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In what began as a piece against the Nazi concentration camps, the composer Hanns Eisler and his collaborator, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, created the eleven-movement, twelve-tone Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50 (1935–1958) to communicate political ideas. They soon expanded it to articulate what they saw as the very roots of fascism: militarism and capitalism. To explain the problems of class conflict in Europe, Eisler and Brecht focused on two groups that were central to Marxist–Leninist ideology: peasants and industrial workers. In two movements, the Peasant Cantata (Bauernkantate) and Workers Cantata (Arbeiterkantate), they portrayed long-standing injustices that peasants and industrial workers endured in the twentieth century. Eisler thus viewed the Deutsche Sinfonie, his largest and most ambitious work, as a way of explaining the arc of modern German history—from the late nineteenth century through to the 1940s—and how the Nazis came to power. The article further argues that the Deutsche Sinfonie can be analysed in relation to the discourse on human rights, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Micheline Ishay and other human rights theorists and historians, as a contribution to what Mark Philip Bradley calls the ‘global human rights imagination’. The article explains the vital role that the Peasant Cantata and Workers Cantata had in the overall conception of the work and how human rights issues were at the core of that musical idea. To place the Deutsche Sinfonie in historical and cultural context, this interdisciplinary analysis integrates methodologies of both cultural history and musicology.

Albrecht von Wallenstein was one of the most colourful and controversial figures of the Thirty Years War, and his dismissal by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and eventual assassination was one of the most talked about events of the conflict. This article examines how the downfall of the imperial generalissimo and massacre of his subordinate officers at Eger, in Bohemia, were viewed and reported across Europe at various pro- and anti-Habsburg courts. In addition to assessing how Wallenstein’s demise was discussed in diplomatic circles, the article addresses how the events at Eger were portrayed in newsprint published in the German states as well as further afield in Sweden, England and the Italian states. An examination of political and private correspondence, as well as a comparison of news publications from across the continent, provides valuable insight into how information and intelligence were collected and disseminated throughout early modern Europe. By examining the depiction of Wallenstein’s downfall in the arts, such as poetry and stage plays in various European cities in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and in the mid- and later 1630s, it is also possible to determine what information had been received in different locations at different times. The final section of the article addresses how Wallenstein’s reputation had changed by the end of the seventeenth century, with the result that he was almost universally regarded as a notorious rebel and would-be regicide.

This article examines family memoirs and novels by children or grandchildren of East Germany’s literary founding generation. Written after reunification, this generational literature looks back on family life in the German Democratic Republic. It paints a group portrait of a distinct milieu in East German society and inside the Communist elite. Shaped by politics, habitus and social background, this milieu was stamped by German history, Jewish history and the history of Communism. A unifying thread runs through this family literature: intense generational dissonance stemming from parental silence about the Nazi past and the socialist present. In children’s memory, parents’ stories about exile clung to a narrative of victorious anti-fascist struggle and left out their suffering as Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe or as Communists in the Stalinist USSR. The article traces the postwar reverberations of silence about the past. Younger generations asked the founding generation who in the family survived, and how, and who did not survive, and why. How, they wondered, could parents condone socialist repression after resisting Nazi terror? Children confronted parental silence emotionally, culturally and politically, in a similar mode, the article argues, to the generational stance of 68ers in West Germany. In their discontent with anti-fascist parents, however, this group of East Germans shared the point of view of youth rebels in non-German Europe who challenged parents who opposed, not supported, National Socialism.

This article uses the previously unjustly discarded early thirteenth-century hagiographical text Vitae s. Heinrici additamentum to show how different ideals of female sainthood could be combined within one figure. In two of its chapters, the Additamentum presents two distinct but not contradictory images of its female protagonist, Cunigunde (d. 1033), the wife of the German emperor Henry II (d. 1024). The first chapter of the text portrays Henry and Cunigunde’s marriage as dominated by consensual chastity and emphasizes the spouses’ equality. On their wedding night, within the privacy of their bedchamber, their mutual wish for chastity takes the place of any gendered expressions and is the reason for the blossoming deep affection between them. Following ideals of love and consensual marriage from the twelfth century onwards, this chapter is situated within contemporary discussions of marital affection. In contrast, the third and last chapter of the Additamentum is set within the public space of the imperial court. Cunigunde, a powerful empress, goes through a trial by ordeal to clear herself of an accusation of infidelity. In this chapter, both she and Henry are clearly gendered, but Cunigunde is behaving considerably more ‘manly’ than her husband and ultimately proves herself a saintly virago. Both the ordeal and the virago were predominantly early and central medieval motifs, situating this chapter within a different literary tradition from the first. The Additamentum thus proves the coexistence and possible intertwining of different models of female sainthood.

[Trust Exercise] reminds us that visibility and recognition, for racialized groups who desire the psychic satisfaction of being and feeling seen, are also fraught and contingent on those doing the viewing.

Literary scholars are understandably keen nowadays to compensate for institutional vulnerability by asserting the field’s indispensability. But they haven’t stopped there. Critics are positioning themselves at the metacritical epicenter of solutions to crises in the humanities at large. Is this a mark of extradisciplinary generosity, a selfless imparting of reformist know-how? Or is the appetite for standing at the heart of cross-disciplinary rejuvenation the latest installment in literary studies’ longstanding enchantment with its own transformative potentiality, reaffirming its unflagging belief in the capacity to matter beyond the shared lexicons and methodological precincts of its own constituents? Provoking these questions, Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment (2021) and Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason (2021) offer audacious propositions for revivifying the way we articulate the value of connecting aesthetic experiences and humanist literacies to the production of knowledge. To achieve this, they depend on certain generalizations about the collective behaviors and inclinations that have shaped literary and cultural studies’ fortunes, generalizations that allow them to ascertain not only how aesthetic education and humanist reason, respectively, might contribute to the humanities’ durability, but also how scholars might export their critical and pedagogical expertise far beyond the boundaries of their own discipline.[These] books demonstrate in revealing ways the stakes of literary critics positioning themselves at the source—as the source?—from which urgent arguments flow about the utility and exportability of expertise, about the moral and political valences of critical writing, and about the value of getting a humanist education.

This essay situates Marianne Noble’s Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (2019) and Hannah Walser’s Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2022) in the current conversation our discipline has been having about sympathy/empathy. Noble and Walser describe ways of knowing other minds that avoid the dangers the discipline has associated with sympathy/empathy—foremost among them, the harm that comes from the assumption on the part of a witness to suffering that they can understand exactly what the sufferer is feeling. Noble finds in a group of nineteenth-century authors a conceptualization of sympathy that honors the differences between people and a state of benevolent not-knowing; Walser investigates how an overlapping cluster of nineteenth-century authors depicts ways of knowing other minds that do not require mind-reading. By making explicit the extent to which Noble’s and Walser’s exhilarating, rigorous studies align with our discipline’s association of empathy with a myriad of ethical harms, this essay seeks to carve out a space outside of this antipathy and suggest that literary sympathy can be seen as a narrative resource, with unpredetermined ethical effects, rather than an inevitable ethical lapse.This antipathy [towards empathy] has left the literary scholar with three options regarding [it]: (1) one can point out its dangers and offer more salubrious methods for interpersonal connection; (2) one can try to rescue empathy by demonstrating there are other ways of conceptualizing it; or (3) one can defend it.

This essay offers a close reading of Lauren Berlant’s posthumously published book, On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022), while addressing its place in the critic’s body of work, especially in relation to the field changing project of Cruel Optimism (2011).This is a Lauren Berlant book . . . which means that readers are tasked with following a critical eye that has grown increasingly more interested in when and how clarity falters . . . than in marshaling cultural criticism to shore up the pretense of understanding and knowing.

This essay review discusses the Reclaim Her Name project and Radicals, a two-volume anthology of writings by US women.Collaboration and community have been at the heart of the feminist recovery of American literary works from the beginning.

Beginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants based on their favorite books. Unexpected character combinations frequently appeared on the same stage. Shakespeare’s Falstaff stood beside Dickens’s Little Nell; Longfellow’s Hiawatha rubbed shoulders with Old Mother Goose. For attendees, these events offered peculiar thrills. Similar to today’s fan conventions and cosplay events, participants engaged their cherished texts anew through physical enactment. Meanwhile, spectators could witness the totality of their reading experiences within a single shared space. Amateur play suddenly brought so many literary works to three-dimensional life—and all at once. Despite their amusements, however, the carnivals also fell short of loftier goals. First, organizers sought to advance a definitive literary canon in America, but they only affirmed Eurocentric texts that no longer dominated the marketplace. Second, the events might have produced an innovative form of theater, yet clumsy staging and spectatorial disorientation stymied these efforts. Thus, the authors’ carnivals left behind not only a legacy of spectacular fandom but also one of squandered cultural potential.US authors’ carnivals finally demonstrate[d] both the possibilities and the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. . . . [D]espite their estimable amusements . . . the carnivals ultimately proved resistant to the literary and theatrical cultures they intended to bolster.

This essay evaluates how the three writers under review contribute to a persistent discussion about American identity and the many debates that still circulate around it—what it is and isn’t, and who it includes, fails to include, or shouldn’t include. Individually, each author tries to add nuance and contemporary problematics to the debates. Collectively, moreover, they remind the reader that, despite the work of identity politics in its many forms throughout the twentieth century and since; despite the increased secularization of the nation, or at least its culture; and despite even the election of a Black president or the presidential candidacy of a woman, these debates about race, gender, sexuality, and the place of religion in American life are just as significant now as they have ever been. Instead of seeing racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious fervor as remnants of the past or as legacies of beliefs that have been surpassed through progress, each book works to show how the fights over national identity are very much ongoing.“Despite how weathered this material has become . . . battles for equality are still pitched over the same ideas of a national sovereignty embedded in a frontier mentality that . . . sees the very work of inclusion and representation itself as the failure of the nation.”

Drawing on recent research on the intersections of race and atmosphere, this essay considers thermal sensation as a nonrepresentational sensory modality for staging atmospheric racial disparities. I begin with discussions of research on the physical, psychological, and affective consequences of heat exposure and scholarship on the disparities encoded in thermal landscapes—especially “urban heat islands” where Black and Brown communities are disproportionately exposed to extreme temperatures that exacerbate preexisting health vulnerabilities. I consider a range of literary and cultural works by Nella Larsen, Chester Himes, and Spike Lee that represent the physical and affective implications of thermal disparities, and conclude with an extended discussion of the nonrepresentational, embodied affordances of thermal sensation in Rashid Johnson’s restaging of LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman in a Manhattan sauna.What kinds of knowledge and affective involvement might be afforded by a direct, nonrepresentational aesthetics of thermoception? . . . How might an immersive aesthetics of thermoception sensitize audiences to the spatial and atmospheric dynamics of racialization?

This essay reviews recent scholarly work on EcoHorror and Post-Apocalyptic science fiction. It pays particular attention to the influence of Stacey Alaimo’s call for attention to the ethics of “transcorporeality” when it comes to reading horror, a need to imagine the human and nonhuman not as a binary but as intermeshed and mutually dependent. Hybridity in horror might thus present something not monstrous but politically desirable. Similarly, the essay explores the ways in which scholarship and public intellectuals have tended to see the recent boom in post-apocalyptic writing as either indicating the durability of late capitalism or the moment of its collapse and reshaping into something new.The books under review examine the outpouring of ecological horror and postapocalyptic fiction in the second half of the twentieth century and into the present. Why have such stories come so forcefully into the literary and filmic marketplace over the last 50 years or so?

This essay-review is centered on two recently published contemporary works about language, literature, embodiment, and ritual: Ana-Maurine Lara’s Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (2020) and Mecca Jamila Sullivan’s The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Poetics in the African Diaspora (2021). Exploring creative and critical praxis as method and object of study, both authors provide innovative studies of queerness and queer worldmaking in the work of African diasporic spiritual and artistic communities.Lara’s and Sullivan’s arguments seem most relevant and timely for what twenty-first–century Black theorizing must do: refuse US exceptionalism, solidify transnational solidarities/relations across the African Diaspora, . . . better prepare for the abolition of gender.