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This text contains fresh articles about a much neglected genre--fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto.
The German Pícaro and Modernity reads the re-emergence of the picaresque narrative in twentieth-century German-language writing as an expression of modernity and its social imaginaries. Malkmus argues that the picaresque, whose origins date back to the Spanish Renaissance and the Baroque Age, re-emerged as a reflection both of Germany's explosive modernizing processes between 1880 and 1930 and of the most barbarous implosion of modern civilization under National Socialism. Another reason for the fertility of this literary form at that particular cultural moment is rooted in the complexities of German-Jewish relations and the history of Jewish assimilation in central Europe. A considerable number of authors who used the picaresque form in the twentieth century are from a Jewish background, and Malkmus demonstrates how the picaresque narrative template also offers a medium for German-Jewish self-reflection. In highlighting these connections, he contributes not only to scholarship in European literature, but also but also to our understanding of major social, economic and political issues at stake in modernity
This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. “Health is natural; sickness is unnatural: at least so it seems to man,” is how Stefan Zweig begins his fascinating, often entertaining examinations of Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, and Sigmund Freud. “Bodily suffering is not assuaged by technical manipulation but through an act of faith.” Mental Healers is dedicated to Albert Einstein, the scientist who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. It first appeared in 1931 as Die Heilung durch den Geist, orHealing Through the Spirit, a title that anticipates our current interes...
In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an a...
Originally published in 1932 and for decades since one of Stefan Zweig’s most popular biographies, this “portrait of an average woman,” betrothed at fourteen, crowned queen at nineteen, and beheaded at thirty-seven, aimed “not to deify, but to humanize.” Supplementing library and archival research with psychological insight,Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is a vivid narrative of France’s most famous queen, her relations with her mother Empress Maria Theresa, her husband Louis XVI, and her lover Swedish Count von Fersen, set against the backdrop of the French and Austrian courts of the ancien régime, the French Revolution and the Terror. “... the biography to end all biographies on Marie Antoinette ... [Zweig's book] possesses all the qualities of the excellent biography — directness, frankness, full exposition, picturesqueness, characterization, color and delectable readableness.” —The New York Times “Powerful, magnificent, poignant…” — The New Republic “A stupendous and superb piece of work.” — Chicago Daily Tribune
New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust.
This biography of the man Stefan Zweig viewed as "the most perfect Machiavelli of modern times" was written in 1929, before the full impact of Nazism and Stalinism was understood. In this gripping case study of ruthlessness, political opportunism, intrigue, and betrayal, Zweig portrays Minister of Police Joseph Fouché (1759-1820), a "thoroughly amoral personality" whose only goal was political survival and the exercise of power. Zweig traces Fouché's career, beginning with his stint as a math and physics teacher in provincial Catholic schools and evolving into a moderate and then radical legislator. Fouché cultivated every political movement du jour, holding no convictions of his own. Aft...