Bela Balazs's two works, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balazs's detailed analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution - such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar silents.

Bela Balazs was a Hungarian Jewish film theorist, author, screenwriter and film director who was at the forefront of Hungarian literary life before being forced into exile for Communist activity after 1919. His German-language theoretical essays on film date from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, the period of his early exile in Vienna and Berlin.

Erica Carter is Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick. Her writings on film include The German Cinema Book (co-ed. Tim Bergfelder & Deniz Gokturk, 2002), and Dietrich's Ghosts. The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004).

Rodney Livingstone is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Southampton. He is an American Translators Association award winner for his work on Detlef Claussen's Life of Adorno: Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (2008). He is well known as a translator of books by Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Weber, among others."

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police. Drawing on Schlögel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.

In ten brilliant essays, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory. Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a cultural dimension too. He develops a persuasive view of the life of the past in such surface phenomena as codes, religious rites and festivals, and canonical texts on the one hand, and in the Freudian psychodrama of repressing and resurrecting the past on the other. Whereas the current fad for oral history inevitably focuses on the actual memories of the last century or so, Assmann presents a commanding view of culture extending over five thousand years. He focuses on cultural memory from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Osage Indians down to recent controversies about memorializing the Holocaust in Germany and the role of memory in the current disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the "Western legacy of positivity," the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from "metaphysical experience." In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: "Toward a New Categorical Imperative," "Damaged Life," "Administered World, Reified Thought," "Art, Memory of Suffering," and "A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive." A substantial number of Adorno's writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno's work.

This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the "Western legacy of positivity," the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from "metaphysical experience." In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: "Toward a New Categorical Imperative," "Damaged Life," "Administered World, Reified Thought," "Art, Memory of Suffering," and "A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive." A substantial number of Adorno's writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno's work.

" The book is] part of the Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context series. It] has an attractive typeface and a well-designed layout. In addition to Carter's introduction there is also a useful Glossary of terms and an Appendix with two reviews... In all, this book is a very good introduction to Balazs' film philosophy and a long overdue entry into the English-speaking world of film literature." . Screening the Past "An exemplary book in every way, this translation makes Balazs' revolutionary texts available in English for the first time ... Dating from 1924 and 1930 respectively, The Visible Man and The Spirit of Film had a decisive influence on such major Russian filmmakers as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, and were among the first studies to examine filmic syntax, grammar, and editorial structure. Including a detailed introduction and numerous illustrations, this volume is a must for anyone serious about film ... Highly recommended." . Choice Bela Balazs's two works, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balazs's detailed analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution - such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar silents.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the leading social thinkers of the twentieth century, long concerned himself with the problems of moral philosophy, or "whether the good life is a genuine possibility in the present." This book consists of a course of seventeen lectures given in May-July 1963. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called "the fingerprint of the living mind"), these lectures present a somewhat different, and more accessible, Adorno from the one who composed the faultlessly articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose of the works published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno's thought in the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes), endowed with the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word. The lectures focus largely on Kant, "a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence." After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism. In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory and practice, ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of morality.

Originally published separately, Weber's 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation' stand as the classic formulations of his positions on two related subjects that go to the heart of his thought: the nature and status of science and its claims to authority; and the nature and status of political claims and the ultimate justification for such claims. Together in this volume, these newly translated lectures offer an ideal point of entry into Weber's central project: understanding how, as Weber put it, in the West alone there have appeared cultural manifestations that seem to] go in the direction of universal significance and validity.

Theodor Adorno is one of this century's most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. Throughout the essays in this book, all of which concern musical matters, he displays an astonishing range of cultural reference, demonstrating that music is invariably social, political, even ethical.
Adorno's insistence on the social character of aesthetic works will come as no surprise to those familiar with his writings, although many may be surprised by the volume's somewhat colloquial tone. This colloquialism, in dialogue with Adorno's unceasing rigor, stems from the occasional sources of many of the essays, mainly public lectures and radio addresses. As such, this volume represents an important and, for English-language readers, largely unfamiliar side to Adorno. His arguments move more quickly than in his more formal and extended musicological works, and the writing is much more accessible and generous than his usually dense and frequently opaque prose.
This volume includes essays on prominent figures in music (Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Arturo Toscanini), compositional technique (the prehistory of the twelve-tone row, the function of counterpoint in new music), and the larger questions of musical sociology for which Adorno is most famous, including the relation of interpretation to audience, the ideological function of opera, and the historical meaning of musical technique. The essay on the sociology of music, for example, represents an early statement of what would soon become trademark principles of his mode of musical analysis, serving as a catalyst for his famous study "Introduction to the Sociology of Music."
Some forty years after most of these essays were written, they remain fresh and relevant. In part, this is because Adorno's method has only recently begun to make substantial inroads into Anglo-American musicology. And the interdisciplinary nature of his thought provides a precursor for today's interdisciplinary studies.

Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flaneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flaneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

Originally published separately, Weber's 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation' stand as the classic formulations of his positions on two related subjects that go to the heart of his thought: the nature and status of science and its claims to authority; and the nature and status of political claims and the ultimate justification for such claims. Together in this volume, these newly translated lectures offer an ideal point of entry into Weber's central project: understanding how, as Weber put it, in the West alone there have appeared cultural manifestations that seem to] go in the direction of universal significance and validity.

Theodor Adorno is one of this century's most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. Throughout the essays in this book, all of which concern musical matters, he displays an astonishing range of cultural reference, demonstrating that music is invariably social, political, even ethical.
Adorno's insistence on the social character of aesthetic works will come as no surprise to those familiar with his writings, although many may be surprised by the volume's somewhat colloquial tone. This colloquialism, in dialogue with Adorno's unceasing rigor, stems from the occasional sources of many of the essays, mainly public lectures and radio addresses. As such, this volume represents an important and, for English-language readers, largely unfamiliar side to Adorno. His arguments move more quickly than in his more formal and extended musicological works, and the writing is much more accessible and generous than his usually dense and frequently opaque prose.
This volume includes essays on prominent figures in music (Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Arturo Toscanini), compositional technique (the prehistory of the twelve-tone row, the function of counterpoint in new music), and the larger questions of musical sociology for which Adorno is most famous, including the relation of interpretation to audience, the ideological function of opera, and the historical meaning of musical technique. The essay on the sociology of music, for example, represents an early statement of what would soon become trademark principles of his mode of musical analysis, serving as a catalyst for his famous study "Introduction to the Sociology of Music."
Some forty years after most of these essays were written, they remain fresh and relevant. In part, this is because Adorno's method has only recently begun to make substantial inroads into Anglo-American musicology. And the interdisciplinary nature of his thought provides a precursor for today's interdisciplinary studies.

The essays in this book - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Buchner and Heinrich Heine, and on the novelists Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane - were mostly written between 1936 and 1944, when Lukacs was in exile in Moscow. After the literary polemics of the earlier thirties, Lukacs increasingly turned to the literature he knew and loved best - the German classics and 19th century realists. His defence of realism against the crude simplicities of "socialist realism" and against all didactic literature, is implicit and occasionally explicit, throughout these studies. Lukacs appears in this volume as a literary historian, ready to make illuminating comparisons between Kleist and Schiller, Buchner and Shakespeare, Heine and Balzac, Keller and Tolstoy, Raabe and Dickens, or Fontane and Thackeray. He appears as a critic whose discussions and assessments of indivudual works, whether plays, novels, short stories or poems, are enlivened by the exploration of the relations betwen historical period, style and aesthetic form, which runs through all his literary work.

This is the first time one of the most important of Lukacs' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat.Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukacs evaluated the influence of this book as follows: "For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."George Lichtheim, also in 1968, writes that ..".The originality of the early Lukacs lay in the assertion that the totality of history could be apprehended by adopting a particular 'class standpoint': that of the proletariat. Class consciousness;not indeed the empirical consciousness of the actual proletariat, which was hopelessly entangled with the surface aspects of objective reality, but an ideal-typical consciousness proper to a class which radically negates the existing order of reality: that was the formula which had made it possible for the Lukacs of 1923 to unify theory and practice.""

In this rich body of early work the foundations of Marxism can be seen in essays on alienation, the state, democracy, and human nature.

Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe's most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner's oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword by Slavoj Zizek situates Adorno's reflections within present debates over Wagner's anti-Semitism and the moral status of his work, proving why this book remains one of the most important character studies of the twentieth century.

Frigga Haug, one of Germany's best-known feminist and Marxist critics, develops here a profound challenge both to women's oppression and to what she sees as women's 'collusion' in that oppression. Rejecting the essentialism of much feminist writing today, along with the denial of subjectivity that still permeates Marxism, Haug explores the connections between Marxist theory and the emancipation of women, a project which necessarily involves, as she explains, "diverting a powerful and long-standing anger into detective work." Under the headings of Socialization, Work and Politics, she combines the fruits of these investigations with the influential "memory-work" she has pioneered with women's collectives, to throw startling new light on a wide range of themes and issues: personal ethics and public morality; daydreams, domesticity and consumerism; privatization, new technologies and the restructuring of the workplace; the evolution of women's politics in Germany; the future of socialist feminism in the wake of Communism's collapse. Above all, this is a book which strives to find new links between the micro-politics of daily life and the evolving structures of capitalism. "If we could find out why and when our hopes for life were buried," Haug argues, "then we could try to take our history in our own hands." Beyond Female Masochism provides the materials, and inspiration, to do just that.

This revealing autobiography of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs is centered on a series of interviews that he gave in 1969 and 1971, shortly before his death on 4 June 1971. Stimulated by the sympathetic yet incisive questioning of the interviewer, the Hungarian essayist Istvan Eoersi, Lukacs discusses at length the course of his life, his years of political struggle, and his formation and role as a Marxist intellectual. From a highly evocative account of his childhood and school years, Lukacs proceeds to discuss his political awakening; the debates within the socialist movement over the First World War form the prelude to an assessment of Tactics and Ethics, written in 1919; from there the discussion turns to Lukacs's early major contribution to Marxist philosophy, History and Class Consciousness. After considering at length the years of emigration in Vienna and the Soviet Union, Lukacs finally recalls his return to Hungary after the Second World War, and his new position as a revolutionary left critic of actually existing socialism. "By socialist democracy," he wrote in 1970, "I understand democracy in ordinary life, as it appears in the Workers' Soviets of 1871, 1905 and 1917, as it once existed in the socialist countries, and in which form it must be re-animated." This Record of a Life, which includes an introduction by Istvan Eoersi, furnishes a compelling tribute to a remarkable man.

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface.It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukacs, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and The Phenomenology of Mind." Lukacs completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work.

The articles and essays collected in this book were written during the decade of Lukacs's life when he was most active in politics. The first texts mark his transition from an anti-bourgeois aestheticism to Marxism and the newly founded Hungarian Communist Party. They are followed by material which displays the full range of his activity and thought during the subsequent ten years. Some of these essays were written when Lukacs was deputy commissar of education in the embattled, short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Others include the famous article on parliamentarianism which earned its author the respectful yet severe criticism of Lenin.
The volume includes short studies on German revisionism, Bukharin's Marxism, and Karl Wittfogel, and longer pieces on Lassalle and Moses Hess. The collection ends with the theses Luckas wrote, under his cover name "Blum," in opposition to the policies of the Third Period of the Comintern.

Tactics and Ethics collects Georg Lukacs's articles from the most politically active time of his life, a period encompassing his stint as deputy commissar of education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Including his famed essay on parliamentarianism-which earned Lukacs the respectful yet severe criticism of Lenin-this book is a treasure chest of valuable insights from one of history's great political philosophers.

He was famously hostile to biography as a literary form. And yet this life of Adorno by one of his last students is far more than literary in its accomplishments, giving us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create "critical theory." An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno's day-and its ongoing importance in our own. The biography begins at the shining moment of the German bourgeoisie, in a world dominated by liberals willing to extend citizenship to refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Detlev Claussen follows Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) from his privileged life as a beloved prodigy to his intellectual coming of age in Weimar Germany and Vienna; from his exile during the Nazi years, first to England, then to the United States, to his emergence as the Adorno we know now in the perhaps not-so-unlikely setting of Los Angeles. There in 1943 with his collaborator Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed critical theory, whose key insight-that to be entertained is to give one's consent-helped define the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. In capturing the man in his complex relationships with some of the century's finest minds-including, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukacs, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht-Claussen reveals how much we have yet to learn from Theodor Adorno, and how much his life can tell us about ourselves and our time.