Mr Brecher S Fiasco

In the offices of a large media conglomerate responsible for all kinds of advertising, Max Brecher considers himself the intellectual among the clerks. He reflects on the personal relations in the office, his own situation as an employee and human being, and the shifts in the values and ideas of life in 1920s Berlin. His office has its share of interesting characters, such as the corrupt Dr. Geist, who becomes a hypocrite in order to advance in the office hierarchy; the lovely Mucki Schopps, a tricky young girl with whom everyone falls in love; Gudula Often, who strives for harmony among her coworkers but never achieves her goal; and the department head, Mr. Sack, who meets an unfortunate end.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Writing Weimar shows how German literature between 1918 and 1933 is related both to the politics of the time and to longer-term cultural developments. Individual chapters discuss the dominant trends in particular literary genres and the significance of the term Neue Sachlichkeit, as well as the literary representation of the city, technology, and the First World War.