A masterful biography of Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), the German scientist who discovered continental drift. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Alfred Wegener aimed to create a revolution in science which would rank with those of Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin. After completing his doctoral studies in astronomy at the University of Berlin, Wegener found himself drawn not to observatory science but to rugged fieldwork, which allowed him to cross into a variety of disciplines. The author of the theory of continental drift—the direct ancestor of the modern theory of plate tectonics and one of the key scientific concepts of the past century—Wegener also made major contributions to geology, geophysics, astronomy, geodesy, atmospheric physics, meteorology, and glaciology. Remarkably, he completed this pathbreaking work while grappling variously with financial difficulty, war, economic depression, scientific isolation, illness, and injury. He ultimately died of overexertion on a journey to probe the Greenland icecap and calculate its rate of drift. This landmark biography—the only complete account of the scientist’s fascinating life and work—is the culmination of more than twenty years of intensive research. In Alfred Wegener, Mott T. Greene places Wegener’s upbringing and theoretical advances in earth science in the context of his brilliantly eclectic career, bringing Wegener to life by analyzing his published scientific work, delving into all of his surviving letters and journals, and tracing both his passionate commitment to science and his thrilling experiences as a polar explorer, a military officer during World War I, and a world-record–setting balloonist. In the course of writing this book, Greene traveled to every place that Alfred Wegener lived and worked—to Berlin, rural Brandenburg, Marburg, Hamburg, and Heidelberg in Germany; to Innsbruck and Graz in Austria; and onto the Greenland icecap. He also pored over archives in Copenhagen, Munich, Marburg, Graz, and Bremerhaven, where the majority of Wegener’s surviving papers are found. Written with great immediacy and descriptive power, Alfred Wegener is a powerful portrait of the scientist who pioneered the modern concept of unified Earth science. The book should be of interest not only to earth scientists, students of polar travel and exploration, and historians but to all readers who are fascinated by the great minds of science.

Das Erscheinen der Gesammelten Schriften Franz Rosenzweigs stellt ein Ereignis von besonderem geistigen Rang dar. Denn es ist ganz unbestritten, daß Franz Rosenzweig zu den bedeutend sten jüdischen Denkern unseres Jahrhunderts gehört, ja, daß er vermutlich sogar weit über unsere Epoche hinaus von Bedeutung sein wird. E. Levinas hat Rosenzweig nicht zu Unrecht Gestalten wie Blaise Pascal und Sören Kierkegaard an die Seite gestelltl. Gleichwohl ist das Werk Rosenzweigs bis jetzt nur schwer zu gänglich gewesen. Und zwar nicht nur aus den Gründen, derent wegen auch sonst ein Werk, das Entscheidendes zu sagen hat, seine Zeit braucht, bis es zugänglich wird, sondern auch deshalb, weil sich dem Schicksal des Werkes Rosenzweigs die leidvollen Spuren der jüdischen Emigration deutlich eingegraben haben. Franz Rosenzweig starb 42-jährig im Dezember 1929, drei Jahre vor dem Ausbruch der braunen Diktatur. Edith Rosen zweig, seine Gattin, konnte zwar 1935 und 1937 noch die Kleine ren Schriften und eine Auswahl aus Rosenzweigs Briefen ver öffentlichen. Die beiden Bände gehören zu den wenigen umfang reicheren von Juden verfaßten Büchern, deren Druck in jenen Jahren möglich war. An weitere Veröffentlichungen war damals aber nicht zu denken. Der handschriftliche Nachlaß Rosenzweigs wurde zum Teil Glatzernach den Vereinigten Staaten, zum Teil durch Nahum N.

Of all the colorful figures on the twentieth-century European cultural scene, hardly anyone has provoked more polarity than Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964), mistress to a long succession of brilliant men and wife of three of the best known: composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel. To her admirers Alma was a self-sacrificing socialite who inspired many great artists. Her detractors found her a self-aggrandizing social climber and an alcoholic, bigoted, vengeful harlot - as one contemporary put it, "a cross between a grande dame and a cesspool." So who was she really? When historian Oliver Hilmes discovered a treasure-trove of unpublished material, much of it in Alma's own words, he used it as the basis for his first biography, setting the record straight while evoking the atmosphere of intellectual life in Europe and then in ŽmigrŽ communities on both coasts of the United States after the Nazi takeover of their home territories. First published in German in 2004, the book was hailed as a rare combination of meticulously researched scholarship and entertaining writing, making it a runaway bestseller and advancing Oliver Hilmes to his position as a household name in contemporary literature. Alma Mahler was one of the twentieth century's rare originals, worthy of her immortalization in song. Oliver Hilmes has provided us with an even-handed yet tantalizingly detailed account of her life, bringing Alma's singular story to a whole new audience.

The essays in this volume seek to confront some of the charged meeting points of European - especially German - and Jewish history. All, in one way or another, explore the entanglements, the intertwined moments of empathy and enmity, belonging and estrangement, creativity and destructiveness that occurred at these junctions.

The modern German-Jewish experience through the rise of Nazism in 1933 was characterized by an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity. Yet well after that history has ended, the influence of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals has become ever greater. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss have become household names and possess a continuing resonance. Beyond the Border seeks to explain this phenomenon and analyze how the German-Jewish legacy has continuingly permeated wider modes of Western thought and sensibility, and why these émigrés occupy an increasingly iconic place in contemporary society. Steven Aschheim traces the odyssey of a fascinating group of German-speaking Zionists--among them Martin Buber and Hans Kohn--who recognized the moral dilemmas of Jewish settlement in pre-Israel Palestine and sought a binationalist solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. He explores how German-Jewish émigré historians like Fritz Stern and George Mosse created a new kind of cultural history written against the background of their exile from Nazi Germany and in implicit tension with postwar German social historians. And finally, he examines the reasons behind the remarkable contemporary canonization of these Weimar intellectuals--from Arendt to Strauss--within Western academic and cultural life. Beyond the Border is about more than the physical act of departure. It also points to the pioneering ways these émigrés questioned normative cognitive boundaries and have continued to play a vital role in addressing the predicaments that engage and perplex us today.