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War and violence have been constitutive elements in the shaping of western civilization from antiquity to the present. Perceived interconnections between war, violence, and modernity have given rise to a number of theories from Walter Benjamin to Paul Virilio and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
This volume explores the specific role which war has played in the constitution of a modern mentality. It is divided into three distinct but related parts:
One dealing with issues of conceptualizing war, violence, and modernity/modernism; one is devoted to issues of the First World War as an exemplary experience in the 20th century; and one is concerned with issues of violence and its representation in the aftermath of the first modern war and up to the present.
List of contents
Frontmatter -- Introduction: Modernity and Violence: Observations Concerning a Contradictory Relationship -- Violence and Modernity -- The Great War and the Persistence of Tradition: Languages of Grief, Bereavement and Mourning -- Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man's Land -- The Therapeutic Response: Continuities from World War One to National Socialism -- From War Economy to "New Economy": World War I and the Conservative Debate about the 'other' Modernity in Germany -- Codes of War and Violence -- Some Lessons of the War: The Discourse on the Propaganda and Public Opinion in Germany in the 1920s -- Blitzkrieg: "God Stinnes" or the Depoliticization of the Sublime -- The fiftieth Anniversary of the Allied Air Raids on Dresden: A Half Century of Literature and History Writing -- Sexy Nazis and Daddy's Girls: Fascism and Sexuality in Film and Video since the 1970s -- Bodies, Souls and Modern Warfare -- Aesculap in the Trenches: Aspects of German Medicine in the First World War -- The Failure of Love: A Lesser Theory of the Great War -- Benn's Body. Masculine Aesthetics and Reproduction in Gottfried Benn's Essays -- Women in the Military and the Cult of Masculinity -- Artistic and Literary Representations of Modern Warfare -- "A Murderous Carnival": German Artists in the First World War -- Arnold Zweig's War Novellas of 1914 and their Versions: Literature, Modernity and the Demands of the Day -- War and Novel: Alfred Döblin's "Wallenstein" and "November 1918" -- Violent Orders in Robert Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" and Thomas Bernhard's "Kalkwerk" -- "Les peuples meurent, pour que Dieu vive": Gertrud Kolmar's Consecration of the Protagonists in the Drama of the French Revolution -- Laws of War and Revolution: Violence in Heiner Müller's Work -- Bibliography -- List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Index -- Backmatter
About the author
Bernd Hüppauf, geboren 1942, lehrt als Professor am Department of German an der New York University. Publikationen über die Literatur der Weimarer Republik und die Nachkriegszeit, Veröffentlichungen im Bereich Literatur, Fotografie und über die Repräsentation von Krieg und Gewalt.
