First published in 1955, with a revised edition appearing five years later, H. G. Adler's Theresienstadt, 1941-1945 is a foundational work in the field of Holocaust studies. As the first scholarly monograph to describe the particulars of a single camp - the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezin - it is the single most detailed and comprehensive account of any concentration camp. Adler, a survivor of the camp, divides the book into three sections: a history of the ghetto, a detailed institutional and social analysis of the camp, and an attempt to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and the victims. A collaborative effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terezin Publishing Project makes this authoritative text on Holocaust history available for the first time in the English language, with a new afterword by the author's son Jeremy Adler.

Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

This is the first collection of Franz Steiner's keynote papers on comparative economics and the classification of labor, complemented by major unpublished texts on politics, civilization, and cultural criticism. This enables a complete re-evaluation of Steiner's thought. His ideas on truth, value, and civilization are highly critical of Western culture and offer perhaps the earliest critique of Orientalism in British anthropology. Equally significant is the inclusion of Steiner's unpublished lectures on Aristotle and Simmel, the latter probably being the first lecture series devoted to Simmel's ideas by a British-based anthropologist, as well as hitherto unedited political writings.

Another side to Steiner's thought is shown by his aphorisms, often caustic texts and newly translated from the German, as well as by verse translations of his poems relevant to his scholarship. These include an extract from his autobiographical poem, "Conquest, " that places his anthropological writings into a personal and ultimately religious framework. A detailed introduction, based on new research, provides a thorough study of Steiner's ideas and establishes the wider intellectual context, thus rounding off a most remarkable collection of texts by one of the most singular anthropologists of this century.

Franz Steiner's study of Taboo is internationally recognized as a classic in its field. In a newly researched introductory chapter, based on a thorough study of Steiner's unpublished papers, this edition for the first time places the book in its context and offers a new reading of the text. More than just a critique of existing taboo theories, as it has often been seen, this study offers a profound analysis of danger behavior and pollution in "non-civilized" societies. This provided an important starting-point for Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger. A key aspect of Steiner's achievement lies in his attempt to reconcile detailed, faithful ethnographic analysis with anthropological comparison. His analysis of taboo thus provides a case study with wide-ranging ramifications.

This new edition makes a classic text available once again to students and general readers. A major new introduction based on archival research offers, for the first time, a biography and critical study of Franz Steiner; it not only places him in the context of British and European thought but also shows his importance for contemporary debates, among them deconstruction and Orientalism.

Jeremy Adler is Professor of German at King's College London and specializes ininterdisciplinary subjects such as literature and science, poetry and painting, literature and anthropology. He is currently preparing a collected edition of Franz Steiner's poetry for the German Academy of Language and Literature, Darmstadt.

Richard Fardon is Professor in West African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and has intensively researched among Chamba-speaking people in Cameroon and Nigeria. He is currently completing an intellectual biography of Mary Douglas.

This is the first collection of Franz Steiner's keynote papers on comparative economics and the classification of labor, complemented by major unpublished texts on politics, civilization, and cultural criticism. This enables a complete re-evaluation of Steiner's thought. His ideas on truth, value, and civilization are highly critical of Western culture and offer perhaps the earliest critique of Orientalism in British anthropology. Equally significant is the inclusion of Steiner's unpublished lectures on Aristotle and Simmel, the latter probably being the first lecture series devoted to Simmel's ideas by a British-based anthropologist, as well as hitherto unedited political writings.

Another side to Steiner's thought is shown by his aphorisms, often caustic texts and newly translated from the German, as well as by verse translations of his poems relevant to his scholarship. These include an extract from his autobiographical poem, "Conquest," that places his anthropological writings into a personal and ultimately religious framework.A detailed introduction, based on new research, provides a thorough study of Steiner's ideas and establishes the wider intellectual context, thus rounding off a most remarkable collection of texts by one of the most remarkable anthropologists of this century.

H.G. Adler (1910–1988) was one of the founding figures of Holocaust scholarship whose monumental monograph Theresienstadt 1941-1945. The Face of a Coerced Community (1955; 1960) was the first study to present a fully documented account of the Final Solution. This collection gathers together, for the first time in English, some of Adler’s most important scholarly essays on the Shoah and connected themes. Ideas raised for the first time in his book on Theresienstadt are here taken up and developed at greater length, new accents are set, and new themes are explored. Spanning his thought across three decades they focus on the fate of the ‘coerced’ human being and reflect on freedom, enslavement, terror, concentration camps, persecution, the mass society, dread, loneliness, and ideology.

One of Germany's greatest poets, Johann Christian Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) was also a prose writer of intense feeling, intelligence and perception. This new translation of selected letters and essays traces the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. Hoelderlin's letters to friends and fellow writers such as Hegel, Schiller and Goethe describe his development as a poet, while those written to his family speak with great passion of his beliefs and aspirations, as well as revealing money worries and, finally, the tragic unravelling of his sanity. These works examine Hoelderlin's great preoccupations - the unity of existence, the relationship between art and nature and, above all, the spirit of the writer.

This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book offers fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all the major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe’s greatest work, Faust. Alongside these works the incidents of his life are analysed, including his love affairs and his meetings with the great people of the age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Jeremy Adler shows how Goethe’s encyclopedic interest in many fields influenced later thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns – a maker of modernity.

Franz Steiner's study of Taboo is internationally recognized as a classic in its field. In a newly researched introductory chapter, based on a thorough study of Steiner's unpublished papers, this edition for the first time places the book in its context and offers a new reading of the text. More than just a critique of existing taboo theories, as it has often been seen, this study offers a profound analysis of danger behavior and pollution in "non-civilized" societies. This provided an important starting-point for Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger. A key aspect of Steiner's achievement lies in his attempt to reconcile detailed, faithful ethnographic analysis with anthropological comparison. His analysis of taboo thus provides a case study with wide-ranging ramifications. This new edition makes a classic text available once again to students and general readers. A major new introduction based on archival research offers, for the first time, a biography and critical study of Franz Steiner; it not only places him in the context of British and European thought but also shows his importance for contemporary debates, among them deconstruction and Orientalism.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe's supreme poets. Although he was scarcely known to his contemporaries and became deeply unstable in the latter part of his life, when he lived in virtual seclusion, he produced, writes Michael Hamburger, a poetic work 'rich in potentialities and possiblities for the "future ages" in which he placed his hope'. Hölderlin first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for Susette Gontard, the wife of a rich banker to whose children he was tutor. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The 'Canticles of Night', by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an utterly unprecedented style which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Throughout his career, he struggled desperately to reconcile his faith in the power of nature, as embodied in the gods of ancient Greece, with conventional Christianity. In this superb bilingual selection, Hamburger has produced the definitive English version of a German literary giant.

The Confusions of Young Torless is a taut, powerful depiction of teenage masculinity in this short novel set in an Austrian military academy. An unpopular boy is gradually bullied and humiliated by a coterie of better-off classmates until the almost unbearable conclusion. This was the work which made Musil's name and is his most popular work before his unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities.

It was E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr, perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century.

Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering ‘magic realist’, fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician Johannes Kreisler. In this astonishing book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer’s error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, The Tomcat Murr is also shot through with the warmth, humanity and almost uncanny ability to captivate his readers which make Hoffmann the greatest of German story tellers.

First published in 1955, with a revised edition appearing five years later, H. G. Adler's Theresienstadt, 1941-1945 is a foundational work in the field of Holocaust studies. As the first scholarly monograph to describe the particulars of a single camp - the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezin - it is the single most detailed and comprehensive account of any concentration camp. Adler, a survivor of the camp, divides the book into three sections: a history of the ghetto, a detailed institutional and social analysis of the camp, and an attempt to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and the victims. A collaborative effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terezin Publishing Project makes this authoritative text on Holocaust history available for the first time in the English language, with a new afterword by the author's son Jeremy Adler.

This volume assembles thirteen essays by two of the greatest British Germanists, Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby. The essays are presented chronologically from 1942 to 1969 and offer extraordinary insights into Goethe's works and Schiller's aesthetics. They demonstrate the ways in which and the extent to which Wilkinson and Willoughby in their thirty-five years of collaboration reshaped the study of Goethe and Schiller in the United Kingdom with their combination of critical intelligence, historical awareness and literary panache. These essays are fresh and immediate - not simply because Wilkinson and Willoughby wrote so well, but also because their arguments have much to contribute to literary studies in the present Age of Theory. By their analyses they show how Goethe and Schiller provide us with intellectual models and an understanding of the importance of art for life. 'Wholeness' is the key concept which permeates these essays; it is testimony to what criticism can achieve when the whole man and the whole woman act in unison.