In Times of Crisis : Essays on European Culture, Germans and Jews.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aschheim, Steven E., 1942- Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Germany--Intellectual life.

Jews.

Jews--Intellectual life--Europe.

Jews--Cultural assimilation--Germany.

Jews--Cultural assimilation--Europe.

Antisemitism--Germany.

Antisemitism.

Antisemitism--Europe.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (281 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison, WI, USA University of Wisconsin Press 20010201

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience produced some of the West's most powerful and enduring intellectual creations-and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, our century's darkest genocidal moments. In Times of Crisis explores the flashpoints of this vexed relationship, mapping the coordinates of a complex triangular encounter of immense historical import. In essays that range from the question of Nietzsche's legacy to the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the distinguished historian Steven E. Aschheim presents this encounter as an ongoing dialogue between two evolving cultural identities. He touches on past dimensions of this exchange (such as the politics of Weimar Germany) and on present dilemmas of grasping and representing it (such as the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust). His work inevitably traces the roots and ramifications of Nazism but at the same time brings into focus historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Holocaust. These essays reveal the ubiquitous charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and illuminate the projects of some later thinkers and historians-from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander-who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its essence. From the broadly historical to the personal, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the experience of growing up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays expand our understanding of German Jewish history in particular, but also of historical processes in general.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Preface

Part I: The Crisis of Culture-Then and Now

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration

2. Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today: A Historian's Perspective

3. Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of Liberal-Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory

4. Nazism and the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture

Part II: (Con)Fusions of Identity-Germans and Jews

5. Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa

6. Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of Moritz Goldstein

7. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

8. German History and German Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries, and Interdependencies

9. Archetypes and the German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair

Part III: Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust: Competing Models and Radical Paradigms

10. Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg

11. Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil

12. Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen

Part IV: Historians, History, and the Holocaust

13. Reconceiving the Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

14. George Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio

15. On Saul Friedlander

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

9786612268960

9781282268968

1282268961

9780299168636

0299168638

OCLC:

49857471