In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem, it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Streetin Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. --

Erich Heller is probably the finest critic of German literature now writing. As evidence one need only mention The Disinherited Mind and Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. These are works which illuminate the literary consciousness at many levels, combining scholarly precision with highly adventurous forays into the psychology and artistic development of their subjects, and which manage, as so many learned studies do not, to capture a particular sensibility and its relevance to culture in general. Alive, original, acute, Heller's judgments have moreover a wide philosophical range, a talent eminently displayed in the seven superb essays under discussion here. Two of them tackle the thorny area of Romanticism and Realism and show the interlocking paradoxical nature of each. Three of them consider the meaning of Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein especially as reflected through the dilemma of human inwardness, whether in Hamlet, Rilke's Elegies, or in religious, historical, philological questions of salvation and ethics. The first essay elaborates on the various versions of the Faust legend as encountered in Marlowe, Goethe and Mann, and the second achieves the extraordinary feat of making Schiller's poetic dramas and ""Beautiful Soul"" ideal a fascinating and moving experience. The whole collection is one of imposing dimensions, profound, gracefully written, thorough. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re... Contents: Faust's damnation: the morality of knowledge.-- In two minds about Schiller.-- The romantic expectation.-- The realistic fallacy.-- The artist's journey into the interior: a Hegelian prophecy and its fulfillment.-- The importance of Nietzsche.-- Wittgenstein and Nietzsche.

"In this published version of the Lord Northcliffe Lectures in Literature, delivered at University College London in Spring 1975, Professor Heller is concerned with the imaginative mediation between life and art which is a major theme in the work of the four writers he discusses. The profound process by which a great work of literary art ('poem' in the title is used in a sense close to the German 'Dichtung') may grow out of a situation in life, mirror, and yet transcend it is illustrated by Goethe in Marienbad, Nietzsche in the 'Waste Land', Rilke in Paris and Thomas Mann in Venice." -- Goodreads

Originally published in 1977, this volume gives a co-hesive overview of Franco-German literary relationships between 1770 and 1895. It discerns the dynamics and outlines the structure of the interrelationship. The two literatures develop in a broadly similar direction in the nineteenth century, but there is a puzzling time-lag which forms the focal point of enquiry. It looks back to the combination of literary, political and social factors that may explain how the time-lag came into being. The book serves both as an introduction and as a starting point for further detailed analysis of specific areas and offers a new approach to the comparative study of literature. - -

Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hölderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called 'the miracle of ingeniousness regained' and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century German literature and its modernity, which qualities are also placed in the context of German political and social conditions. All prose quotations are given in English translation, and the majority of verse quotations in both German and English.

"First published in 1987, and encompassing texts from almost four decades, Kleist, moss, pheasants brings together autobiographical pieces, diary entries and reflections on fellow authors by Ilse Aichinger. As Richard Reichensperger remarks, the volume demonstrates the complex interconnections between historical events and Aichinger's life, thought and writing. The style, tone, and force of Kleist, moss, pheasants foreshadow the major achievements of Aichinger's late productive period around the turn of the millennium, which are evidenced in Film and fate and Improbable journeys."--Back cover.

Central Europe, the venue of all these essays, is seen here as a region with blurred edges, comprising mainly Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia - a region notorious for its national conflicts, but where reluctantly acknowledged family likenesses may one day prevail. The essays, most of them written over the last 25 years and revised, concentrate (though not exclusively) on the era since 1900. They represent a mixed bag of episodes from the literature, politics and philosophy of the region. Some were written to remind the reader that the heart of Europe has also been, and could once again become, the heart of darkness. Some are devoted to heroes of the resistance, others to philosophical fellow-travellers of one kind and another; some show how the revolutions of 1989 in the wake of defunct ideologies followed the same agenda in all the countries concerned; others again examine the relationship between literature, ideology and politics in the writings of Robert Musil, Jaroslav Hasek, Vaclav Havel and others. Since the author has tried to let each topic determine its own approach, the theory behind these essays is that there is here no theory - either "Marxist" or "Aryan", "critical" or "Postmodern", or any other. Throughout, the author has kept a close look at the language of his texts and its functions in different contexts, but that is, or should be, too obvious a procedure to merit the name of theory.

This is a reissue of Professor Stern's distinguished study of German prose from the death of Goethe to the heyday of the Wilhelminian Empire. Professor Stern argues that nineteenth-century German prose is characterized by a particular combination of the prophetic and the archaic, of the existential and the parochial, and is only partially and sometimes not at all related to the social and political realities of the age. In this sense, German literature of the period stands apart from the main stream of European realism and has, for that reason, received little attention from the common reader outside its own country. The book contains studies of Goethe, Grillparzer, Büchner, Schopenhauer, Heine, Stifter and Fontane, all of whom re-interpreted the world from points of view other than that of the common and commonly explored social certainties of their age. Consequently, Professor Stern suggests alternative criteria to the common notion of realism with which to asses their work.

Originally published in 1971, this book outlines the period of Germany's belated industrial revolution and suggests why German literature does not, before the 1880s, contribute to the tradition of European realism. It considers the alternatives to realism offered in three genres of drama, poetry and prose fiction.