Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Language & Literature — English & American

Kater's comprehensive study presents a detailed sweep of leading cultural figures along with representative works they produced. Nazi artistic policy grew from an assumption that culture reflected race, so, therefore, controlling culture would strengthen racial identity. By weeding out unrepresentative cultural products, the state would also weed out members who did not belong in a pure racial state. The increased centralization of artists' efforts began with reorganization of the film industry under Goebbels. However, throughout the entire field of visual and performing arts, no single standard of Nazi Party aesthetic expressing German racial culture emanated from a single source. Rather, Kater describes the sundry levels of party power, from district leader (Gauleiter) through to the highest party ranks, including the Nazi elite, competing with each other even as they claimed to be working together toward Hitler's goals of a strengthened racial identity. This is a solid resource for exploring the arts as an expression of Nazi culture and its ideals. The endnotes and bibliography provide key sources for gaining entry into more-detailed narratives along with primary sources. Kater's book is a must for any serious student of Hitler's Germany.Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students through faculty.

In this edited and abridged English-language version of his two-volume biography of Ibsen first published in Norweigan (2006-7), prize-winning Norwegian historian, literary critic, and biographer Ivo de Figueiredo provides a stellar life of the celebrated father of modern European drama, Henrik Ibsen, in terms of both the man (as private individual) and the writer (as masked social actor). Eschewing close readings of the plays in favor of illuminating the more camouflaged aspects of his subject's activities, Figueiredo focuses on Ibsen's preoccupation with the revolt of the human spirit--understood as a permanent phenomenological state of being that valorizes the unfettered will--against the stultifying ideals of repressive societies, be they imposed shackles forged from specious political ideologies or religion's crimping strictures. Ibsen emerges as an animated farrago of contradictions. He was a genius at internalizing the pressing issues of his day and radically transforming them into strikingly original expressions in dramatic form, yet he was a flawed human being who belligerently hurled at others idealistic demands that he himself could not satisfy.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

With this translation into English, Decker's 2012 biography of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), the 1946 Nobel laureate and recipient of the Goethe Prize, is now the definitive English-language account of Hesse's life. Every author's work is determined to some extent by life experiences. Hesse's oeuvre manifests this truth to a high degree. Decker exploits this phenomenon by providing intimate details of Hesse's life and looking at how they explain the author's unique place in 20th-century literature. In doing so Decker reveals Hesse's faults and his eccentricities: his disdain of women (especially his three wives), his neutral positions on important political issues, his misunderstood antiwar stance, his extreme honesty in relationships with friends and enemies, his kindness to perfect strangers, and his Manichean struggle (going back to his childhood) with pietistic parents who neither understood nor tolerated their gifted and rebellious son and so drove him into depression, a mental institution, and suicide attempts. His troubled upbringing affected his sexuality late into his life. Not even years of psychoanalysis solved his problems. Only his compulsive writing saved him from his demons and enabled him to attain a ripe old age. Decker makes clear that Hesse's restless soul was the basis of his books, which spoke to many people around the world.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Lorenz's critical powers are on display in her social analysis and diagnoses of characters in German works published from 1920 to 1950. The book proceeds chronologically, starting with an examination of the Nazi Party platform formulated after WW I. The nonspecialist reader will probably be most interested Lorenz's treatment of familiar work: Hitler's Mein Kampf, Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a propaganda film of the Nazi Party rally in 1934. Just as interesting to generalists will be discussions of the well-known anti-fascist works The Private Life of the Master Race (officially, The Fear and Misery of the Third Reich) by Bertolt Brecht and Mephisto by Klaus Mann, and postwar works about the tragedy of the "good" German soldier caught up in the evil of Hitler's war: Carl Zuckmayer's The Devil's General, Wolfgang Borchert's The Man Outside, and Heinrich Boll's novella The Train Was on Time. Of more educational value, however, are Lorenz's discussion of extremely influential works that are now mostly forgotten: e.g., Arthur Dinter's novel The Sin against the Blood and Hans Gunther's Racial Science of the German Nation. Analysis of these works, which successfully promoted National Socialist values in the 1920s, make the book particularly valuable.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.