... on ongoing movement, discovery, and exploration. The Life of a Nomad and a World Citizen: Alexander von Humboldt, Nomadic Knowledge, and the Global Landscapes of Theory Ottmar Ette On June 23, 1791, writing in the small German town of Freiberg...

... of Benn’s critical engagement with the modern life sciences, and in particular with the discourses of medicine and psychology. The article focuses on Benn’s so-called Rönne novellas, written between 1914 and 1916, arguing that they record and enact the disintegration of body and subjectivity through...

... a Life of Political Violence: A Neo-Nazi Steigt Aus William Little In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part...

... into the life of the community. ( GLAS , 12:43–44) What is the meaning of this “life of the community”? To be sure, any effort to respond to this question today cannot get around the posthumous echo of the reference to a “gifted, chosen, great one” who is set to bring the “new redeeming message...

... environment in a decrepit Jewish town in eastern Europe but left it behind to travel to Berlin and dedicate his life to philosophy in the tradition of the German enlightenment. Scholem (1897–1982), born a century and a half later to a middle-class acculturated Jewish family in Berlin, left it behind...

... the conceptions of life that come into play in the novel (life as career, life as theater, life as gesture) and considers the fate of the protagonist in this light. Seeing the question of inclusion/exclusion as key to Kafka’s novel, the article argues that it exposes the thin line between utopia and dystopia...

... and the challenge of acting with authenticity in modern life, though rootlessness is neither limited to the twentieth century nor uniquely German. Understood in this way, Arendt's “peculiar biography” of Rahel Varnhagen becomes far more than an idiosyncratic or self-revelatory work; rather, it is an examination...

...Daniel Morgan Miriam Hansen's idea of vernacular modernism explains the global appeal of classical Hollywood cinema by drawing on its affinity with modernist aesthetics. She argues that cinema's modernism is part of a widespread mass culture response to the changing features of modern life...

...Gertrud Koch The article discusses the notion of “experiment” and relates it—via Immanuel Kant's concept of liveliness, which is a central topos of aesthetic experience—to “animation” in film, insofar as both refer to “life sciences.” Drawing on the example of Sergei Eisenstein's poetics...

... the relationship between the people’s god and the earth. Both thinkers also reject the Darwinian concept of the “state as organism” in the new academic study of human geography known as Geopolitik . Both thinkers embrace a neovitalist concept of animal life as it was developed in the work of Jakob von Uexküll...

...Todd Cronan Georg Simmel's sociology tends to elicit mixed feelings even among his admirers. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” provides one of the most compelling and influential accounts of modern, urban experience available, yet the meaning of this work is notoriously elusive. Does the difficulty...

.... This essay confronts Horkheimer and Adorno's argument with the less-celebrated work of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose functionalistic concept of myth as a symbolic form enables him to give detailed philosophical analyses of myth as a long-established form of life and as an artificial weapon...

... and never truly “works,” revealing literature's fragile dimension. Fragility not only addresses the vulnerability of bare human life but conveys the condition of literary and cultural studies, torn between ethical responsibility and the continuous threat to fail in the process. With a genealogical approach...

... in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Men in Dark Times , and The Life of the Mind . Many who discuss her account of forgiveness fail to adequately consider the distinctions and assertions that Arendt makes in her political theory. This article thus challenges a propensity in critical literature...

...Susan H. Gillespie In 1966 Theodor W. Adorno devoted an affectionate essay to his recollections of the provincial Frankish village of Amorbach, where he spent summers as a child and to which he returned in later life. Literally and figuratively, the essay centers on the experience and concept...

...Karen Leeder The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded on the specter of communism; it now haunts contemporary capitalism as unrealized aspiration, trauma, or travesty. This article focuses on the representation of the after-life of the GDR in the work of Volker Braun. It examines...

... understandings and responses. Aschheim imagines an unwritten confrontational, yet also confessional and ultimately conciliatory, letter that a dying Klemperer addresses to Arendt and Scholem, justifying his life path, analyzing their differences, and, surprisingly, arguing that all three figures had values...

... in displaced persons (DP) camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy survived because they had been “deported to life” from parts of Poland that came under Soviet control as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, first in labor camps in the Soviet interior and then, with their release after the German...

...Susannah Heschel From the 1830s to the 1930s Jewish scholars came to dominate Islamic studies in Europe, particularly Germany, Hungary, and France, concentrating primarily on the Qur'an and the life of Muhammad but also painting a broad canvas describing the nature of Islam as a religion...

..., matrix for rethinking the “incomprehensible” in Holocaust representations along a spectrum of genres from memoir and poetry to documentary history. In the wake of emerging research on the “language situation” in the camps, Gramling explores texts that reanimate the multiple-language milieus of camp life...