Pastor Martin Niemöller, popular author Ernst Wiechert, and the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer were well known in the public sphere in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. As the decade of the 1930s progressed each of these figures became a vocal opponent of National Socialism. In the last twenty-eight sermons delivered before his arrest in 1937 Martin Niemöller revitalized Protestant homiletic discourse as a political tool in defiance of the regime. Having protested Niemöller's imprisonment, Ernst Wiechert was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated at Buchenwald for three months during the summer of 1938. Wiechert chronicled his experiences in the fictional autobiography Der Totenwald (1939) - a text which marks the apex of Wiechert's literary turn from Blut und Boden Dichter to outspoken critic of Nazism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a member of the Pastors' Emergency League and for a time pastoral assistant to Martin Niemöller, constructed a sphere of textual resistance in his prose and poetic writings composed while imprisoned in Tegel from 1943 to 1945. This study traces the emergence of cultural confessionalism as a new literary resistance paradigm that developed out of the ideological nexus of cultural Protestantism and the confessionalist trend of the Kirchenkampf. Through literary analysis of sermons by Niemöller and written texts by both Wiechert and Bonhoeffer the book demonstrates how the textual resistance strategies of the cultural confessionalists varied from the oppositional approaches of the 'innere Emigration', the political resistance, and the Christian humanist tradition.

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.

"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --

Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. Instead, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.

The Weimar Republic was a turbulent and pivotal period of German and European history and a laboratory of modernity. The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic provides an unsurpassed panorama of German history from 1918 to 1933, offering an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the fascinating history of the Weimar Republic.

This book is the only book-length monograph comparing the impact of confessional identity on both halves of the Wittelsbach dynasty which provided Bavarian dukes and German emperors as well as its implications for late Renaissance court culture. It demonstrates that religious conflict led to the development of distinctly confessional court cultures among the main Wittelsbach courts. Likewise, it illuminates how these confessional court cultures contributed significantly to the splintering of Renaissance humanism along religious lines in this era. Concomitantly, it sheds new light on the impact of late medieval dynastic competition on shaping the early modern Wittelsbach courts as well as the important role of Wittelsbach women in the creation and continuation of dynastic piety in their roles as wives, mothers, and patronesses of the arts.