Marie Adelheid, Prinzessin Reuß-zur Lippe was a rebellious young woman and aspiring writer from an ancient princely family who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded Jugendstil artist who was to join the German Communist Party and later emigrate to the Soviet Union. Ludwig Roselius was a successful Bremen businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee. What was it about the revolutionary climate following Germany's defeat in World War I that induced three such different personalities to collaborate in the production of a slim volume of poetry - entitled Gott in mir - about the indwelling of the divine within the human?
Part I of Gossman's study situates the poem in the ideological context that made the collaboration possible - pantheism, Darwinism, disillusionment with traditional liberal values, theosophy and völkisch religions, and Lebensreform.
In part II Gossman outlines the subsequent life of the Princess who, until her death in 1993, continued to support and celebrate the ideals and heroes of National Socialism.
The aim of Gossman's study is to gain insight into the sources and character of the "Nazi Conscience." As such it is invaluable reading for anybody interested in understanding German society during the inter-war and Nazi periods.
Contents:
Introduction: An Unusual Book and a
Strange Collaboration. Part 1: Seeking a New Religion: Gott in Mir. 1. The Title; 2. The Epigraph and the Envoy; 3. The
Poem; 4. Appendix to Part I: The Völkisch
Rejection of Christianity. Part II: Serving New Gods. 5. Marie Adelheid,
Prinzessin Reuß-zur Lippe: Society, Ideology, and Politics; 6. Nordische Frau und Nordischer Glaube; 7.
Die Overbroocks; 8. After 1945:
Unrepentant Neo-Nazi; 9. Concluding Reflections; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
No. of pages: 216
Lionel Gossman is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance
Languages emeritus at Princeton University. Most of his work has been
on 17th and 18th century French literature, 19th century European
cultural history, and the theory and practice of historiography. His
publications include Men
and Masks: A Study of Molière;
Medievalism
and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment; French
Society and Culture: Background for 18th Century Literature; The Empire Unpossess’d:
An Essay on Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”; Between History and Literature; Basel in the Age of
Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas; The Making of a Romantic Icon: The
Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s “Italia und Germania”; and several edited
volumes: The
Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts; Building a Profession:
Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in
the United States (with
Mihai Spariosu); Geneva-Zurich-Basel:
History, Culture, and National Identity, and Begegnungen
mit Jacob Burckhardt (with
Andreas Cesana).
http://www.princeton.edu/fit/people/display_person.xml?netid=lgossman&display=All
Brownshirt Princess by
Lionel Gossman is licensed under a
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