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Diary

Thomas Laqueur: My Dead Fathers, 7 September 2006

... a statement that they would have expected their parents, as well as strangers, to understand. Max Weber’s mother slapped his face when he came home from university with a duelling scar, taking it as a sign that he was gravitating away from her pietism and towards the physicality and boorishness of his father. I don’t think my father understood his ...

A Gutter Subject

Neal Ascherson: Joachim Fest, 25 October 2012

Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood 
by Joachim Fest, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Atlantic, 316 pp., £20, August 2012, 978 1 84354 931 4
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... In 1986, as cultural editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he published the article by Ernst Nolte which was held to ‘relativise the Jewish Holocaust’ and touched off the Historikerstreit dispute over the uniqueness of Nazi crime. Fest was a handsome, restless, rather unhappy man. In postwar West Germany, he never fitted into any of the ...

Theme-Park Prussia

David Blackbourn, 24 November 1994

Prussia: The Perversion of an Idea 
by Giles MacDonogh.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 456 pp., £20, July 1994, 1 85619 267 9
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... German history. Their mordant view of the Old Gang built on the insights of earlier critics like Max Weber, and of historians who had been marginalised in the Twenties and exiled under Hitler. Like many Anglo-Saxon writers of the period – Barrington Moore is a prime example – these scholars concluded that Nazism was the ultimate price paid for a stubborn ...

At MoMA

Hal Foster: Käthe Kollwitz’s Figures, 4 July 2024

... she preferred the fluidity of lithography, and in 1920, spurred by the work of the Expressionist Ernst Barlach and a commission to commemorate the murdered Karl Liebknecht, she turned to the dramatic contrasts of woodcuts. Yet the subjectivism of the Expressionist painters remained foreign to Kollwitz, and she was even more remote from the radicality of the ...

Unreasoning Vigour

Stefan Collini: Ian Watt, 9 May 2019

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic 
by Marina MacKay.
Oxford, 228 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 0 19 882499 2
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... compound that, in its general or abstract form, owed most to German sociologists such as Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, though its empirical uses had a longer pedigree in British social and economic thought. Defoe provided Watt’s first and most compelling exhibit here, as the creator of such uncompromising ...

On Saving the Warburg

Charles Hope, 4 December 2014

... time, Fritz Saxl, lost his professorship at the University of Hamburg, as did Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, both of whom were closely associated with the institute. Various proposals for moving the library abroad failed because the destinations suggested – Jerusalem, Rome and Leiden – would only accept it as a gift, and this would have left the ...

Howitzers on the Hill

Neal Ascherson: ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’, 8 March 2018

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh 
by Franz Werfel, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, revised by James Reidel.
Penguin, 912 pp., £10.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 33286 3
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... still in the Habsburg Empire. As a young man publishing his first poems, he sat in cafés with Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Milena Jesenská and Willy Haas. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, ending up in Vienna, where he graduated to the intellectual hothouse of the Café Central and, in 1915, was introduced to Alma ...

From Shtetl to Boulevard

Paul Keegan: Freud’s Mother, 5 October 2017

Freud: In His Time and Ours 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Catherine Porter.
Harvard, 580 pp., £27.95, November 2016, 978 0 674 65956 8
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Freud: An Intellectual Biography 
by Joel Whitebook.
Cambridge, 484 pp., £30, February 2017, 978 0 521 86418 3
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... on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis’, Freud’s case history of the Rat Man (real name: Ernst Lanzer), there is an account of Lanzer’s attempts to repay a debt, or rather his attempt to describe his attempts to do so. While a reserve officer on military exercises, he loses his pince-nez and sends a telegram to his optician in Vienna. The ...

Don’t talk to pigeons

Ben Jackson: MI5 in WW1, 22 January 2015

MI5 in the Great War 
edited by Nigel West.
Biteback, 434 pp., £25, July 2014, 978 1 84954 670 6
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... discussion of dissolving Kell’s department. Helm’s case, along with the subsequent trials of Max Schultz and Armgaard Karl Graves, were also sufficient to secure a remarkable restriction of British civil liberties. In 1911 Churchill, then home secretary, began issuing general warrants to examine the entire correspondence of particular suspects ...

Bypass Variegated

Rosemary Hill: Osbert Lancaster, 21 January 2016

Osbert Lancaster’s Cartoons, Columns and Curlicues: ‘Pillar to Post’, ‘Homes Sweet Homes’, ‘Drayneflete Revealed’ 
by Osbert Lancaster.
Pimpernel, 304 pp., £40, October 2015, 978 1 910258 37 8
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... Homes, the first two of these reprinted volumes, appeared in 1938 and 1939 and were described by Ernst Gombrich as comprising ‘the best textbook of architecture ever published’. The foreword or ‘Order to View’ of Pillar to Post opens with the sentence: ‘This is not a textbook.’ Like all great satirists Lancaster had his finger on the pivotal ...

What kind of funny is he?

Rivka Galchen: Under Kafka’s Spell, 4 December 2014

Kafka: The Years of Insight 
by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 682 pp., £24.95, June 2013, 978 0 691 14751 2
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Kafka: The Decisive Years 
by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 552 pp., £16.25, June 2013, 978 0 691 14741 3
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... first volume, covering Kafka’s youth, was written last in the hope that the papers in the Max Brod estate – a mysterious suitcase full of documents – would exit the apartment of the septuagenarian daughter of Max Brod’s presumed lover, but the destiny of those papers remains in legal dispute.) Part of what is ...

Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

The World of Yesterday 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.
Pushkin Press, 474 pp., £20, 1 906548 12 9
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... and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig – was both, to the max); not a pacifist much less an activist but a passivist; this professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector, owner of Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo and Mozart manuscripts and busy Balzac proofs and contemporaries out the ...

Not Window, Not Wall

Hal Foster: Farewell to Modernism?, 1 December 2022

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present 
by T.J. Clark.
Thames and Hudson, 239 pp., £30, August 2022, 978 0 500 02528 4
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... his thinking since his days as a young Situationist. More surprising are powerful statements from Ernst Bloch, who gives Clark his minatory title, and Samuel Beckett, who underscores the alien aspect in Cézanne that intrigues Clark. Above all, as Clark debates these others, he argues with himself, and though he often gathers his readers into the ‘we’ of ...

Barbarism with a Human Face

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin v. Stalin in Kiev, 8 May 2014

... that a moderate fascism was a justified response to the communist threat (a point made long ago by Ernst Nolte in his defence of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism). In Slovenia, the right is advocating the rehabilitation of the anti-communist Home Guard which fought the partisans during the Second World War: they made the difficult choice to collaborate ...

The Khugistic Sandal

Jenny Diski: Jews & Shoes, 9 October 2008

Jews and Shoes 
edited by Edna Nahshon.
Berg, 226 pp., £17.99, August 2008, 978 1 84788 050 5
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... The Zionists took up the story about the physically weak body of the Jew, but they had a solution. Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist Organisation with Theodor Herzl, had also studied with Charcot in his youth. Zer-Zion says: ‘He accepted the assumption that Jews suffered from orthopedic and psychological problems that prevented them from becoming ...

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