LibGuides: German: Books

Featured New EBooks in Ritter Library

Absolute War by Mark Hewitson Wars have played a fundamental part in modern German history. Although infrequent, conflicts involving German states have usually been extensive and often catastrophic, constituting turning-points for Europe as a whole. Absolute War is the first in a series of studies from Mark Hewitson thatexplore how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently imagined and understood during peacetime, from Clausewitz and Kleist to Junger and Adorno. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shiftscharacterising the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. The studies argue that the ease - or reluctance - with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to soldiers' and civilians' attitudes to violence anddeath, as well as to long-term transformations in contemporaries' conceptualisation of conflict. Absolute War reassesses the meaning of military conflict for the millions of German subjects who were directly implicated in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Based on a re-reading of contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs, official correspondence, press reports, pamphlets, treatises, plays,and cartoons, this volume refocuses attention on combat and conscription as the central components of new forms of mass warfare. It concentrates, in particular, on the impact of violence, killing, and death on many soldiers' and some civilians' experiences and subsequent memories of conflict. Warhas often been conceived of as "an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds", as Clausewitz put it, but the relationship between military conflicts and violent acts remains a problematic one.
Publication Date: 2017
Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German by Agnes Jäger (Editor); Gisella Ferraresi (Editor); Helmut Weiß (Editor) This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into central aspects of clause structure and word order, outlining the different stages of their historicaldevelopment. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis with descriptive generalizations, supported by a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. Reference is also made throughout to the more traditional descriptive model of the German clause. The volume is divided into three parts that correspond to the main parts of the clause. Part I explores the left periphery, looking at verb placement (verb second and competing orders), the prefield, and adverbial connectives, while Part II discusses the middle field, including pronominal syntax,the order of full NPs, and the history of negation. The final part examines the right periphery with chapters covering basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in historical syntaxand the Germanic languages, and for both descriptive and theoretical linguists alike.
Publication Date: 2018
Leipzig after Bach by Jeffrey S. Sposato Leipzig, Germany, is renowned as the city where Johann Sebastian Bach worked as a church musician until his death in 1750, and where Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy directed the famed Gewandhaus orchestra until his own death in 1847. But the century in between these events was critically importantas well. During this period, Leipzig's church music enterprise was convulsed by repeated external threats - a growing middle class that viewed music as an object of public consumption, religious and political tumult, and the chaos of the Seven Years and Napoleonic wars. Jeffrey S. Sposato's Leipzig After Bach examines how these forces changed church and concert life in Leipzig. Whereas most European cities saw their public concerts grow out of secular institutions such as a royal court or an opera theater, neither of these existed when Leipzig's first subscriptionconcert series, the Grosse Concert, was started in 1743. Instead, the city had a thriving Lutheran church-music enterprise that had been brought to its zenith by Bach. Paid subscription concerts therefore found their roots in Leipzig's church music tradition, with important and unique results. Theseincluded a revolving door between the Thomaskantor position and the Gewandhaus directorship, as well as public concerts with a distinctly sacred flavor. Late in the century, as church attendance faltered and demand for subscription concerts rose, the Gewandhaus dominated the musical life of Leipzig,influencing church music programming in turn. Examining liturgical documents, orchestral programs, and dozens of unpublished works of church and concert music, Leipzig After Bach sheds new light on a century that redefined the relationship between sacred and secular musical institutions.
Publication Date: 2018
Post-Unification Turkish German Cinema by Gozde Naiboglu This book offers a post-representational approach to a range of fiction and non-fiction films that deal with labour migration from Turkey to Germany. Engaging with materialist philosophies of process, it offers analyses of films by Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Aysun Bademsoy, Seyhan Derin, Harun Farocki, Yüksel Yavuz and Feo Aladag. Shifting the focus from the longstanding concerns of integration, identity and cultural conflict, Gozde Naiboglu shows that these films offer new expressions of lived experience under late capitalism through themes of work, social reproduction, unemployment and insecure work, exhaustion and precarity, thereby calling for a rethinking of the established ideas of class, community and identity.
Publication Date: 2018
The Sinews of Habsburg Power by William D. Godsey The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituteda central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. The monarchy's composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Lower Austrian Estates - a leading representative body and privileged corps - formed a vital, if changing, element underlying Habsburg international success and resilience. With its capital at Vienna, the archduchy below the riverEnns (the historic designation of Lower Austria) was geographically, politically, and financially a key Habsburg possession. Fiscal-military exigency induced the Estates to take part in new and evolving arrangements of power that served the purposes of government; in turn the Estates were able inpreviously little-understood ways and within narrowing boundaries to preserve vital interests in a changing world. The Estates survived because they were necessary, not only thanks to their increasing financial potency, but also because they offered a politically viable way of exacting ever-larger quantities of money, men, and other resources from local society. These circumstances would persist as ruling becamemore regularized, formalized, and homogenized, and as the very understanding of the Estates as a social and political phenomenon was evolving.
Publication Date: 2018