...Friedrich Kittler; Geoffrey Winthrop-Young The essay presents a reading of three war-related texts: Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell , Heinrich von Kleist’s The Battle of Hermann , and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow . Written against the background of the Revolutionary Wars and the Prussian...

... Younger Moltke is succeeded by [Erich von] Falkenhayn, who stands in front of his sandbox (an innovation, incidentally, introduced by Heinrich von Kleist’s circle of military friends) and ponders the situation. Ever since the Battle of the Marne, breakthroughs and thrusts, encirclements and annihilation...

... intimate mother/child-relationship were now inscribed into the nation as a whole. Heinrich von Kleist’s Battle of Hermann —a play that reads like a Quentin Tarantino rewrite of Wilhelm Tell —goes a step further by adding the discursive creation of total enmity. The occupation of ancient Germania...