Elisabeth Krimmer

Patricia Anne Simpson

This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #MeToo movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that "rape cultures" persist.

Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020

German #MeToo

New essays exploring the relationship between warfare and Enlightenment thought both historically and in the present.

German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz

Enlightened War

Helga Druxes

With the leverage of digital reproducibility, historical messages of hate are finding new recipients with breathtaking speed and scope. The rapid growth in popularity of right-wing extremist groups in response to transnational economic crises underscores the importance of examining in detail the language and political mobilization strategies of the New Right. In Europe, for example, populist right-wing activists organized around an anti-immigration agenda are becoming more vocal, providing pushback against the increase in migration flows from North Africa and Eastern Europe and countering support for integration with a categorical rejection of multiculturalism. In the United States, anti-immigration sentiment provides a rallying point for political and personal agendas that connect the rhetoric of borders with national, racial, and security issues. Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right in Europe and the United States is an effort to examine and understand these issues, informed by the conviction that an interdisciplinary and transnational approach can allow productive comparison of far-right propaganda strategies in Europe and the United States. With a special emphasis on performing ideology in the far-right music scene, on violent anti-immigrant stances, and on the far right’s skillful creation and manipulation of virtual communities, the contributions foreground the cultural shibboleths that are exchanged among far-right supporters on the Internet, which serve to generate a sense of group belonging and the illusion of power far greater than the known numbers of neo-Nazis in any one country might suggest. Moreover, with attention to transatlantic right-wing movements and their use of particularly digital media, the essays in this volume put pressure on the similarities among the various national agents, while accommodating differences in the virtual and sometimes violent identities created and nurtured online.

Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right in Europe and the United States

The Play World chronicles the history and evolution of the concept of play as a universal part of childhood. Examining texts and toys coming out of Europe between 1631 and 1914, Patricia Anne Simpson argues that German material, literary, and pedagogical cultures were central to the construction of the modern ideas and realities of play and childhood in the transatlantic world. With attention to the details of toy manufacturing and marketing, Simpson considers prescriptive texts about how children should play, treat their possessions, and experience adventure in the scientific exploration of distant geographies. She illuminates the role of toys—among them a mechanical guillotine, yo-yos, hybridized dolls, and circus figures—as agents of history. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from postcolonial, childhood, and migration studies, she makes the case that these texts and toys transfer the world of play into a space in which model childhoods are imagined and enacted as German. With chapters on the Protestant play ethic, enlightened parenting, Goethe as an advocate of play, colonial fantasies, children’s almanacs, ethnographic play, and an empire of toys, Simpson’s argument follows a compelling path toward understanding the reproduction of religious, gendered, ethnic, racial, national, and imperial identities, emanating from German-speaking Europe, that collectively construct a global imaginary. This foundational and deeply original study connects German-speaking communities across the Atlantic as they collectively engender the epistemology of the play world. It will be of particular interest to German studies scholars whose research crosses the Atlantic.

Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood

The Play World

In The Erotics of War in German Romanticism, Patricia Anne Simpson explores the ways early nineteenth-century German philosophers, poets, and artists represent war and erotic desire. The author argues that gender is connected to a larger debate about the construction of the self in relation to a community at a time that this definition is under revision. She analyzes the culture of war as it shapes the bonds of fraternal, familial, and eventually national identity. Simpson defines the erotics of war as discursive attempts to assert the priority of ethical identity and citizenship over individualized desire. The seemingly ancillary problem of female desire emerges not as a marginal issue, but as the focal point of a debate about identity.

The Erotics of War in German Romanticism

This book examines the street as both a material and ideological space constructed by cultural anxieties and affiliations. The early twenty-first century brought a new cartography of the street that inscribes a narrative of identity and difference, engaging discources of political, economic, and ethnic subjectivities.

Cultures of Violence in the New German Street

This year's volume is highlighted by a special section on Goethe's narrative events in addition to a range of other articles from emerging and established scholars.

Goethe Yearbook 26

Investigates how culture in the Age of Goethe shaped and was shaped by a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion in politics, philosophy, and culture.

Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe

Birgit Tautz

A new Forum section focuses on the impact of Digital Humanities on Goethe scholarship and on eighteenth-century German Studies, alongside articles on a diverse range of authors and topics.

Patricia Anne Simpson

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