Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas

The phrase fin de si cle conjures up images of artistic experimentation and political decadence. The contributors to this volume argue that Wilhelmine Germany--best known for its industrial and military muscle--also shared these traits. Their essays look back to the years between 1885 and 1914 to find in Germany a mixture of sociopolitical malaise and experimental exhilaration that was similar in many ways to the better-known cases of France and Austria.

Revising the view that the German Second Reich was merely a precursor to the Third, this broad-scoped study presents pre-World War I Germany in its own fascinating and often contradictory terms. The foundations of the antiliberal passions that would plague the Weimar Republic are evident, but Wilhelmine society also had a lighter, more playful and moderate spirit, one that was largely extinguished by the Great War.

Blending social, cultural, and intellectual history, the contributors--a distinguished cross-section of older and younger scholars--trace changing German views on liberalism, penal reform, race, women, art, popular culture, and technology. They juxtapose better-known figures such as Max Weber, Thomas Mann, and Martin Heidegger with now-forgotten individuals like the Jewish feminist novelist Grete Meisel-Hess and the iconoclastic Swiss painter Arnold B cklin. Their essay topics range from the esoteric and erotic poetry of Stefan George to the Jewish comedy of the Herrnfeld Theater. "Modernity" is examined from the perspectives of bourgeois cinema-goers and judicial reformers, as well as from the viewpoint of Carl Jung. The result is a variegated picture of an unsettled world, rich in its innovations, ambitious in its undertakings, and often apocalyptic in its dreams.

Author: Suzanne Marchand
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 10/01/2004
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.46lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.44w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9780807129791

About the Author

Suzanne Marchand teaches European intellectual history at Louisiana State University and is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970; coauthor of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart; and coeditor of Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority and Objectivity.

David Lindenfeld is a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of The Transformation of Positivism: Alexius Meinong and European Thought, 1880-1920 and The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century.