Luise Miller

First Published in 1990. Information about individual operas and other types of musical theater is scattered throughout the enormous literature of music. This book is an effort to bring that data together by comprehensively indexing plots and descriptions of individual operatic background, criticism and analysis, musical themes and bibliographical references. The principal audience for this general reference guide will be for the non-specialist, but its hoped that persons specialising in opera would also find it useful.

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.

Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world's leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship. It includes in-depth discussions of the writer's major dramatic and poetic works, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in 20th-century Germany. Contributors: Steven D. Martinson, Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D. Martinson is Professor of German at the University of Arizona.

A journalist’s profound investigation into the reality behind an intense waking vision and the search for healing after death • Details the author’s vivid waking vision of a dying German soldier in World War II and how he discovered the soldier was a real person, including his research into German military archives and meeting the man’s surviving family members • Explores synchronicities, reincarnation, and communication across the veil between life and death • Reveals how the author helped the dead soldier find forgiveness and healing While on a spiritual retreat in Peru, journalist Stéphane Allix experienced a vivid waking vision of a soldier dying on a snowy battlefield, followed by scenes from the soldier’s earlier life. He also clearly saw the man’s name, Alexander Herrmann, and felt a disturbing sense of closeness with the soldier. Obsessed by the power of this extremely real vision, Allix began an intensive investigation that revealed this individual had actually existed: a German soldier who died in World War II during the 1941 Russian campaign. As he began retracing Herrmann’s past, he found that the other images accompanying the battle scene were also of people who had truly existed and were close to the man who died. Diving deep into German military archives, meeting the man’s surviving family members, and following his own intuitive hunches, the author also discovered that the soldier was part of the Waffen S.S., the infamous Totenkopf Brigade, and his investigation broadened to explore what drove Herrmann to become part of such an organization. While Allix’s initial impression is that this German soldier was a past life, as he progresses in his rigorous investigation and his decoding of the events surrounding it, he realizes that it was actually his own work with the paranormal and his unresolved feelings over the death of his brother and his father that made him particularly sensitive to the veil between life and death, culminating in the soul of this dead soldier coming to him in search of forgiveness and healing. Allix realizes that his mission is not to bring about the rebirth of this person but to heal him--and the victims of his ignominious actions during the war. Offering a fascinating exploration of visions, synchronicities, reincarnation, and the connections between the spiritual and physical planes, When I Was Someone Else shares a powerful message of healing after death along with the profound epiphany that light needs darkness to be perceived.

Designed to provide English readers of German literature the opportunity to familiarize themselves with both the established canon and newly emerging literatures that reflect the concerns of women and ethnic minorities, the Encyclopedia of German Literature includes more than 500 entries on writers, individual work, and topics essential to an understanding of this rich literary tradition. Drawing on the expertise of an international group of experts, the essays in the encyclopedia reflect developments of the latest scholarship in German literature, culture, and history and society. In addition to the essays, author entries include biographies and works lists; and works entries provide information about first editions, selected critical editions, and English-language translations. All entries conclude with a list of further readings.

Above the dogmatic ideologies and utopias that have proved illusory, there is a resurgence of ideals of/for humanity in the human spirit's urgent quest after measure and harmony of the dispersed threads of existence. Devalued in the sectarism of postmodern thought, they affirm themselves in their original freedom as the irrepressible swing of the human spirit within the all-embracing new field of the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition. Preceded by the exploration of allegory in aesthetics and the metaphysics of the ontopoiesis of life, the present collection opens with Tymieniecka proposing the 'golden measure' as the ideal our present day humanity calls and strives for. Studies of the 'Ascension in troubled times', 'On the way', 'The search for harmony', 'European message', and other sections, collect papers by: G. Vajda, M.A. Cecilia, E. di Vito, A. Balan, R. Kieffer, G. Overvold, L. Kimmel, J.B. Williamson, F.P. Crawley, P. Pylkkö, N. Campi de Castro, and others. Introduced by the editor: Marlies Kronegger.

This book analyzes and contextualizes Auerbach’s life and mind in the wide ideological, philological, and historical context of his time, especially the rise of Aryan philology and its eventual triumph with the Nazi Revolution or the Hitler Revolution in Germany of 1933. It deals specifically with his struggle against the premises of Aryan philology, based on völkisch mysticism and Nazi historiography, which eliminated the Old Testament from German Kultur and Volksgeist in particular, and Western culture and civilization in general. It examines in detail his apologia for, or defense and justification of, Western Judaeo-Christian humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment. It discusses Auerbach’s ultimate goal, which was to counter the overt racist tendencies and völkish ideology in Germany, or the belief in the Community of Blood and Fate of the German people, which sharply distinguished between Kultur and civilization and glorified völkisch nationalism over European civilization. The volume includes an analysis of the entire twenty chapters of Auerbach’s most celebrated book: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1946.