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Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann’s novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick’s horror film reflects its creator’s and its era’s struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hitzer argues that 'the history of "being diagnosed with cancer" should not be told as a straightforward story of liberation from the conventions of paternalistic dishonesty' (p. 154) and includes an illuminating discussion of Emperor Friedrich III whose death from laryngeal cancer in 1888 occasioned the first extensive coverage of cancer by the German media. While the book covers the history of cancer in both men and women, each chapter begins with a biographical or autobiographical portrait of a woman's experience with the disease. Bettina Hitzer, Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden and I Privatdozentin i at the Freie Universität Berlin, has written what may fairly be called a definitive history of cancer in twentieth-century Germany. [Extracted from the article]