the vitality and richness of university German studies on the threshold of the new millennium."

"The German-speaking world has spawned some of the most extreme contrasts between products of culture--the endlessly fascinating, if clichéd, Beethoven-Hitler dichotomy--and thus provokes compelling questions about culture and identity. A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies is an invitation to explore the rapidly expanding scholarship in cultural studies within the German context. This collection brings together more than twenty-five essays from top-notch scholars and astute cultural critics who examine diverse questions in both broad outlines and specific instances. A literary scholar investigates multiculturalism in German literature; a political scientist asks which past Germans live with after reunification; a historian studies the revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829; a journalist wonders how we learn to stop hating the Germans."

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"This text offers an account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialization. Chapters trace developments in culture, including national identity, minorities and women, Jews in German society and the functions of folk and mass culture."

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"The Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture brings together myriad strands of social, political and cultural life in the post-1945 German-speaking world. With a unique structure and format, an inclusive treatment of the concept of culture, and coverage of East, West and post-unification Germany, as well as Austria and Switzerland, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture is the first reference work of its kind."

Link leads to ebook version available with Butler University credentials.

"Representations of German Identity examines the multi-faceted nature of German identity through the lens of myriad forms of visual representation. The contributors explore the nature of German national identity in different historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present and consider how conceptions of that identity have been depicted across the broad spectrum of visual culture: from painting to sculpture, advertising to architecture, television and film to installation art."

Link leads to ebook version available with Butler University credentials.

"German Film after Germany focuses on the film industry of Germany, one of Europe's largest film markets and one of the world's largest film-producing nations. This book balances film politics and film aesthetics, tracing transformations in financing along with analyzes of particular films to describe the effects on the film object itself."

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"In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker."