Martha B. Helfer

Examines the notion of Darstellung [representation] in the critical discourse of German Idealism and Romanticism, paying particular attention to Kant, Fichte, Novalis, and Kleist.

The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse

The Retreat of Representation

William Collins Donahue

Second volume of the biennial publication of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, making available important new research and considering the definition and development of the field of German Jewish Studies.

Essays in German Jewish Studies

Nexus

This book analyzes the structure of Romantic critical discourse, as well as its ties to twentieth-century discursive paradigms, in a series of case studies.

Rereading Romanticism

The publication of Martha B. Helfer’s The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture marks a stunningly original new direction in the interpretation of canonical works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature. Between 1749 and 1850—the formative years of the so-called Jewish Question in Germany—the emancipation debates over granting full civil and political rights to Jews provided the topical background against which all representations of Jewish characters and concerns in literary texts were read. Helfer focuses sharply on these debates and demonstrates through close readings of works by Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Achim von Arnim, Annette von Droste- Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, and Franz Grillparzer how disciplinary practices within the field of German studies have led to systematic blind spots in the scholarship on anti-Semitism to date. While all the authors discussed are well known and justly celebrated, the particular works addressed represent an effective mix of enduring classics and less recognized, indeed often scandalously overlooked, texts whose consideration leads to a reevaluation of the author’s more mainstream oeuvre. Although some of the works and authors chosen have previously been noted for their anti-Semitic proclivities, the majority have not, and some have even been marked by German scholarship as philo-Semitic—a view that The Word Unheard undertakes not so much to refute as to complicate, and in the process to question not only these texts but also the deafness of the German scholarly tradition. With implications that reach into many disciplines, The Word Unheard will be a foundational study for all scholars of modern Germany.

Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture

The Word Unheard

Simon Richter

Essays on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Faust, Goethe's early plays, Schiller's Räuber and on Goethe's thought in relation to current debates on cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality.

Martha B. Helfer

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