Jews have been well represented in the cinema industry from the beginning of the film era: behind the screen, as producers, distributors, directors, script-writers, composers, set designers; and on the screen, as Jewish actors and as named Jewish characters in the film's plot. Some of these characters are fictional; others, ranging from Rabbi Loew of Prague to Ferdinand Lassalle and Alfred Dreyfus, have a historic original. This book examines how a variety of German and Austrian films treat aspects of Jewish life, at home and in the synagogue, and Jewish interaction with fellow Jews in different cultural environments; conflicts and accommodations between Jews and non-Jews at various times, ranging from the medieval to the contemporary. The author, one of the best known scholars in film history, theory and criticism, offers the reader a rich panorama of the many Jews involved in all spheres of the cinema and who, as the author reminds us repeatedly, together with their non-Jewish contemporaries, created a great industry and new forms of art. S. S. Prawer is a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, the British Academy, and the German Academy of Language and Literature.

Jews have been well represented in the cinema industry from the beginning of the film era: behind the screen, as producers, distributors, directors, script-writers, composers, set designers; and on the screen, as Jewish actors and as named Jewish characters in the film's plot. Some of these characters are fictional; others, ranging from Rabbi Loew of Prague to Ferdinand Lassalle and Alfred Dreyfus, have a historic original. This book examines how a variety of German and Austrian films treat aspects of Jewish life, at home and in the synagogue, and Jewish interaction with fellow Jews in different cultural environments; conflicts and accommodations between Jews and non-Jews at various times, ranging from the medieval to the contemporary. The author, one of the best known scholars in film history, theory and criticism, offers the reader a rich panorama of the many Jews involved in all spheres of the cinema and who, as the author reminds us repeatedly, together with their non-Jewish contemporaries, created a great industry and new forms of art.

Based on an intensive study of the original German text of Freud's writings, letters and journals, S. S. Prawer's new book is the first to make a full and systematic map of Freud's use of English literature. The great psychoanalyst has long been acclaimed as a polymath, as a practical doctor who was also a theoretician, as a writer of non-fiction which was also a counterpoint to the great novels of the early twentieth century, and as an essayist who, like Montaigne, absorbed all of the cultural world around him. Freud was fascinated by writings from many nations and languages, and his use of English shows the great range of his reading: from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw, Henry Fielding to George Eliot, Mark Twain to Thornton Wilder; from scientific works by Maxwell and Darwin to the economics of Adam Smith, Malthus and Keynes, and from psychology and anthropology to the origins of religion. Though Freud's genius was unique, his sense of being a citizen of a world far wider than Vienna was not, and it can tell us much about the exchange of ideas across national and linguistic frontiers. Though he was a reader par excellence, he was also a case study in how world literature can be used by men and women who are not professional literary scholars or critics -- and of how much it can come to mean to them, and for their sense of who they are. Siegbert Prawer is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus of German Literature and a Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford.

In this edition, which was originally published in 1961, Dr Prawer follows his study of the Buch der Lieder with a full-length study of the later works of Heine. A brief introductory study of the Buch der Lieder is followed by detailed treatment of Neue Gesichte, Atta Troll, Deutdchland, ein Wintermarchen, Romanzero, Gedichte 1853 und 1854, and the poems in the posthumous Letzte Gedichte und Gedanken. Dr Prawer extracts and relates to Heine's life the underlying themes in his poetry; those, and the consistent careful analysis of the poems, makes his book an excellent introduction to the poet's work.

Professor Prawer's new book documents Heinrich Heine's lifelong involvement with England and the English. It shows him to have been a witty and intelligent observer of English men and women, institutions and politics, and books and journals of his own day; and to have extended his observation backwards into English history and literature of the past in a way that constantly welds the past to the present. The picture which emerges is one shaped by traditional preconceptions, political considerations, social philosophies and aesthetic experiences. The author (who is an authority on Heine) has amassed a vast amount of quotations; many of these passages have never been available in English before. The book will be an important reference work for scholars of nineteenth-century German literature and history; and, since all quotations are rendered in English, it will appeal to general readers interested in verbal caricature and in the changing image of England and the English in Europe.

"Very few men," said Bakunin, "have read as much, and, it may be added, have read as intelligently, as M. Marx." S. S. Prawer's highly influential work explores how the world of imaginative literature--poems, novels, plays--infused and shaped Marx's writings, from his unpublished correspondence, to his pamphlets and major works. In exploring Marx's use of literary texts, from Aeschylus to Balzac, and the central role of art and literature in the development of his critical vision, "Karl Marx and World Literature" is a forensic masterpiece of critical analysis.

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht (1979) is one of the masterpieces of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and mindful too of F. W. Murnau's earlier German film version of that same novel, Herzog's film is perhaps the most compelling screen treatment of the vampire myth. In this comprehensive account of Nosferatu, S. S. Prawer begins with discussion of Stoker's book, the cultural fascination with vampires, and the formation and evolution of Herzog's career. Taking the production history into account, Prawer ultimately foregrounds the cultural and aesthetic components of the film that combine to such powerful effect. This second edition features a new foreword by Brad Prager and original cover artwork by Matt Brand.

The author traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The German Sketch Book' which is built up embraces the fiction and criticism of Thackeray's Paris Sketch Book and the impressions related by the cockney' traveller in Irish Sketch Book and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. Thackeray's own pictorial illustrations of his writings, and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognised as an integral part of his German discourse. This is the first full-length study, in any language, of Thackeray's observation and presentation of Germany' and the Germans' in all the genres in which he worked. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackeray's construction of Germany' and the Germans' against the background of his own development and of the social, industrial, cultural and political history of Britain and its continental neighbours.