German Studies Review最新文献

{"title":"African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 by Sara Pugach (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910196","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 by Sara Pugach Katherine Pence African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975. By Sara Pugach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 256. Paper $29.95. ISBN 9780472055562. In the Cold War battle for affinities of peoples around the globe, socialist states, such as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), decried ongoing racism and imperialism of the capitalist West and declared themselves as bastions of anti-racism and of solidarity with decolonizing nations in the Global South. One concrete way that East Germany and other Soviet-bloc states practiced this solidarity was by offering African students scholarships to study in university and vocational training programs, so they could return to build up their home countries through technical expertise. Sara Pugach's excellent new book shows that studying in East Germany was much more complicated for African exchange students than the official anti-racist party dogma purported. Using interviews and extensive research in German, British, Kenyan, and Ghanaian archives, Pugach finds that legacies of prewar racism continued into the GDR, creating deep ambivalence toward non-whites there. The book also helpfully analyzes humanitarianism and development aid by focusing not on state-level or European actors but on the perspectives of average students whose scholarships were [End Page 513] one aspect of aid and cultural diplomacy. As such, Pugach's work takes its place among the best new works that analyze the intersection of the Cold War and decolonization. The book is rich in its approach since it straddles both a transnational framework of flows across borders and a micro-history of everyday interactions between East Germans and African students. Pugach has importantly sought out sources giving voice to individual students, and she includes archival photos of the students throughout. Pugach examines African students' experiences from their selection as scholarship recipients through their complex travel routes to East Germany to their life while studying. Chapter One focuses on the first set of eleven students who came from Nigeria in 1951. Other chapters profile subsequent groups from socialist-aligned countries, such as Ghana or Mali, and non-aligned nations, such as Kenya. Pugach maintains the specificity of these diverse contexts, showing how ethnic divisions and changing politics in the home countries affected the students abroad. Chapter Two traces how students traveled through circuitous and difficult routes to East Germany, often through transit hubs such as Cairo. Chapter Three focuses on Ghana to exemplify how African countries selected students for study abroad. The GDR Ministry of Foreign Affairs often worked with local trade missions or government agencies, such as the Ghanaian Scholarships Secretariat, to identify prospective students. Socialist-leaning leaders, such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, and parties, such as Kenya's ZI","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Peter Sloterdijk, Philosopher of Germany's New Right","authors":"Kumars Salehi","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910190","url":null,"abstract":"abstract: Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's popularity among the German New Right is attributable to the fact that his perspective is identifiably conservative while eschewing rote traditionalism and anti-intellectual sloganeering. Sloterdijk portrays his critics as disingenuous or hysterical, but by harnessing the trappings of counterculture to undermine the perceived hegemony of liberal values, Sloterdijk's self-identified \"left-conservatism\" serves as both a model for the New Right and a gateway to their ideas for a mainstream audience. This paper explores why the primary concern of Sloterdijk's critics is the disinhibiting effect of his interventions on hierarchical instincts constrained by modest progress toward egalitarianism and inclusivity.","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postmemory and Oral History in Josef Winkler's Die Verschleppung and Die Ukrainerin : Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzählt ihre Geschichte","authors":"William Christopher Burwick","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910191","url":null,"abstract":"abstract: Josef Winkler's fourth novel, Die Verschleppung. Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzählt ihre ukrainische Kindheit (The deportation: Njetotschka Iljaschenko narrates her Ukrainian childhood, 1983) contributes to the Austrian discourse of trauma narratives, the experience of alterity, and the representation of politically disenfranchised persons and groups, adding the aspect of forced labor, human rights violations with the emphasis on Ukraine, oral history, and postmemory. This article examines the intersection of ethics and language in Winkler's mediation of Iljaschenko's autobiography in Die Verschleppung and the 2022 reprint Die Ukrainerin. Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzählt ihre Geschichte (The Ukrainian. Njetotschka Iljaschenko narrates her story) and explores the challenges facing literary mediation while maintaining fidelity to the historicity of oral history and postmemory.","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Germany and the Confessional Divide:Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 ed. by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910203","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Germany and the Confessional Divide:Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 ed. by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting Jeremy Stephen Roethler Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989. Edited by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. viii + 364. Hardback $149.00. ISBN 9781800730878. This collection surveys confessional relations from the inauguration of the Kaiserreich to the fall of the Berlin Wall, during which Germany transitioned from arguably Europe's most hyper-confessionalized polity, when hostility between Protestant and Catholic not only determined national political outcomes but also shaped intimate life, to the other end of the spectrum, when confessional identity hardly mattered, except, as narrated by Großbölting, in the realm of self-deprecating humor (326). The purpose of this collection is to explain why. While the book's title suggests a comprehensive survey, the distribution of chapters is uneven. After an Introduction by editors Ruff and Großbölting, Jeffrey Zalar singularly carries the burden of the Kaiserreich on his able shoulders. In his contribution about \"The Kulturkampf and Catholic Identity,\" Zalar explains how Catholics sought to prove to their hostile liberal and Protestant countrymen that they were just as German as they were. Internal Catholic discourse admitted that Catholic parity required improved Catholic material conditions and culture, thus self-affirming a Protestant and liberal trope about inferior Catholics. Zalar also documents that Catholics used their deep organizational network (then known as the Catholic \"milieu\") to make their case as dependable Germans, attending national events, for instance, and participating more broadly in the \"nationalization of the masses\" (borrowing from George Mosse) (31). Compared to the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich receive more extensive coverage. Klaus Große Kracht's piece \"The Catholic Kulturfront during the Weimar Republic\" demonstrates that even when confronted with a perceived common enemy (Bolshevism), instead of moving closer to their Protestant co-religionists, right-wing Catholics such as Karl Adam, Carl Schmitt, and Franz von Papen pivoted towards fascist authoritarianism instead, with ominous consequences (62–63). It is well-documented that conservative Catholic influencers (for instance, Archbishop Faulhaber of Munich-Freising) railed against the Revolution of 1918/19 and supported Weimar only tepidly; Benedikt Brunner tells the less appreciated story about why the Revolution and Weimar also unhinged conservative Protestants, even if, reflecting the still confessionally charged times, they would not make common cause against Weimar with Catholics. The redoubtable Jürgen Falter makes an appearance in this volume, adding updated detail to account for Catholic voting patterns during the final years of Weimar. He repeats his well","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910207","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock Paul Michael Lützeler February 1933: The Winter of Literature. By Uwe Wittstock. Translated by Daniel Bowles. Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2023. Pp. ix + 278. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 9781509553792. Uwe Wittstock hat mit seinem Buch über die Flucht der Hitlergegner in den ersten Wochen der Naziherrschaft eine Studie veröffentlicht, die bei den zeitgeschichtlich interessierten Mitgliedern der GSA auf großes Interesse stoßen wird. Es geht hier nicht nur um das Schicksal von Autor*innen, die in mehr oder weniger fremde Länder verbannt werden, sondern auch um ein historisches Lehrstück über die unglaublich schnelle Verwandlung einer liberalen Demokratie in ihr politisches Gegenteil: die terroristische Diktatur. Innerhalb von sechs Wochen werden die wirkungsmächtigsten Repräsentant*innen der deutschen Literatur der Weimarer Republik vertrieben—man denke an Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Oskar Maria Graf, Mascha Kaléko, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich und Thomas Mann, Erika und Klaus Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Gabriele Tergit, Ernst Toller, Carl Zuckmayer. Das geschieht, weil ein föderativ organisierter Rechtsstaat durch einen zentralistisch strukturierten Terrorapparat ersetzt wird. Nach der Ernennung Hitlers zum Reichskanzler am 30. Januar 1933 unterzeichnet Reichspräsident Hindenburg alle vom \"Führer\" der Nationalsozialisten gewünschten sogenannten Notverordnungen. Der Präsident gibt auch dem Drängen des Kanzlers nach, Neuwahlen fünf Wochen später anzusetzen. Von freien Wahlen kann da schon nicht mehr die Rede sein, weil Hitler die gegnerischen Parteien Parteien (Zentrum, SPD, KPD) massiv im Wahlkampf behindert und für seine NSDAP alle nur denkbaren staatlichen Mittel für propagandistische Zwecke missbraucht. Zudem füllen Industrielle die leeren Kassen der Hitlerpartei. Wittstock schildert den rasanten gesellschaftlich-politischen Umbruch von Tag zu Tag, von Woche zu Woche. Das Bemerkenswerte ist, dass er die Gleichzeitigkeit der erfolgreichen Schachzüge Hitlers und der ständig scheiternden Versuche von Opposition und Widerstand in Erinnerung ruft. In Hitlers Partei gilt das Führerprinzip: seine Stör-, Verfolgungs- und Verhaftungsbefehle werden von SA und SS sofort befolgt. In der Sektion Dichtung der Preußischen Akademie der Künste will ihr Vorsitzender [End Page 503] Heinrich Mann sich nicht zu Loyalitätserklärungen Hitler gegenüber erpressen lassen. Er tritt zurück, überlässt aber dadurch das Schicksal seiner Akademie-Sektion dem Nationalsozialisten Hanns Jost und dem Mitläufer Gottfried Benn. Noch nie ist in der Literaturgeschichte so genau im Zusammenhang beschrieben worden, wie, auf welche Weise, mit welchen Mitteln und bei Berücksichtigung der familiären Verhältnisse fast gleichzeitig Autor*innen oder Verleger, Kritiker*innen und Akademieangehörige die Flucht vor der neuen Diktatur ergreifen. Zuweilen helfen nur rasche Geistesgegenwart oder glückliche Umstände, di","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program by Kevin McLaughlin (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910206","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program by Kevin McLaughlin Esther Leslie The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program. By Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Pp. iv + 208. Paper $32.00. ISBN 9781531501693. This book is a concentrated contribution to the diverse field of Walter Benjamin studies, a crowded field but one that endlessly offers unploughed vistas, lending credence to Benjamin's own concern with the unfurling afterlife of works. Kevin McLaughlin's new study is about the life of creative work and its relation to life in general, as theorized by Benjamin in the early part of his writerly career, through essays written at a point when he was still a student under the umbrella of the university. Across three chapters, McLaughlin's study focuses on Benjamin's essay on two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, \"Timidity\" and \"The Poet's Courage,\" written around the start of World War I; \"The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,\" Benjamin's PhD dissertation, submitted in 1919; and the long essay \"Goethe's Elective Affinities,\" written around 1924, just before Benjamin was compelled to strike out as an independent scholar. These writings by Benjamin are compact, difficult works in which are developed and extended critical vocabularies of truth, myth, the poeticized, inner form and content, and so on. McLaughlin's central interest is in the ways in which the critical works initiate discussions of what he conceives of as a specifically Benjaminian take on the idea of the Book of Life. This is worked through in relation to a concept of densely layered textures in language, which evokes a complex notion of Geschichte (history or story), understood critically through its core embedded word Schicht or layer. McLaughlin's study undertakes an unpicking of terms, focusing on questions that revolve, in complex and unpredictable ways, around language. This is unsurprising. As well as being a renowned commentator and critic of Benjamin's contribution, McLaughlin is also one of the translators of Benjamin's Arcades Project. He has stared deeply into words, divining in them panoplies of connotation and resonance. Under investigation here is the meaning of the word philology, or more [End Page 501] broadly, the resources of the practice of philology for opening texts up to historical understanding, which means an opening up to lived life. Equally under examination are the caverns of meaning in the small word life and the ways in which it multiplies and repeatedly extends in Benjamin's work as Lebenden, Erdleben, Fortleben, and so on. How to translate these terms is put under pressure here: life, living, life on Earth, and continuing life might be only some ways of rendering the conceptual heft of these terms in English. To be attentive to resonances is to be alert to what theoretical insights are carried across in translations. A compound word used by Benjamin lends the book its title: Lebens","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136093894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin by Bettina Stoetzer (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910198","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin by Bettina Stoetzer Thomas Sullivan Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin. By Bettina Stoetzer. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 328. Paper $28.95. ISBN 9781478018605. Ruins, voids, and overgrown spaces have long been a distinctive feature of Berlin's built environment. Scarred by massive destruction during World War II, divided during the Cold War, and then subject to major development and speculation following [End Page 517] reunification, Berlin has been shaped by cyclical patterns of rupture, destruction, and re-imagination. Repeated regenerations produced a city, over time, with fragmented gaps that often became overgrown, hosting spontaneous, ever-evolving botanical communities. Within these spaces of ruination and spontaneous growth, unplanned and unique environments emerged, combining expected plant and animal species with \"unexpected newcomers\": non-native species arriving via war, displacement, migration, and trade (37). The study of these sites by celebrated urban ecologist Herbert Sukopp and his collaborators made Berlin a center for the study of \"ruderal ecologies\": unexpected, unplanned, and unpredictable assemblages of plants and animals spontaneously emerging within disturbed urban spaces. A substantial number of scholarly publications, including recent books such as Jens Lachmund's Greening Berlin: The Co-production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature (2013) and Matthew Gandy's Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (2022), have further examined and analyzed these spaces. Bettina Stoetzer's book, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (2022), similarly takes Berlin's ruderal ecologies as a starting point but utilizes them in a new way, arguing that they offer an alternate way of examining urban life and processes. Positing that ruination and rubble are \"central to the urban landscapes we inhabit\" and the constant product of \"social exclusions, capitalist urbanization, and profound environmental change,\" Stoetzer proposes and advocates the use of a \"ruderal analytic\" (25–26). Building on the ecological understanding of the term, Stoetzer conceptualizes \"ruderal\" organisms as arising in conditions of hybridity, disturbance, and inhospitableness. The ruderal, then, is \"neither wild nor domesticated\" and arises as the product of \"juxtapositions of contrasting environments\" (4). This conceptualization of ruderal-as-analytic echoes the ecological version in multiple ways. Just as ruderal plants arise in disparate, in-between, and unexpected spaces, a ruderal analytic encourages an ethnographic approach focused on \"catching glimpses of seemingly disparate worlds\" (5) and focuses attention on the gaps and cracks of modern urban life (25). Echoing the hybridity of ruderal plants, which often trouble categorization, this approach calls on researchers to quest","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contrasting Ways of Knowing: Overlapping Epistemologies in the Thought and Lives of Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Steiner","authors":"Henry Holland","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910187","url":null,"abstract":"abstract: First Theodor Adorno in 1965, and then a second wave of scholars in the 1980s, noted that the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) engaged substantially with theosophy, particularly when young. This included Bloch's critique of the new religious movement anthroposophy, which some see as an offshoot of theosophy, and of anthroposophy's founder, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). I address the lack of English publications on the content of this engagement, and integrate other current questions about Steiner, including the centrality of racism to his whole philosophy. Comparing Bloch's epistemology with Steiner's ultimately reveals much that is irreconcilable, alongside significant points of convergence.","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film by Maria Stehle (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910199","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film by Maria Stehle Joela Jacobs Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film. By Maria Stehle. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023. Pp. 186. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 9781640141254. Maria Stehle's Plants, Places, and Power tackles the complex intersection of land and belonging in the German context, which brings together the reverberations of the Nazi Blut und Boden legacy as well as European colonizer history with the critical urgency of the environmental future. By examining contemporary literature and film with feminist and anti-racist tools, the book aims to put forward intersectional models of relating to places that are both socially and ecologically just. In doing so, Stehle highlights topographies, the layers of history that shape places in myriad ways, and she emphasizes that place-making entails the resignification of such meanings. In other words, she shows how the figures in her primary sources both fail and succeed in inclusive place-making for themselves and others. While some of them fail because of their violent colonizer approaches or because they continue to center whiteness, others stubbornly hold on to new places after the loss of their home or defiantly make place for themselves despite repeated rejection and thus change who gets to belong. In Stehle's own words, \"to make place is to form new kinds of interrelations\" (160). The new alliances and ways of kin-making that go along with this process involve not just other people but landscapes, gardens, and forests, as well as parks, cemeteries, and greenhouses, which are summed up in the book's titular focus on plants in the plural. While this is not necessarily an approach to plants for their own sake or in their species specificity (with the fascinating exception of the pencil cactus in chapter five), it is a tool to read texts and people in and through nature toward both social and environmental justice. In practice, this can entail a historical or environmental analysis of background landscapes and rural spaces, or the cultural and aesthetic significance of flowers, fruit, or potted plants, while on other occasions, it involves the unpacking of pervasive metaphors of belonging such as roots and stem. In doing so, Stehle reminds us that plants are everywhere and worth paying attention to because they are productive lenses for analysis—and what's more, that plants can be political actors in relationships of care and collaboration. In addition to its combined methodological focus on social and ecological justice, the book's second stated goal is the expansion of the canon of German studies materials in antiracist, feminist, and decolonizing ways. The primary works Stehle analyzes are all composed by artists who identify as female, queer, of color, and/or [End Page 520] have experienced forced migration, and they range from Juli Zeh and ","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136093879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2023.a910194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.a910194","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder Philipp Nielsen Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture. By Lynette Widder. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2022. Pp. 320. Cloth €52.00. ISBN 9783856764272. Lynette Widder's Year Zero to Economic Miracle charts the architectural practice of Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, two prominent West German architects. Widder focuses on five iconic public commissions from the late 1940s, immediately following the establishment of the Federal Republic, until the early 1960s, with Schwippert's St. Hedwig's Cathedral, completed in 1963, literally straddling the German division. Next to the cathedral, the buildings covered (in chronological order) are: the West German parliament building (Bundeshaus) in Bonn (1948–1949) by Schwippert and the Academy of the Arts in Nuremberg (1950–1954) by Ruf for the early years; the West German Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, which both men designed together with Egon Eiermann; and the College for Public Administration (Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften) in Speyer (1957–1960) by Ruf. The book is structured into four chronological sections, three of which focus on the buildings and one on theoretical debates in postwar West Germany. In addition to the historical chapters, four more personal reflection chapters conclude each section: one on job books, one on the architecture critic Ulrich Conrads, one on the Ruf family archive, and one on construction drawings. These four reflection chapters chart Widder's own growing interest in Ruf and Schwippert and in becoming an architectural historian. Here, her evocative descriptions of architectural sources and of personal encounters do more than trace a personal journey. These chapters enrich the narrative of postwar architecture and architectural history itself when Widder describes the fate of the Ruf archive or the way the workbooks for the St. Hedwig's Cathedral reveal the complicated process of building across the German-German border. Widder's book forms part of a growing interest in postwar West German—and to a lesser extent East German—architecture and its preservation, which itself follows on the heels of a new wave of historiography on the postwar period. Notably, the book keeps East and West German architectural and political history connected by including St. Hedwig's Cathedral. The architectural clearly dominates, and Widder is an expert in making the field's materiality accessible to the lay reader. The impressive [End Page 509] visual quality of the book, with its over 150 images, many of them in color, further aids Widder in bringing her arguments and the architects' work to life. Widder has two wider objectives beyond recounting the careers of Schwippert and Ruf. For one, she situates the work of the two architects within the West German postwar debate about the genealogy of mod","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}