Speculations on German History: Culture and the State (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Speculations on German History: Culture and the State (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Barry Emslie

Language: English

Pages: 257

ISBN: B01BOGSBTK

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


German history never loses its fascination. It is exceptionally varied, contradictory, and raises difficult problems for the historian. In a material sense, there have been a great many Germanies, so that it was long unclear what""Germany"" would amount to geopolitically, while German intellectuals fought constantly over the idea(s) of Germany. Provocative and spiced with humor, Speculations tackles Germany's successes and catastrophes in view of this fraught relationship between material reality and ideology. Concentrating on the period from Friedrich the Great until today, the book is less a conventional history than an extended essay. It moves freely within the chosenperiod, and because of its cultural studies disposition, devotes a great deal of attention to German writers, artists, and intellectuals. It looks at the ways in which German historians have attempted to come to terms with theirown varying notions of nation, culture, and race. An underlying philosophical assumption is that history is not one dominant narrative but a struggle between competing, simultaneous narratives: like all those Germanies of thepast and of the mind, history is plural. Barry Emslie pursues this agenda into the present, arguing that there has been an unprecedented qualitative change in the Federal Republic in the quarter-century since unification.Barry Emslie lives and teaches in Berlin. He is the author of Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Boydell Press, 2010) and Narrative and Truth: An Ethical and Dynamic Paradigm for the Humanities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

as a “lofty song of revenge,” which is surely odd terminology, but it underlines the extent to which something new and hostile to the immediate past is being created out of the deep history of the German Volk.184 And it is an apposite irony that you are going to come across far more glowing passages on Shakespeare in the German histories than one would in a standard English/British history. His works were performed routinely in eighteenth-century Germany and they were all duly and quickly

Friedrich Jahn’s gymnastic clubs, an immediate ideological presence. It was a perpetual theme in the plethora of magazines and journals that had grown up, despite the censorship. (Not surprisingly the abolition of the censorship was a key demand of the revolutionaries of 1848.) Meanwhile the general public would crowd into the lecture halls of Berlin’s university to listen to the leading intellectuals interpret the great questions of German history and Germany and Prussia’s future. Major

Furthermore, although Treitschke denies himself the pleasure of recounting the triumphs of his immediate heroes, he can, very much in the style of Macaulay, take the opportunity of a passing character portrayal of the future emperor when he was but a prince and second in line to the throne. That is, whereas Macaulay has ample opportunity to praise William of Orange throughout his five volumes, Treitschke can in all justice allow himself only occasional flourishes about the privileged monarch.

given them good reason to drink deeply when and if they had the opportunity), or are we merely being asked to consider an objective historical development that leaves blame (somewhat astonishingly) out of the equation? Whatever the case, it is an uncomfortable observation to come across, although, in all fairness, it does remind one of Einstein’s advice to Rathenau in the early 1920s not to take up the position of foreign minister because it is dangerous when a Jew becomes prominent.318 Given

that it presumably ignores or contaminates. That is, the postwar reaction is not a continuation of Adorno’s rank snobbery toward jazz and popular culture that colors his contributions to The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944). Rather he argues that the great German artists and thinkers from Kant onward are the progenitors and carriers of just that disease that Meinecke imagines they will cure. It is true that Adorno will make a partial exception of Beethoven. He is, like a great many German

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