German Studies

... Used by both Adorno and Walter Benjamin, in In Search of Wagner and the Arcades Project respectively, the word has spawned two distinct usages, one in ... It reads phantasmagoria as the dominance of things and thing-like qualities over the relational and social aspects of ...

Abstract Richard Wagner's Siegfried constitutes something of an anomaly within the Ring cycle: the epic narrative of the Nibelungs and Valsungs grinds to a virtual halt, while two characters, Mime and Siegfried, reenact the fairy tale of the “youth who went forth to learn ...

The transformation of medication into a proper “market” takes the shape of what has been called “the abolition of good health.” In the interest of branding products and expanding sales, drug companies now are actively engaged in redefining sickness and health. The ...

Arthur Schopenhauer, in what is perhaps the most stridently misogynist text of the nineteenth century, describes how women ruin a man's concertgoing experience by “continuing their chatter”[ihr Geplapper fortsetzen] even “during the most beautiful passages of the greatest ...

What is the color of Siegfried's hair, and how do we know? We know that Emma Bovary has black hair,“whose two bands seemed as though they were each of one piece,” 1 that Alyosha Karamazov has “dark brown” 2 hair, and that Oliver Twist's Fagin has a face “ ...

Das vierhändige Klavierspiel war die Schallplatte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Erst durch das Spiel am Klavier wurde der Musikliebhaber zum Musikkonsumenten. Und nur durch den vierhändigen Auszug konnte das Bürgertum kanonische und neue Werke kennenlernen, mit ihnen umgehen, sie besitzen und sammeln. Doch anders als das Grammophon erforderte der vierhändige Klavierauszug eine aktive Leistung von Seiten des Besitzers. Um das Versprechen, den musikalischen Kanon als Objekt zu besitzen, einlösen zu können, mußte der Sammler selber aktiv werden im Zusammenspiel mit einem Anderen. Dieses Buch behandelt diese merkwürdige Konstellation, und zeigt auch, daß diese Form des Musikkonsums dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert in vielerlei Hinsicht bereits unheimlich war. Ob in der musikalischen Fachpresse, in der Literatur oder der bildenden Kunst das vierhändige Klavierspiel war immer der Rede wert. Anhand von Notenbeispielen und Handpositionen werden Fragen der Arbeitsteilung, der Erotik und der körperlichen Wahrnehmung behandelt. Bearbeitungs-, Übungs- und Spielpraxis stehen dabei genauso im Vordergrund wie die Behandlung des Phänomens in Presse, Literatur und (später) im Film.

"“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “[I]s it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?”

Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage, but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage.

Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the Romantic and Idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage and sex to the present day."

"Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference.

Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow."