Andreas Höfele

Beate Kellner

Denkmuster und Repräsentationsformen vom Alten Testament bis in die Neuzeit

Natur - Geschlecht - Politik

No Hamlets is the first critical account of the role of Shakespeare in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the Empire in 1871 to the 'Bonn Republic' of the Cold War era. In this sustained study, Andreas Höfele begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and follows the rightist engagement with Shakespeare to the poet Stefan George and his circle, including Ernst Kantorowicz, and the literary efforts of the young Joseph Goebbels during the Weimar Republic, continuing with the Shakespeare debate in the Third Reich and its aftermath in the controversy over 'inner emigration' and concluding with Carl Schmitt's Shakespeare writings of the 1950s. Central to this enquiry is the identification of Germany and, more specifically, German intellectuals with Hamlet. The special relationship of Germany with Shakespeare found highly personal and at the same time highIy political expression in this recurring identification, and in its denial. But Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character with strong appeal: Carl Schmitt's largely still unpublished diaries of the 1920s reveal an obsessive engagement with Othello which has never before been examined. Interest in German philosophy and political thought has increased in recent Shakespeare studies. No Hamlets brings historical depth to this international discussion. Illuminating the constellations that shaped and were shaped by specific appropriations of Shakespeare, Höfele shows how individual engagements with Shakespeare and a whole strand of Shakespeare reception were embedded in German history from the 1870s to the 1950s and eventually 1989, the year of German reunification.

German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt

No Hamlets

Andreas Höfele presents this critical account of the role of Shakespeare in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany, from the 1870s to the Cold War era. He explores the identification of Germany with Hamlet, and shows how a whole strand of Shakespeare reception became embedded in German history over this period.

Michael Dobson

Martin Procházka

Hanna Scolnicov

Selected contributions to the most prestigious international event in Shakespeare studies, the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress (2011), represent major trends in the field in historical and present-day contexts. Special attention is given to the impact of Shakespeare on diverse cultures, from the Native Americans to China and Japan.

Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress

Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances

Werner von Koppenfels

The volume analyses some of the travelling and bridge-building activities that went on in Renaissance Europe, mainly but not exclusively across the Channel, true to Montaigne's epoch-making program of describing 'the passage'. Its emphasis on Anglo-Continental relations ensures a firm basis in English literature, but its particular appeal lies in its European point of view, and in the perspectives it opens up into other areas of early modern culture, such as pictorial art, philosophy, and economics. The multiple implications of the go-between concept make for structured diversity. The chapters of this book are arranged in three stages. Part 1 ('Mediators') focuses on influential go-betweens, both as groups, like the translators, and as individual mediators. The second part of this book ('Mediations') is concerned with individual acts of mediation, and with the 'mental topographies' they presuppose, reflect and redraw in their turn. Part 3 ('Representations') looks at the role of exemplary intermediaries and the workings of mediation represented on the early modern English stage. Key features High quality anthology on phenomena of cultural exchange in the Renaissance era With contributions by outstanding international experts

Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe

Renaissance Go-Betweens

Die Naturalisierung der Geschlechterordnung hat eine eminent politische Bedeutung. Dies lässt sich an der Geschichte der Geschlechter in vormodernen Gesellschaften beobachten, gewinnt aber auch in unseren Tagen erneut unerwartete Aktualität.0Die vermeintliche ?Natur?-Ordnung der Geschlechter, die teils explizit behauptet, teils aber auch begründungslos vorausgesetzt wird, demonstriert die Wirkungsmacht von Naturalisierung in besonderem Maße. Gerade hier wird die Umwandlung gesellschaftlich-kulturell bedingter und historisch variabler Verhältnisse in vermeintlich ahistorische und invariable Naturgegebenheit und Naturnotwendigkeit exemplarisch deutlich. Der Band zeigt Strategien und Modelle der Naturalisierung der Geschlechterordnung sowie die Breite und Varianz der Geschlechterrollen vom Alten Testament und der klassischen Antike über naturphilosophische Spekulationen im Mittelalter bis in die Literaturen und die Kunst der Neuzeit.

Natur, Geschlecht, Politik

Christoph Levin

Björn Quiring

Reinhard Müller

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both. From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar 'formations of the formless'. Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern 'chaos theories' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

Andreas Höfele

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