Anson Rabinbach

A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler’s rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies around Nazism that took place after the regime’s demise, the philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts—from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit—and the role of Auschwitz in European history.

A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler’s rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies around Nazism that took place after the regime’s demise, the philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts—from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit—and the role of Auschwitz in European history.

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step—from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx's Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz's social thermodynamics, Albert Speer's Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace, Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about. This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach's brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the "man as machine" model before tracing its steep decline after 1945—and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step—from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx's Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz's social thermodynamics, Albert Speer's Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace, Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about. This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach's brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the "man as machine" model before tracing its steep decline after 1945—and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

In 1933, Jews and, to a lesser extent, political opponents of the Nazis, suffered an unprecedented loss of positions and livelihood at Germany’s universities. With few exceptions, the academic elite welcomed and justified the acts of the Nazi regime, uttered no word of protest when their Jewish and liberal colleagues were dismissed, and did not stir when Jewish students were barred admission. The subject of how German scholars responded to the Nazi regime continues to be a fascinating area of scholarship. In this collection, Rabinbach and Bialas bring some of the best scholarly contributions together in one cohesive volume, to deliver a shocking conclusion: whatever diverse motives German intellectuals may have had in 1933, the image of Nazism as an alien power imposed on German universities from without was a convenient fiction.

No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance" promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror - World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With "The Third Reich Sourcebook", editors Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman present a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents drawn from wide-ranging primary sources, documenting both the official and unofficial cultures of National Socialist Germany from its inception to its defeat and collapse in 1945. Framed with introductions and annotations by the editors, the documents presented here include official government and party pronouncements, texts produced within Nazi structures, such as the official Jewish Cultural League, as well as documents detailing the impact of the horrors of National Socialism on those who fell prey to the regime, especially Jews and the handicapped. With thirty chapters on ideology, politics, law, society, cultural policy, the fine arts, high and popular culture, science and medicine, sexuality, education, and other topics, "The Third Reich Sourcebook" is the ultimate collection of primary sources on Nazi Germany.

No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance" promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror - World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With "The Third Reich Sourcebook", editors Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman present a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents drawn from wide-ranging primary sources, documenting both the official and unofficial cultures of National Socialist Germany from its inception to its defeat and collapse in 1945. Framed with introductions and annotations by the editors, the documents presented here include official government and party pronouncements, texts produced within Nazi structures, such as the official Jewish Cultural League, as well as documents detailing the impact of the horrors of National Socialism on those who fell prey to the regime, especially Jews and the handicapped. With thirty chapters on ideology, politics, law, society, cultural policy, the fine arts, high and popular culture, science and medicine, sexuality, education, and other topics, "The Third Reich Sourcebook" is the ultimate collection of primary sources on Nazi Germany.

This special issue of "New German Critique" explores the art of Dada and photomontage in transnational contexts. Dadaism, an art movement cultivated during World War I, questioned traditional aesthetics and eventually led to the formation of surrealism. Focusing on Dada's achievements in building a network of artists in Europe and America, this issue examines photomontage as an integral part of the movement, as well as its relationship to mass media, photography, propaganda, constructivism, and left-wing politics in the Soviet Union and western Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. The central figure of the issue is John Heartfield, a Dadaist who influenced much of the art world in Europe after World War I. The collection investigates Heartfield's lesser-known early work with cinema in the service of the German High Command. Believing that photographic cinema was akin to war propaganda, Heartfield rejected live-action war footage in favor of American cinematic animation to promote an honest discussion about the horror and realities of war. One essay explores Heartfield's photomontages while turning to film theory as a way of interpreting the politics of his work, demonstrating how his photomontages retain the organic and traditional nature of photography even as they produce cognitive dissonance and satire. Another essay on Heartfield's role in Soviet discussions of the 1930s offers fascinating insights based on new archival research. The issue also looks at the relationship between Heartfield and the illustrated German magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung and how that magazine influenced photomontage across Europe. Contributors include Karin L. Crawford, Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, Maria Gough, Sabine Kriebel, Bernhard Malkmus, Elizabeth Otto, and Andres Mario Zervigon. David Bathrick is Jacob Gould Schurman Emeritus Professor of Theatre, Film and Dance and of German Studies at Cornell University. Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Anson Rabinbach is Professor of History at Princeton University. Bathrick, Huyssen, and Rabinbach are editors of "New German Critique".

These essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time. Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia, Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.

Science once had an unshakable faith in its ability to bring the forces of nature - even human nature - under control. In this wide-ranging book Anson Rabinbach examines how developments in physics, biology, medicine, psychology, politics, and art employed the metaphor of the working body as a human motor. From nineteenth-century theories of thermodynamics and political economy to the twentieth-century ideals of Taylorism and Fordism, Rabinbach demonstrates how the utopian obsession with energy and fatigue shaped social thought across the ideological spectrum.