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Although the three conspicuous cultures of Berlin in the twentieth
century-Weimar, Nazi, and Cold War-are well documented, little is
known about the years between the fall of the Third Reich and the
beginning of the Cold War. In a Cold Crater is the history of this
volatile postwar moment, when the capital of the world's recently
defeated public enemy assumed great emotional and symbolic meaning.
This is a story not of major intellectual and cultural achievements
(for there were none in those years), but of enormous hopes and
plans that failed. It is the story of members of the once famous
volcano-dancing Berlin intelligentsia, torn apart by Nazism and
exile, now re-encountering one another. Those who had stayed in
Berlin in 1933 crawled out of the rubble, while many of the exiles
returned with the Allied armies as members of the various cultural
and re-educational units. All of them were eager to rebuild a
neo-Weimar republic of letters, arts, and thought. Some were highly
qualified and serious. Many were classic opportunists. A few came
close to being clowns. After three years of "carnival," recreated
by Schivelbusch in all its sound and fury, they were driven from
the stage by the Cold War. As Berlin once again becomes the German
capital, Schivelbusch's masterful cultural history is certain to
captivate historians and general readers alike. This title is part
of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University
of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the
brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on
a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality,
peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1999.
The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of
the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern
society. But this was not always the case; as Wolfgang Schivelbusch
points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to
technological change--the development of our modern, industrialized
consciousness--was very much a learned behavior. In The Railway
Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized
consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century
to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad.
In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses
the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy,
speed and risk were altered by railway travel. As a history, not of
technology, but of the surprising ways in which technology and
culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics,
including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of
conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway
compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the
railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and
the railroad and the city. Belonging to a distinguished European
tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of
Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored
in rich empirical data, and full of striking insights about railway
travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal is regarded today as the
democratic ideal, a triumphant American response to a crisis that
forced Germany and Italy toward National Socialism and Fascism. Yet
in the 1930s, before World War II, the regimes of Roosevelt,
Mussolini, and Hitler bore fundamental similarities. In this
groundbreaking work, Wolfgang Schivelbusch investigates the shared
elements of these three "new deals"--focusing on their architecture
and public works projects--to offer a new explanation for the
popularity of Europe's totalitarian systems. Writing with flair and
concision, Schivelbusch casts a different light on the New Deal and
puts forth a provocative explanation for the still-mysterious
popularity of Europe's most tyrannical regimes.
Focusing on three seminal cases of military defeat--the South after
the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and
Germany following World War I--Wolfgang Schivelbusch reveals the
complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations
to the experience of loss on the battlefield. Drawing on reactions
from every level of society, Schivelbusch charts the narratives
defeated nations construct and finds remarkable similarities across
cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, "The Culture of Defeat" is
a brilliant and provocative tour de force of history.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of
artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of
a technology, Disenchanted Night reveals the ways that the
technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern
consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and lively narrative,
Schivelbusch discusses a range of subject including the political
symbolism of street lamps, the rise of night-life and the
shop-window, and the importance of the salon in bourgeois culture.
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