Download or read book Franz Werfel A Life in Prague Vienna and Hollywood written by Peter Stephan Jungk and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-18 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Czech-born playwright, novelist and poet Franz Werfel (1890-1945) became internationally famous(and a special target of the Nazis) after he wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the first novel about the Armenian Genocide. He later published the Catholic classic The Song of Bernadette, written after a deeply religious experience in Lourdes, a stop on his escape route to the United States through occupied France. Born into a wealthy family of Prague Jews, Werfel was torn between his Jewish identity and his attraction to Catholicism, between high art and popular success. He was friends with Franz Kafka and Max Brod in his youth and later and part of a larger Central European intellectual circle that included Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber. He married Alma Schindler-Mahler-Gropius (widow of composer Gustav Mahler and ex-wife of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius). The couple fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 and became part of the German exile community of California. They lived in Beverly Hills where Werfel died, a successful Hollywood screenwriter. “This lovely book is more than a biography — a meditation on art, history and human life.” — John Simon, New York Times Book Review “An exemplary biography.” Edward Timms, The Times Literary Supplement “Jungk’s description of how he researched his subject is highly suspenseful and reads like a detective story.” — Der Spiegel “This exemplary biography recalls Werfel’s career and its vanished settings as part of the cultural history of the West. Mr. Jungk also provides a searing picture of Werfel’s wife, the famous Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel...” — The New Yorker “This biography, ostensibly the story of a life, is really a broad panorama of culture and history... It is Jungk’s genius to seduce us into following him into Werfel’s world, and to keep us there, completely enthralled.” — Die Welt
Download or read book Understanding Franz Werfel written by Hans Wagener and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the life & work of the Austrian poet & novelist who heralded the German Expressionist movement in 1911, wrote some of Europe's most widely read novels in the 1930s, & enjoyed popular success in the 1940s with the film adaptations of his best-selling novels.
Download or read book Franz Werfel written by Peter Stephan Jungk and published by Fromm International. This book was released on 1991 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lone Wolf A Biography of Vladimir Ze ev Jabotinsky written by Shmuel Katz and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shmuel Katz’s detailed and comprehensive biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) is an unabashedly partisan defense of one of the most complex Zionists of the early 20th century. Jabotinsky was a Russian poet, playwright, journalist, and novelist as well as the founder of Revisionist Zionism and of Betar. His oratory in many languages was legendary. Katz first heard him speak in South Africa in the early part of the 20th century and was so impressed that he dropped out of university to work for Revisionist Zionism. Katz recounts Jabotinsky’s efforts to create the Jewish Legion during World War I, traces the history of Jewish relations with the British during the time of the Palestine Mandate, describes Jabotinsky’s role in the defense of the Jewish Yishuv and in organizing the Af-Al-Pi “illegal” Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War II. He paints a vivid mural of competing Jewish personalities, factions and ideologies in the decades before the establishment of Israel. “Shmuel Katz has written an intelligent, journalistic account of Jabotinsky’s life […] and was able to use a substantial amount of previously unavailable material, particularly British archival documents. Although Katz clearly has tremendous respect and affection for Jabotinsky, he does not hesitate to criticize him, for example, for his ineffectiveness as a fundraiser [...] Lone Wolf’s greatest strength is its comprehensive breadth. Every major event and many minor incidents are extensively covered. Furthermore, Katz has taken the rather unorthodox move of including verbatim large sections of Jabotinsky’s original speeches and writings.” — Paul Radensky, H-Net “[S]cholarly and yet totally gripping... we must be everlastingly grateful [...] to Shmuel Katz for so masterfully giving [Jabotinsky’s] memory fresh life... this [book] — quiet, calm, and, while certainly partisan, without a single shrill note — may one day help to direct the course of Israel’s seemingly endless argument with itself.” — Midge Decter, Commentary Magazine “Dr. Katz's monumental and superb biography is a balanced, detailed story of a lion and not a wolf. (Ze'ev in Hebrew means a wolf and this is the reason why the title isLone Wolf)” — Jewish Post
Download or read book Jan cek and His World written by Michael Beckerman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once thought to be a provincial composer of only passing interest to eccentrics, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and original creative figures of his time. Banned for all purposes from the Prague stage until the age of 62, and unable to make it even out of the provincial capital of Brno, his operas are now performed in dynamic productions throughout the globe. This volume brings together some of the world's foremost Janácek scholars to look closely at a broad range of issues surrounding his life and work. Representing the latest in Janácek scholarship, the essays are accompanied by newly translated writings by the composer himself. The collection opens with an essay by Leon Botstein who clarifies and amplifies how Max Brod contributed to Janácek 's international success by serving as "point man" between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. John Tyrrell, the dean of Janácek scholars, distills more than thirty years of research in "How Janácek Composed Operas," while Diane Paige considers Janácek's liason with a married woman and the question of the artist's muse. Geoffrey Chew places the idea of the adulterous muse in the larger context of Czech fin de siècle decadence in his thoroughgoing consideration of Janácek's problematic opera Osud. Derek Katz examines the problems encountered by Janácek's satirically patriotic "Excursions of Mr. Broucek" in the post-World War I era of Czechoslovak nationalism, while Paul Wingfield mounts a defense of Janácek against allegations of cruelty in his wife's memoirs. In the final essay, Michael Beckerman asks how much true history can be culled from one of Janácek's business cards. The book then turns to writings by Janácek previously unpublished in English. These not only include fascinating essays on Naturalism, opera direction, and Tristan and Isolde, but four impressionistic chronicles of the "speech melodies" of daily life. They provide insight into Janácek's revolutionary method of composition, and give us the closest thing we will ever have to the "heard" record of a Czech pre-war past-or any past, for that matter.
Download or read book Janacek and His World written by Michael Brim Beckerman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once thought to be a provincial composer of only passing interest to eccentrics, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and original creative figures of his time. Banned for all purposes from the Prague stage until the age of 62, and unable to make it even out of the provincial capital of Brno, his operas are now performed in dynamic productions throughout the globe. This volume brings together some of the world's foremost Janácek scholars to look closely at a broad range of issues surrounding his life and work. Representing the latest in Janácek scholarship, the essays are accompanied by newly translated writings by the composer himself. The collection opens with an essay by Leon Botstein who clarifies and amplifies how Max Brod contributed to Janácek 's international success by serving as "point man" between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. John Tyrrell, the dean of Janácek scholars, distills more than thirty years of research in "How Janácek Composed Operas," while Diane Paige considers Janácek's liason with a married woman and the question of the artist's muse. Geoffrey Chew places the idea of the adulterous muse in the larger context of Czech fin de siècle decadence in his thoroughgoing consideration of Janácek's problematic opera Osud. Derek Katz examines the problems encountered by Janácek's satirically patriotic "Excursions of Mr. Broucek" in the post-World War I era of Czechoslovak nationalism, while Paul Wingfield mounts a defense of Janácek against allegations of cruelty in his wife's memoirs. In the final essay, Michael Beckerman asks how much true history can be culled from one of Janácek's business cards. The book then turns to writings by Janácek previously unpublished in English. These not only include fascinating essays on Naturalism, opera direction, and Tristan and Isolde, but four impressionistic chronicles of the "speech melodies" of daily life. They provide insight into Janácek's revolutionary method of composition, and give us the closest thing we will ever have to the "heard" record of a Czech pre-war past-or any past, for that matter.
Download or read book Dogmatics Among the Ruins written by Ian R. Boyd and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second decade of the twentieth century the cultural life of Germany was transformed by the emergence of Expressionism, a series of vigorous, youthful artistic movements which were to exert a lasting influence on modern culture. In the same decade a young Swiss pastor called Karl Barth began a theological revolution, laying the foundations for probably the most influential body of Christian theology in the modern age. Some relationship between these two revolutions has long been assumed by scholars; yet it has never been examined in detail. The first part of this study addresses this omission, offering the most detailed analysis to date of the important relationship between Barth and Expressionism. The second part of the book takes a broader look at both Barth's theology and Expressionist culture, considering the relevance of the Enlightenment as a context for both. The key to this is a detailed discussion of Barth's own analysis of the Enlightenment in his neglected book Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Barth's view is also compared with Alasdair MacIntyre's treatment of the Enlightenment in After Virtue. The examination of these two contexts, German Expressionism and the Enlightenment, yields valuable insights into Barth's entire theological project.
Download or read book Messengers of Disaster written by Annette Becker and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading up to World War II, two Polish men witnessed the targeted extermination of Jews under Adolf Hitler and the German Reich before the reality of the Holocaust was widely known. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term "genocide," and Jan Karski, a Catholic member of the Polish resistance, independently shared this knowledge with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Having heard false rumors of wartime atrocities before, the leaders met the messengers with disbelief and inaction, leading to the eventual murder of more than six million people. Messengers of Disaster draws upon little-known texts from an array of archives, including the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Carrying the knowledge of disaster took a toll on Lemkin and Karski, but their work prepared the way for the United Nations to unanimously adopt the first human rights convention in 1948 and influenced the language we use to talk about genocide today. Annette Becker's detailed study of these two important figures illuminates how distortions of fact can lead people to deny knowledge of what is happening in front of their own eyes.
Download or read book Mary Stuart written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, Francis. He ascended the French throne as King Francis II in 1559, and Mary briefly became queen consort of France, until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Four years later, she married her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, but their union was unhappy. In February 1567, his residence was destroyed by an explosion, and Darnley was found murdered in the garden. James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was generally believed to have orchestrated Darnley’s death, but he was acquitted of the charge in April 1567, and the following month he married Mary. Following an uprising against the couple, Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. On 24 July 1567, she was forced to abdicate in favour of James VI, her one-year-old son by Darnley. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne, she fled southwards seeking the protection of her first cousin once removed, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Mary had previously claimed Elizabeth’s throne as her own and was considered the legitimate sovereign of England by many English Catholics, including participants in a rebellion known as the Rising of the North. Perceiving her as a threat, Elizabeth had her confined in various castles and manor houses in the interior of England. After eighteen and a half years in custody, Mary was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth in 1586 and was beheaded the following year. “The story has all the emotional savor of a crime passionnel; it is adroitly worked up to a climax of violence and calamity, and it subsides as skillfully to an end of tragic pity... With his talent for simple exposition on a large scale, his sense of drama, his ready flow of emotion, his inventiveness in detail of the moments of his character’s life, his resources of metaphor, parallel and illustration, and his rich psychological adornment of human life, Herr Zweig has no difficulty in reducing his material into its essential drama... whatever Mary’s story, and we shall never know, Zweig’s book has every right to be set down as one of the most brilliant guesses at the truth, and it is an amazing piece of virtuosity to plunge her into the blackest of guilt, and then restore her to our sympathy and pity.” — Peter Munro Jack, The New York Times “Mr. Zweig... is not a historian but... a litterateur practising biography as a branch of letters. The distinction is not derogatory... It... is the clue to the strength and weakness of the book. The litterateur borrows from the craft and exercises some of the liberty of the novelist. He is interested in character and psychology and indulges in imaginative reconstruction more freely than the historian who is forever... haunted by the words, ‘We do not know.’... [Zweig] makes a real person of Mary, a convincing portrait, and there is sympathetic understanding even when he is presenting her as the accomplice of her lover, Bothwell, in the murder of Darnley. Needless to say the style is remarkably easy and readable... [C]riticism would be unjust to the brilliant qualities of Mr. Zweig’s book, and though I hope that all he says will not be taken for gospel truth, I am certain of the pleasure he will give to his readers. There are many descriptive passages to be scored and many sentences that one would give a great deal to have written. The whole book goes with the swing of a novel. The translation is beyond praise.” — J. E. Neale, The Saturday Review
Download or read book European Culture in the Great War written by Aviel Roshwald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-02-14 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of European cultural and social history during the First World War.
Download or read book Adepts in Self Portraiture Casanova Stendhal Tolstoy written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the 1920s, Zweig's work of literary criticism and biography might today be titled Masters of Memoir. In it, Stefan Zweig – one of the 20th century’s most widely-published writers – describes the creative process and work of authors for whom no subject is as compelling as the material of their own lives. Adepts in Self-Portraiture examines the lives and work of three men who represent, in Zweig's view, three levels of development in autobiographical writing. The first and most basic level is evinced by Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian womanizer who records his sexual and social conquests, adventures and escapes, without attempting to analyze or even reflect on them. The second level of self-portraiture is exemplified by Stendhal, the French pioneer of psychological fiction, who kept voluminous notebooks on his own experience of life and on whom no nuance of feeling seems to have been lost. Russian master Leo Tolstoy represents the third and highest level of autobiographical writing in which the psychological is imbued with the spiritual and ethical. In Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Stefan Zweig examines the impulses that give rise to life writing and anticipates the current popularity of the memoir form.
Download or read book Three Masters Balzac Dickens Dostoevsky written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”
Download or read book Marie Antoinette The Portrait of an Average Woman written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Right to Heresy Castellio Against Calvin written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Castellio is a book against zealots of every kind: against anything engendering “the destruction of this world’s divine manifoldness” and injuring the humane spirit. [...] Why could Castellio not maintain himself against Calvin? Stefan Zweig’s answers to these questions have permanent and tragic validity: it was because the masses pay tribute not only to the power of love, but also to that of hatred. Followers could always be found for political slogans that established “enmity and divisions, casting sinister flames of hatred against another religion, race or class.” [...] Those who sacrificed themselves for a future reconciliation of men, wrote Stefan Zweig in 1933, could not escape the fact that a torrent of fanaticism, “rising from the shoals of human instinct,” would burst all dams and inundate all. [...] Castellio, “a fly against an elephant,” rose in opposition to Calvin who had condemned Miguel Servet — better known as Servetus — a true fighter for spiritual freedom, to die at the stake. “To burn a man alive does not defend a doctrine, but kills a man,” said Castellio. It was an ever-recurring curse that ideologies degenerated into tyranny and brute force. Fanaticism, indifferent to the material from which it was ignited, wanted only to let the accumulated forces of hatred flame forth. And Zweig utters these words, six years before the outbreak of the Second World War: “At such apocalyptic turning points, when mass delusions determine universal destinies, the demon of war, bursting the chains of reason, hurls itself greedily and joyfully into the world.” [...] In describing a tragic contest — here that of conscience against force — Zweig is in his element. He illuminates the interesting figure of Servetus who had fought in his own fanatical-hysterical manner already as a youth. It is characteristic that Servetus was dubbed by his enemies “Jew,” “Turk,” and wicked “Spaniard.” [...] Zweig stressed the self-sacrificing way in which [Castellio] defended freedom of thought against Calvin, becoming the symbol of “Conscience against Force.” And he describes most touchingly the sorrow this genuine hero had to suffer. He shows, too, how free spirits may be endangered by the carelessness with which they choose their fellow-wanderers; whereas the one-sided totalitarians, protected by their rigidity, always hold a stone ready to fling at their enemies. (from Married to Stefan Zweigby Friderike Zweig) “One cannot but admire the ardent spirit with which Stefan Zweig has set out to annihilate the doctrines of exclusiveness and restriction in religion and in politics... the most spirited [book] and, in certain scholarly respects, the most important that Stefan Zweig has yet produced... From Stefan Zweig’s new book there emerges a new hero for a modern reading public: a true historic character rescued from near oblivion, and the first modern man who fought the good fight for humanity’s right to think its own thoughts and to say them. The battle has not yet been decided.” — Lloyd Eshleman,The New York Times, November 16, 1936
Download or read book Amerigo A Comedy of Errors in History written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-10 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stefan Zweig's Amerigo: A Comedy of Errors in History is the Austrian writer's account of how America got its name. This short, late work describes how Amerigo Vespucci, “a man of medium caliber [who] had never been entrusted with a fleet” gave his name to the New World because “of a combination of circumstances — through error, accident, and misunderstanding.” Zweig was living in exile in Brazil when he wrote Amerigo, shortly before committing suicide in despair over Hitler's conquest of Europe. “The paradox that Columbus discovered America but failed to recognize it, while Vespucci did not discover it but was the first to recognize it as a new continent,” he wrote, illustrates how “history will not be reasoned with.”
Download or read book Freud by Zweig written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) first wrote about Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as part ofMental Healers. Published in Germany in February of 1931, it is one of the earliest studies of Freud’s work by a writer outside the psychoanalytic community and is a fresh reminder of the excitement that Freud’s revolutionary approach to the psyche engendered in Zweig and his contemporaries. Zweig had been sending his writing to Freud for feedback since the first decade of the twentieth century. Reading about himself was an ambivalent experience for Freud. In his letter of response to this essay, Freud wrote: “I could object that you overemphasize the element of petit-bourgeois rectitude in me — the fellow is a little more complicated than that!” but “I am probably not wrong in assuming that you were a stranger to psychoanalytical theory prior to the writing of this book. It is all the more to your credit, therefore, that you have absorbed so much of it since.”
Download or read book Erasmus of Rotterdam written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a parable for modern times, Erasmus of Rotterdam is the biography of a great humanist who, when pressed for a confession of faith, said, “I love freedom, and I will not and cannot serve any party.” At no time does Zweig mention Hitler by name, but it is obvious that his biography of a man who tried to remain above the battle, and who was torn to pieces by both Lutherans and Catholics, was aimed to illustrate the predicament of a man who refrains from activism and prefers to focus on his work. Erasmus believed in a united Europe, and thought that Luther was splitting it in two. He first tried to reconcile the Pope to Luther’s Wittenberg theses, then to bring the German Protestants together with the representatives of Rome. Zweig portrays a steadfast Erasmus, unwilling to let emotion betray the lucidity of his thought, who knew he was the most famous intellect of his age, and evaded any commitment that would bring a host of enemies down upon his head. In Erasmus, Zweig may have seen parts of himself. (adapted from “Book of the Times” by John Chamberlain, The New York Times, November 2, 1934) “Under Zweig’s magic pen Erasmus leaps into vital existence... The books is a quietly astounding bit of biographical and historical achievement.” — Percy Hutchison, The New York Times
