Jost Hermand

The terms Heimat, nation, or fatherland have had such controversial histories that they elude all attempts at a one-dimensional definition. Over the course of modern German history, Heimat has come to mean virtually anything: a romantic nostalgia for preindustrial conditions; a conservative emphasis on various attributes; a feeling of ecological responsibility for a particular region; an aversion for the ugliness brought about by industry; a glorification of the German peasantry as the wellspring of national health; and much more. The contributions to this volume critically examine selected aspects of these concepts, including eighteenth-century patriotism, attitudes of German-Americans, German-Jewish understanding of Heimat, the Heimatschutz movement, Nazi appropriations of history, the Heimat film, Heidegger's and Adorno's notions of Heimat, and German geopolitics.

"The meaning of "culture" today has expanded to include almost everything that surrounds people in their daily life, but today's usage would have baffled the influential ideological opinion makers of the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1933 and 1945 most members of all three groups--the Nazi fascists, Inner Emigration, and Exile--fought with equal fervor over who could definitively claim to represent the authentically "great German culture," as it was culture that imparted real value to both the state and the individual. But when authorities made pronouncements about "culture" were they really talking about high art? This book analyzes the highly complex interconnections among the cultural-political concepts of these various ideological groups and asks why the most artistically ambitious art forms were viewed as politically important by all cultured (or even semi-cultured) Germans in the period from 1933 to 1945, their ownership the object of a bitter struggle between key figures in the Nazi fascist regime, representatives of Inner Emigration, and Germans driven out of the Third Reich. Jost Hermand is Vilas Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has been visiting professor at Austin (Texas), Harvard, Berlin, Bremen, Marburg, Giessen, Kassel, Essen, Freiburg, Oldenburg, Potsdam, and Munich. He is an ACLS Fellow, recipient of the Hilldale Award for Academic Excellence, fellow of the Vienna Academy, member of the Saxon Academy in Leipzig, and holds an honorary PhD from the University of Kassel. His research and teaching encompass German literature and culture since 1750, with special emphasis on democratic traditions, German-Jewish relations, fascism, and Germany after 1945, as well as on schools of criticism and a comparative arts approach to German culture."--Publisher's website.

This volume collects the papers presented at a conference that took place in Berkeley, California, in October 1997 in honor of Heinrich Heine's two-hundredth birthday. The theme of that conference was Heine's identity, which was formed and reformed, revised and modified, in relationship to the politics, religion, and nationalism of his era. Several speakers focused on Heine's Jewish identity and most contributions touched on his relationship to the politics of his era. The resulting essays offer a more differentiated understanding of Heine's predicaments and choices, as well as the parameters placed on him by the exigencies of the time. What this volume therefore achieves is not a radically new vision of Heine, but one that recognizes the ambivalences and vacillations, as well as the development and consistency, of his complex identity.

Between 1933 and 1945, millions of German children between the ages of seven and sixteen were taken from their homes and sent to Hitler Youth paramilitary camps to be toughened up and taught how to be "German." Separated from their families and sent to far-away away places like Denmark, Latvia, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and occupied Poland, these children often endured incredible abuse by the adults in charge. In this memoir, Jost Hermand, a distinguished German cultural critic and historian who spent much of his youth in five different camps, writes about his experiences during this period. After reviewing what others have published about the camps and explaining why previous romanticized views must be corrected, Hermand provides background into the creation and development of the camps. He then devotes one chapter apiece to each of the five different camps to which he was sent: Kirchenpopowo, San Remo, Gross Ottingen, Silesia, and Sulmierschutz. Each was quite different from the other, he writes, and almost every form of behavior existed at each place.The children did sometimes find, with certain adults, parental solicitude, belief in the inherent goodness of human beings, and naive idealism, but by and large they encountered fascistic indoctrination, dreary routine, conscious brutalization, and the worst sort of sadism. In the two final chapters, Hermand focuses on the postwar consequences of his camp experiences for his own development, and his return visit in 1991 to some of the sites. In these chapters, as in the rest of the book, Hermand carefully and skillfully combines his personal story with an analysis of the overall purpose of the camps. An intelligent and persuasive document, this book should be read by anyone interested in psychology, the history of everyday life, and in the story of Germany under Hitler.

Old Dreams of a New Reich, the translation of Jost Hermand's comprehensive study of prefascist and fascist utopias (Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich), examines tracts and futuristic novels crucial to the development and final radicalization of German national sentiments from the second part of the eighteenth century. Scholars and propagandists used the glorified virtues of ancient German tribes to create the cult of Germanic values. These works offer a vivid insight into the public imagination between 1871 and 1945, and into the highly successful media machinations employed by the Right as it used all literary genres - including avant-gardistic works as well as pulp novels and works of science fiction - to manipulate the general public.

This volume contains the contributions to the Twenty-Ninth Wisconsin Workshop on "Concepts of Culture." Culture studies in the United States have arrived at a turning point. There is a clear orientation toward solidification on the one hand and to self-clarification on the other. Throughout the exciting debates at the Workshop it became clear that culture studies cannot be reduced to a quest for identity or an inconceivable "Other." It has also become clear, however, that declarations of the end of the "revolution," in order to do (new) business as usual, do not hit the mark either. In nine essays, German studies scholars help to show the state of the discipline and its problematic ambitions.