...Peter Knight New German Critique, Inc. 2008 Outrageous Conspiracy Theories: Popular and Offi cial Responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United States Peter Knight Opinion polls conducted in Germany in 2003...

... published Pfarrerblock 25487 (The Priests’ Block 25487), a diary-like account of his camp experiences, including his strange nine-day “furlough.”1 The offi cial reason for his temporary release was the death of his mother, but it was also used as an opportunity to ask him to collaborate...

... experience of diffi culty in the era of reconstruction and setbacks. His portrayal of Steinert thus provided a concrete enactment of Brechtʼs public critique in a 1953 speech to the Academy of Arts of the apparent preference of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) for superfi cial optimism...

... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Eva Horn Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Postwar United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Timothy Melley Outrageous Conspiracy Theories: Popular and Offi cial Responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United States . . . . . . . . 165...

... of German culture, the offi cial literary-theoretical position on heritage posited the bourgeois classical heritage, in form and, to a certain extent, in content, as the prehistory of contemporary socialist art, implying a continuity rather than a rupture in the transition to the social- ist state...

..., irony, and not a little hauteur. It would be the unoffi cial organ of established society, a publication for those eager for a collective repudiation of piety and provincialism and attracted to its taste and discrim- ination. Ross’s 1924 prospectus to potential subscribers and investors com...

... the fascist personality.2 But concern with sex was not just limited to subconscious processes during the Third Reich. Tor- sten Reters, building on the work of Hans Dieter Schäfer and others, presents a thorough study of the offi cial discourses surrounding heterosexual relations under the Nazis...

... of “researchers” or believers.10 Because they exist outside institutionally respectable or academic knowledge but in a uni- verse parallel to it, such subcultures derive status from their marginality— they thrive on offi cial condemnation. Conspiracy theory is also one of the most powerful genres of fic...

... whimsical or superfi cial, they are nonethe- less marginal and dispersed and therefore do not add up to a Theorie des Kriminalromans. Indeed, critical attention to this fi gure in Benjamin rarely goes farther than a nod to its existence, so that, to date, only a few article- length studies focus...

... with collaborationist authors in France like Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet. This would make this Max Aue into an artifi cial character, a per- fectly unhistorical fi gure, according to historian Peter Schöttler. One would, in other words, blame the author of this novel of having produced an artifi...

... that make up the image are rendered invisible by the totality of the image itself—as completely independent of the individuals that live in it and to explore it as “a whole, in a body of offi cials, which as such consists of a defi - nite ordering of ‘positions,’ of preordination of performances, which...

... of travel cultures. Rudy Koshar’s seminal study of the history of German tourist guidebooks offers valuable discussions on Baede- ker, as well as Nazi tourist sites and West Germany.8 Koshar’s history is cru- cial in revealing the tensions and con³icts within the middle-class Bildungs- reise, which...

... like Beethoven,” Adorno observed, “but one must think as he composed.”2 Both music scholars and philosophers have long been aware of this spe- cial relationship in Adorno’s thinking. Early work on Adorno, above all Mar- tin Jay’s short but influential monograph Adorno (1984), shows...

... projects and turned this insight (originally con- nected to communism) toward understanding fascism as well. The idea of fas- cism as a cultural synthesis that informed his early work grasped how culture can hold opposites in tension, thus satisfying conflicting needs—again, a cru- cial point for me...

... Bauingenieure und die Brücken” (PhD diss., Technische Universität Darmstadt, 2007), has not been published yet. 12 Remigration: Postponed Deutsche Architekten: “Even if Bonatz’s interaction with the party offi cials was said to have been often characterized by ironic distance, he nevertheless...

... Cosmopolitanism,” European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 209–20, where I suggest that in his “Idea of a Universal History” Kant, despite his offi cial line of argument, intimates something like Benjamin’s aesthetics of shock. 14. Wellmer, “Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,” 97. 15. Walter Benjamin...

... of urbanization and industrialization. In addition, modernisms in Europe diverged politically in signifi cant ways. Before World War II there was a fascist modernism, especially in Italy; a communist mod- ernism on the margins of offi cial Soviet culture; and a liberal modernism incorporated...

..., if it is to have sacrifi cial effi cacy. But human language has long since surrendered its superhuman man- date in this regard. From a theological perspective, literature is the drawn- out reaction to this loss of divinely authoritative language. The absence of transcendence, among the earliest reproaches...

... individual.10 His vision of modernity was one in which progress, the benefi cial results of 8. Eric Weitz discusses what he sees as the fragmentary nature of Weimar politics, society, and culture in Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 9...

... uses to describe the postreunifi cation period after 1990 (and not only in Germany): “There is nothing left but superfi cial processes behind which nothing is happening. This is what is new: All the substance is gone. . . . Projection, imagination, the idea of an alternative reality...