The phrase fin de si?cle conjures up images of artistic
experimentation and political decadence. The contributors to this
volume argue that Wilhelmine Germany -- best known for its
industrial and military muscle -- also shared these traits. Their
essays look back to the years between 1885 and 1914 to find in
Germany a mixture of sociopolitical malaise and experimental
exhilaration that was similar in many ways to the better-known
cases of France and Austria.
Revising the view that the German Second Reich was merely a
precursor to the Third, this broad-scoped study presents pre--World
War I Germany in its own fascinating and often contradictory terms.
The foundations of the antiliberal passions that would plague the
Weimar Republic are evident, but Wilhelmine society also had a
lighter, more playful and moderate spirit, one that was largely
extinguished by the Great War.
Blending social, cultural, and intellectual history, the
contributors -- a distinguished cross-section of older and younger
scholars -- trace changing German views on liberalism, penal
reform, race, women, art, popular culture, and technology. They
juxtapose better-known figures such as Max Weber, Thomas Mann, and
Martin Heidegger with now-forgotten individuals like the Jewish
feminist novelist Grete Meisel-Hess and the iconoclastic Swiss
painter Arnold B?cklin. Their essay topics range from the esoteric
and erotic poetry of Stefan George to the Jewish comedy of the
Herrnfeld Theater. "Modernity" is examined from the perspectives of
bourgeois cinema-goers and judicial reformers, as well as from the
viewpoint of Carl Jung. The result is a variegated picture of an
unsettled world, rich in its innovations, ambitious in its
undertakings, and often apocalyptic in its dreams.
General
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