登入選單

返回Google圖書搜尋

Critique of the German Intelligentsia

Hugo Ball

出版	Columbia University Press, 1993
主題	History / Europe / Germany
ISBN	023107526X9780231075268
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=Nq92QgAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

This sweeping polemic by a leader of the early modern German avant garde is a highly critical tour through German political intellectual, and religious history since the Reformation. Hugo Ball places blame for the disaster of World War I on Germany's intellectual heritage and attacks figures such as Luther, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche for their contributions to a morally bankrupt modern ideology. First published in 1919, Critique of the German Intelligentsia is the consummate performance of an extraordinary career that took Ball from the Munich avant garde to the founding of Dada in Zurich, to theological anarchism and antiwar politics in Bern, and finally to spiritual refuge in Catholicism. Ball focuses on the corrupting influence of Germany's intellectual isolation from Western Europe and America and its lack of a democratic ethos to argue that German religion and philosophy conspired with dynastic absolutism and militarism to create the betrayal of 1914. Deeply infused with his theological politics, the book captures the cultural-political climate of an important historical juncture and culminates with an apocalyptic vision in which "Bakuninist anarchism, French romantic poetry, and chiliastic revolt all combine to restore the originary ideal of Christian justice sacrificed to throne and altar." This first English-language translation shows that Ball's thinking was marred by a hitherto unacknowledged anti-Semitism. This edition, in restoring passages excised from the original edition, reveals that the anti-Semitism of that text was not merely an embarrassment but an integral part of Ball's rejection of the war, the German Revolution, and the nationalist elite of the late Wilhelminian era.