This essay portrays the “law of the good neighbor” as the principle of the Warburg Library's collections — as the argument for their expansion and coherence, as well as the principle governing the scholarly practice inspired by the Warburg Institute and “Warburg school” of cultural analysis. The essay includes a tribute to Anne Marie Meyer (1919 – 2004), Warburg scholar and long-time affiliate of the Institute, with special emphasis on the question that she uniquely raised: “Exactly what was the relation (...) between [Aby] Warburg's research on paganism in the Renaissance and his meditations and fears about Judaism (and Jews)?”. (shrink)

The political sphere Arendt strove throughout her career to defend and restore depended upon the performative abilities of its participant speakers. But Arendt's theatricality is that of the speech act, not of the stage in a literal sense, where original utterances and originary deeds are not primarily at stake. Arendt versus Zweig replays the cultural enmity of Berlin versus Vienna, giving voice and person to a Central European cultural fissure that travels far and wide into the émigré experience and remains (...) too regularly overlooked in all of its venues by scholars of Central Europe. The distinction is especially elusive to American scholars, who often remain insufficiently sensitive both to the cultural differences between northern and southern Central Europe, and to the survival of religiously marked cultural differences. Hannah Arendt was an émigré from the northern German world and from the German language. In cultural as well as geographical terms, she was an émigré from Prussia. Born in Hanover, reared in Koenigsberg, educated in Heidelberg, she identified with Berlin and its claim to cosmopolitanism. She therefore became a cosmopolitan thinker from Berlin, a metropolis whose generosity and arrogance has resided at least since the 1870s in its self perception as the center of the world. But Arendt also did battle with her fellow Berliners, especially when they seemed to abandon their Berlin-trained worldliness. (shrink)

The political sphere Arendt strove throughout her career to defend and restore depended upon the performative abilities of its participant speakers. But Arendt's theatricality is that of the speech act, not of the stage in a literal sense, where original utterances and originary deeds are not primarily at stake. Arendt versus Zweig replays the cultural enmity of Berlin versus Vienna, giving voice and person to a Central European cultural fissure that travels far and wide into the émigré experience and remains (...) too regularly overlooked in all of its venues by scholars of Central Europe. The distinction is especially elusive to American scholars, who often remain insufficiently sensitive both to the cultural differences between northern and southern Central Europe, and to the survival of religiously marked cultural differences. Hannah Arendt was an émigré from the northern German world and from the German language. In cultural as well as geographical terms, she was an émigré from Prussia. Born in Hanover, reared in Koenigsberg, educated in Heidelberg, she identified with Berlin and its claim to cosmopolitanism. She therefore became a cosmopolitan thinker from Berlin, a metropolis whose generosity and arrogance has resided at least since the 1870s in its self perception as the center of the world. But Arendt also did battle with her fellow Berliners, especially when they seemed to abandon their Berlin-trained worldliness. (shrink)

In The Afterlife of Moses, Steinberg addresses the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics, of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Motivated in part by this recent period of reactionary insurgency in the US, Europe, and Israel, this work of intellectual history articulates the way in which a critique of myths of origin as a principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship has equal relevance in (...) these places and equal fragility. (shrink)

This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident. Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism (...) and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies. (shrink)

Er was een niet te overbruggen kloof tussen de officiële barok-cultuur van het Habsburgse keizerrijk en het kritisch modernisme van de late negentiende eeuw. Herman Broch was een van de moderne schrijvers, die het meest afwijzend tegenover de officiële esthetische normen stond. Ook als politieke balling in de Verenigde Staten bleef hij een gelouterd verlichtingsidee aanhangen, dat hem met de na-oorlogse sociale filosoof Habermas verbindt.