Geistes- und Ideengeschichte
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The newly emerging historical scholarship on the era ›after the boom‹, on the marketization of societies in the wake of the neoliberal political reforms, deregulation, and privatization starting in the 1970s, has emphasized this threshold as an epochal break that was driven by large-scale structural shifts in the global economy, in social relations, and in cultural identities. This new accentuation of the economic and social transformation has, for good reason, eclipsed older historical traditions that focused on events, discourses, specific interests, and individual actors. The marketization of social relations is thus often considered to be the result of processes beyond the reach and scope of purposeful actors that promoted specific societal changes. While this historical focus is quite right in denying independent causal status to specific agents and the self-aggrandizement of vain leaders and their intellectual entourage, it tends to obscure the historical genesis of ideas and concepts that later became critical components of political leadership, and the specific constellations of interests, knowledge and actors that did prefigure and originally promote the marketization of economic and political institutions.
The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) is widely considered to be one of the most important books which facilitated the ‘spatial turn’ in social and cultural theory by introducing space, as an interpretative concept, into sociological, political, economic, historical and cultural analysis. This reorientation was the programmatic objective of this book which aimed to relate and define ‘all possible spaces, whether abstract or real, mental or social’ (p. 299), and thus account for a wide range of spaces, from those of the body to those of the planet.
Moderne (english version)
(2018)
The word Moderne (modernity) has been a staple of many disciplines ever since the 1980s, though previously restricted almost exclusively to the fields of aesthetics and literary criticism (and referred to here in English as “modernism”). The term can have a variety of meanings, however, depending on its context.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, specifically of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. There can be no doubt that the Reformation had a profound and long-term impact on European civilization. Will there be agreement 400 years from now that Lenin’s April Theses precipitated an event of world-historical significance?
How have Jewish intellectuals reflected on the German language both in relation to and in the aftermath of the ›catastrophe‹? This essay explores one perspective, that of H.G. Adler (Prague, 1910 – London, 1988), a scholar, author, and survivor of the Shoah. Adler’s relationship to and reflections on the German language offer insights into the experience of persecution and survival as well as into the memory and representation of the Holocaust. His vast body of work testifies to both the possibility and the necessity of writing ›after Auschwitz‹, and indeed to the necessity of writing in German after the Holocaust. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two satellite camps of Buchenwald (Niederorschel and Langenstein-Zwieberge), Adler went on to write in various forms, from the analytic to the poetic, about National Socialism, antisemitism, and life and death in the concentration and extermination camp system. His scholarly work made an important contribution to establishing the international and interdisciplinary field of Holocaust Studies, and his poetry and novels bear witness to his own personal experiences in the camps, albeit not in a directly autobiographical form.
This article explores the connection between genocide, language and language consciousness by tracing the strange biography of one Yiddish neologism: shabreven. During the Holocaust, the word came to mean both ›looting‹ and ›taking ownerless property‹. It stoked moral and etymological debate among Yiddish speakers in the Warsaw ghetto, while also occupying a prominent position in postwar Polish and Zionist discourses. The term shifted between different semantic, ethical and cultural fields, navigating a delicate balance between various meanings and norms. The discussions around this term help to shed light on key questions: What were the motivations for the study of Holocaust Yiddish neologisms? How did this early postwar Yiddish philological discourse differ from its parallel in German? Shabreven became both a symbol of the genocidal collapse of language and a tool for regaining victim agency in speech.
What have been the contributions of social memory studies to the discourse of German history, particularly about the Nazi past? This essay seeks to distinguish between the memory boom in politics and culture and the more durable insights of social theory and historiography about memory, including insights about this memory boom itself. In particular, it explores mythologies of ‘turning points’ in the discourse of memory, arguing that the attribution of such turning points is often overstated. To be sure, 1989 did mark significant ruptures. But comparing present debates to the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) of the mid-1980s, and the Historikerstreit to earlier debates shows that as much has stayed the same as has changed. We remember not just the Nazi past, but the previous ways in which we have remembered the Nazi past, and our mnemonic practices are as much comments on earlier practices as on the event itself.