He examines debates over fundamental issues that included citizenship qualifications, minority liguistic rights, Jewish emancipation, and territorial disputes, and offers valuable insights into nineteenth-century liberal opinion on the Jewish Question, language policy, and ideas of race."--BOOK JACKET.

Although many of the practical and intellectual traditions that make up modern science date back centuries, the category of “science” itself is a relative novelty. In the early eighteenth century, the modern German word that would later mean “science,” naturwissenschaft, was not even included in dictionaries. By 1850, however, the term was in use everywhere. Acolytes of Nature follows the emergence of this important new category within German-speaking Europe, tracing its rise from an insignificant eighteenth-century neologism to a defining rallying cry of modern German culture. Today’s notion of a unified natural science has been deemed an invention of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet what Denise Phillips reveals here is that the idea of naturwissenschaft acquired a prominent place in German public life several decades earlier. Phillips uncovers the evolving outlines of the category of natural science and examines why Germans of varied social station and intellectual commitments came to find this label useful. An expanding education system, an increasingly vibrant consumer culture and urban social life, the early stages of industrialization, and the emergence of a liberal political movement all fundamentally altered the world in which educated Germans lived, and also reshaped the way they classified knowledge.

Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna offers a nuanced look at the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political ideology in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Drawing on an extensive selection of writings in the city's political press, correspondence, archival documents, and a large body of recent scholarship in late Habsburg cultural and political history, author David Brodbeck argues that Vienna's music critics were important agents in the public sphere whose writings gave voice to distinct, sometimes competing ideological positions. These conflicting positions are exemplified especially well in their critical writings about the music of three notable composers of the day who were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans: Carl Goldmark, a Jew from German West Hungary, and the Czechs Bed'ich Smetana and Anton n Dvo? k. Often at stake in the critical discourse was the question of who and what could be deemed "German" in the multinational Austrian state. For critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel, traditional German liberals who came of age in the years around 1848, "Germanness" was an attribute that could be earned by any ambitious bourgeois-including Jews and those of non-German nationality-by embracing German cultural values. The more nationally inflected liberalism evident in the writings of Theodor Helm, with its particularist rhetoric of German national property in a time of Czech gains at German expense, was typical of those in the next generation, educated during the 1860s. The radical student politics of the 1880s, with its embrace of racialist antisemitism and irredentist German nationalism, just as surely shaped the discourse of certain young Wagnerian critics who emerged at the end of the century. This body of music-critical writing reveals a continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood. Brodbeck neatly counters decades of musicological scholarship and offers a unique insight into the diverse ways in which educated German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood their relationship to their non-German fellow citizens. Defining Deutschtum is sure to be an essential text for scholars of music history, cultural studies, and late 19th century Central European culture and society.

Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.

How magic influenced people's lives and thought in early modern Europe

The two editors, graduate architects from the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture asked six renowned architects and four well-known artists, all among the latest generation in their field, about their underlying motivation, orientation and stances with respect to architecture and art. The result is inspiring, in-depth reflection, enhanced by quotes, symbolic images and presentations of real projects from the world of architecture and art that underline and symbolize their ideas and reflections. Interviews with the architects Kersten Geers (Office KGDVS, Brussels), François Charbonnet (Made in, Geneva), Go Hasegawa (Tokyo), Anne Holtrop (Bahrain and Amsterdam), Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (DOGMA, Brussels and London), Junya Ishigami (Tokyo) and the artists Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine (film-makers, Paris), Philipp Schaerer (Zurich and Steffisburg), Yuri Ancarani (visual artist and film-maker, Milan), Bas Princen (photographer, Zurich and Rotterdam).

Brilliantly conceived and majestically written, this monumental work of European history recasts the five-hundred-year history of Germany. With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification—and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany’s evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history—the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime—are transformed, while others are unearthed and explored, as Blackbourn reveals Germany’s leading role in creating modern universities and its sinister involvement in slave-trade economies. A global history for a global age, Germany in the World is a bold and original account that upends the idea that a nation’s history should be written as though it took place entirely within that nation’s borders.