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Wer hat Angst vor Walter Wolf?: Roman (German Edition)

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Goethe became severely ill in Frankfurt. During the year and a half that followed, because of several relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence, Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister. In Alsace , Goethe blossomed. No other landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm, wide Rhine area. The two became close friends, and crucially to Goethe's intellectual development, Herder kindled his interest in Shakespeare , Ossian and in the notion of Volkspoesie folk poetry. On 14 October Goethe held a gathering in his parental home in honour of the first German "Shakespeare Day".

His first acquaintance with Shakespeare's works is described as his personal awakening in literature. On a trip to the village Sessenheim , Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion , in October , [15] [16] but, after ten months, terminated the relationship in August At the end of August , Goethe acquired the academic degree of the Lizenziat Licentia docendi in Frankfurt and established a small legal practice. Although in his academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence progressively more humane, his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases, and he was reprimanded and lost further ones.

This prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months. At this time, Goethe was acquainted with the court of Darmstadt , where his inventiveness was praised. Goethe also pursued literary plans again; this time, his father did not have anything against it, and even helped.

Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants' War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama. Goethe could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical published by Schlosser and Merck. In May he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar. In he wrote the book which would bring him worldwide fame, The Sorrows of Young Werther. In later years Goethe would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing "new, revised" editions of his Complete Works. Goethe thus went to live in Weimar , where he remained for the rest of his life and where, over the course of many years, he held a succession of offices, becoming the Duke's friend and chief adviser.

In , Goethe formed a close relationship to Charlotte von Stein , an older, married woman. The intimate bond with von Stein lasted for ten years, after which Goethe abruptly left for Italy without giving his companion any notice. She was emotionally distraught at the time, but they were eventually reconciled. Goethe, aside from official duties, was also a friend and confidant to the Duke, and participated fully in the activities of the court. For Goethe, his first ten years at Weimar could well be described as a garnering of a degree and range of experience which perhaps could be achieved in no other way.

In , when the chancellor of the Duchy's Exchequer left his office, Goethe agreed to act in his place for two and a half years; this post virtually made him prime minister and the principal representative of the Duchy. Daniel Wilson claims that Goethe engaged in negotiating the forced sale of vagabonds, criminals, and political dissidents as part of these activities. Goethe's journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from to was of great significance in his aesthetic and philosophical development.

His father had made a similar journey during his own youth, and his example was a major motivating factor for Goethe to make the trip. More importantly, however, the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann had provoked a general renewed interest in the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome.

Thus Goethe's journey had something of the nature of a pilgrimage to it. During the course of his trip Goethe met and befriended the artists Angelica Kauffman and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein , as well as encountering such notable characters as Lady Hamilton and Alessandro Cagliostro see Affair of the Diamond Necklace. He also journeyed to Sicily during this time, and wrote intriguingly that "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.

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Winckelmann had not recognized the distinctness of the two styles. Goethe's diaries of this period form the basis of the non-fiction Italian Journey. Italian Journey only covers the first year of Goethe's visit. The remaining year is largely undocumented, aside from the fact that he spent much of it in Venice. This "gap in the record" has been the source of much speculation over the years. In the decades which immediately followed its publication in , Italian Journey inspired countless German youths to follow Goethe's example.

This is pictured, somewhat satirically, in George Eliot 's Middlemarch. Again during the Siege of Mainz he assisted Carl August as a military observer. His written account of these events can be found within his Complete Works. In , Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship; they had previously had only a mutually wary relationship ever since first becoming acquainted in This collaborative friendship lasted until Schiller's death in On 13 October, Napoleon 's army invaded the town. The French "spoon guards," the least disciplined soldiers, occupied Goethe's house:.

The 'spoon guards' had broken in, they had drunk wine, made a great uproar and called for the master of the house. Goethe's secretary Riemer reports: His dignified figure, commanding respect, and his spiritual mien seemed to impress even them. Late at night they burst into his bedroom with drawn bayonets. Goethe was petrified, Christiane raised a lot of noise and even tangled with them, other people who had taken refuge in Goethe's house rushed in, and so the marauders eventually withdrew again. It was Christiane who commanded and organized the defense of the house on the Frauenplan.

The barricading of the kitchen and the cellar against the wild pillaging soldiery was her work. Goethe noted in his diary: Preservation of the house through steadfastness and luck. August and Ottilie had three children: Christiane von Goethe died in After , Goethe devoted his endeavours primarily to literature. By , Goethe was on amiable terms with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg. In , having recovered from a near fatal heart illness, Goethe fell in love with Ulrike von Levetzow whom he wanted to marry, but because of the opposition of her mother he never proposed.

Their last meeting in Carlsbad on 5 September inspired him to the famous Marienbad Elegy which he considered one of his finest works. Goethe, now in his seventies, was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter:. Mendelssohn was invited to meet Goethe on several later occasions, [29] and set a number of Goethe's poems to music.

In , Goethe died in Weimar of apparent heart failure. His last words, according to his doctor Carl Vogel, were, Mehr Licht! Eckermann closes his famous work, Conversations with Goethe , with this passage:. The morning after Goethe's death, a deep desire seized me to look once again upon his earthly garment. His faithful servant, Frederick, opened for me the chamber in which he was laid out. Stretched upon his back, he reposed as if asleep; profound peace and security reigned in the features of his sublimely noble countenance. The mighty brow seemed yet to harbour thoughts.

I wished for a lock of his hair; but reverence prevented me from cutting it off. The body lay naked, only wrapped in a white sheet; large pieces of ice had been placed near it, to keep it fresh as long as possible. Frederick drew aside the sheet, and I was astonished at the divine magnificence of the limbs. The breast was powerful, broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were elegant, and of the most perfect shape; nowhere, on the whole body, was there a trace of either fat or of leanness and decay.

A perfect man lay in great beauty before me; and the rapture the sight caused me made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left such an abode. I laid my hand on his heart — there was a deep silence — and I turned away to give free vent to my suppressed tears. The first production of Richard Wagner 's opera Lohengrin took place in Weimar in The conductor was Franz Liszt , who chose the date 28 August in honour of Goethe, who was born on 28 August Die Leiden des jungen Werthers , which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism.

Indeed, Werther is often considered to be the "spark" which ignited the movement, and can arguably be called the world's first "best-seller. In the last period, between Schiller's death, in , and his own, appeared Faust Part One , Elective Affinities , the West-Eastern Diwan a collection of poems in the Persian style, influenced by the work of Hafez , his autobiographical Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit From My Life: Poetry and Truth which covers his early life and ends with his departure for Weimar, his Italian Journey , and a series of treatises on art.

His writings were immediately influential in literary and artistic circles. The short epistolary novel , Die Leiden des jungen Werthers , or The Sorrows of Young Werther , published in , recounts an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide. Goethe admitted that he "shot his hero to save himself": The novel remains in print in dozens of languages and its influence is undeniable; its central hero, an obsessive figure driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for the young Lotte, has become a pervasive literary archetype.

The fact that Werther ends with the protagonist's suicide and funeral—a funeral which "no clergyman attended"—made the book deeply controversial upon its anonymous publication, for on the face of it, it appeared to condone and glorify suicide. Suicide is considered sinful by Christian doctrine: He said he "turned reality into poetry but his friends thought poetry should be turned into reality and the poem imitated. What set Goethe's book apart from other such novels was its expression of unbridled longing for a joy beyond possibility, its sense of defiant rebellion against authority, and of principal importance, its total subjectivity: The next work, his epic closet drama Faust , was completed in stages.

The first part was published in and created a sensation. Goethe finished Faust Part Two in the year of his death, and the work was published posthumously. Goethe's original draft of a Faust play, which probably dates from —74, and is now known as the Urfaust , was also published after his death. The first operatic version of Goethe's Faust , by Louis Spohr , appeared in The work subsequently inspired operas and oratorios by Schumann , Berlioz , Gounod , Boito , Busoni , and Schnittke as well as symphonic works by Liszt , Wagner , and Mahler.

Faust became the ur-myth of many figures in the 19th century.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Later, a facet of its plot, i. In , the world premiere complete production of Faust was staged at the Goetheanum. Goethe's poetic work served as a model for an entire movement in German poetry termed Innerlichkeit "introversion" and represented by, for example, Heine.

Goethe's words inspired a number of compositions by, among others, Mozart , Beethoven who idolised Goethe , [37] Schubert , Berlioz and Wolf. Perhaps the single most influential piece is "Mignon's Song" which opens with one of the most famous lines in German poetry, an allusion to Italy: He is also widely quoted. Epigrams such as "Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him", " Divide and rule , a sound motto; unite and lead, a better one", and "Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must", are still in usage or are often paraphrased.

Some well-known quotations are often incorrectly attributed to Goethe. Goethe overcame emotional turmoil, relational conflicts and mood swings through self-reflection, political and scientific work, and writing. To no one was the faculty for so doing more necessary than to me, for by nature I was constantly carried from one extreme to the other". As to what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it But that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours—of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.

Although his literary work has attracted the greatest amount of interest, Goethe was also keenly involved in studies of natural science. Goethe also had the largest private collection of minerals in all of Europe. By the time of his death, in order to gain a comprehensive view in geology, he had collected 17, rock samples. His focus on morphology and what was later called homology influenced 19th century naturalists , although his ideas of transformation were about the continuous metamorphosis of living things and did not relate to contemporary ideas of "transformisme" or transmutation of species.

The elephant's skull that led Goethe to this discovery, and was subsequently named the Goethe Elephant, still exists and is displayed in the Ottoneum in Kassel , Germany. During his Italian journey, Goethe formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis in which the archetypal form of the plant is to be found in the leaf — he writes, "from top to bottom a plant is all leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other".

The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, they have been given Goethe's botanical theories were partly based on his gardening in Weimar.

Goethe also popularized the Goethe barometer using a principle established by Torricelli. According to Hegel, "Goethe has occupied himself a good deal with meteorology; barometer readings interested him particularly What he says is important: He claims to deduce from it that the barometric level varies in the same proportion not only in each zone but that it has the same variation, too, at different altitudes above sea-level".

In , Goethe published his Theory of Colours , which he considered his most important work. In it, he contentiously characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of light and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in , his theory became widely adopted by the art world, most notably J. Goethe was vehemently opposed to Newton's analytic treatment of colour, engaging instead in compiling a comprehensive rational description of a wide variety of colour phenomena.

Although the accuracy of Goethe's observations does not admit a great deal of criticism, his aesthetic approach did not lend itself to the demands of analytic and mathematical analysis used ubiquitously in modern Science. Goethe was, however, the first to systematically study the physiological effects of colour, and his observations on the effect of opposed colours led him to a symmetric arrangement of his colour wheel, 'for the colours diametrically opposed to each other Goethe, Theory of Colours , Goethe outlines his method in the essay The experiment as mediator between subject and object Steiner elaborated on that in the books The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception [55] and Goethe's World View , [56] in which he characterizes intuition as the instrument by which one grasps Goethe's biological archetype— The Typus.

Novalis , himself a geologist and mining engineer, expressed the opinion that Goethe was the first physicist of his time and 'epoch-making in the history of physics', writing that Goethe's studies of light, of the metamorphosis of plants and of insects were indications and proofs 'that the perfect educational lecture belongs in the artist's sphere of work'; and that Goethe would be surpassed 'but only in the way in which the ancients can be surpassed, in inner content and force, in variety and depth—as an artist actually not, or only very little, for his rightness and intensity are perhaps already more exemplary than it would seem'.

Many of Goethe's works, especially Faust , the Roman Elegies , and the Venetian Epigrams , depict erotic passions and acts. For instance, in Faust , the first use of Faust's power after signing a contract with the devil is to seduce a teenage girl. Some of the Venetian Epigrams were held back from publication due to their sexual content. Goethe clearly saw human sexuality as a topic worthy of poetic and artistic depiction, an idea that was uncommon in a time when the private nature of sexuality was rigorously normative.

Though in his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship , Goethe described the beauty of the male body, he was attracted to women, starting with his first love "Gretchen" when he was 14 and ending with Ulrike von Levetzow when he was In a conversation on April 7 Goethe stated that pederasty is an "aberration" that easily leads to "animal, roughly material" behavior. He continued, "Pederasty is as old as humanity itself, and one can therefore say, that it resides in nature, even if it proceeds against nature What culture has won from nature will not be surrendered or given up at any price.

If I tire of her as a girl, she'll play the boy for me as well". Goethe was a freethinker who believed that one could be inwardly Christian without following any of the Christian churches, many of whose central teachings he firmly opposed, sharply distinguishing between Christ and the tenets of Christian theology, and criticizing its history as a "hodgepodge of fallacy and violence".

Born into a Lutheran family, Goethe's early faith was shaken by news of such events as the Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years' War. His later spiritual perspective incorporated elements of pantheism heavily influenced by Spinoza , humanism , and various elements of Western esotericism , as seen most vividly in part 2 of Faust.

Wolf draws a remarkable historical line from the Third Reich, to the time of the German Democratic Republic, until today, based on her personal beliefs, values and story. Thanks to this book, i received a new platform on which to meet my own grandparents, my mother, to question them about their past and personal history. My reading of this book has already triggered interesting conversation with my family as it offered new grounds for interpretation, understaning, and raised further questions. In particular, Wolf's being in LA seems to have provided a fitting background with the necessary distance to dig deeper into her own self.

Anyone interested in German history experienced on a personal account, and especially from someone living in the east of the country, is recommended to read this book. Sep 11, Laura rated it really liked it Shelves: Freud" by Christa Wolf gives readers an up close and personal view into the mind of an elderly woman looking back at her life, and trying to come to terms with all that she has experienced.

I felt as I read the book, that I was literally wading at times through regret. This was not an easy read, but not all novels are meant for entertainment Wolf's world view in many ways, I feel I have grown as a person from reading her story. One quote in particular stood out to me--"I've begun to see the value of everybody's wisdom and the fact that people discover the same truths through many avenues. Open up your life so that you're not caught in self-concern. Then you will no longer think you're at the center of the world, because you're so concerned with your worries, pains, limitations, desires, and fears that you are blind to the beauty of existence.

You will see that life is such a miracle, and we spend so much time doing nothing except figuring out the ways life is being unfair to us.

She has left us her impressions of Los Angeles, the US and the 'culture' we have now; the loss of faith she and her friends experienced post-GDR, and the way Westerners and the US reacted to the post-Wall and post-USSR era, as though the reunification were an unmitigated triumph, forgetting about the sense of loss and diminution this evoked in the GDR. This isn't a novel in the sense of inventiveness or dramatic arc Ms. This isn't a novel in the sense of inventiveness or dramatic arc, but a series of stories within stories about Wolf and some other emigres Germans who came to LA in the '30s and '40s , other Europeans in LA.

The book shows how people cope psychologically with the loss of their homeland, and incidentally, the loss of belief in a Marxist ideal or notion, not just when the GDR fell, but during the years Stalin destroyed those ideals. Not her best book but important since it's her final legacy, published one year before her death. I read this fictionalized memoir by the East German writer in English, a publication from Farrar, Straus Giroux which Goodreads doesn't seem to recognize. It is a confusing book, in which the author tries to make sense of her experiences as a visiting scholar at, I am guessing, the Getty Center, in Santa Monica and also of the revelation that she informed on comrades to the East German secret police at a time in her past.

The unsealing of secret Stasi files has made her -- and people back i I read this fictionalized memoir by the East German writer in English, a publication from Farrar, Straus Giroux which Goodreads doesn't seem to recognize. The unsealing of secret Stasi files has made her -- and people back in the reunited Germany -- aware of this episode that she has forgotten, to her horror.

The voice changes often from first to second person, often in the same sentence. Is this a deliberate effort to communicate her inability to connect with the Informant she once was? Oct 04, Sarah rated it really liked it. This book had so many layers, and made me think so deeply - not only about the fall of the Berlin wall and Germany's history both pre and post that event. But also about the nature of depression, reading, conversations about literature, travel, America of the last few years and being an expat.

Added to that was Wolf's intimate portrayal of the discovery that she contributed, however unwittingly, to collection of information by the Stasi and East German governments. Fascinating and incredibly tho This book had so many layers, and made me think so deeply - not only about the fall of the Berlin wall and Germany's history both pre and post that event. Fascinating and incredibly thought-provoking. One part of the title refers to the novel's setting and a character's role and the other part is a metaphor for comfortable, private confession.

The German writer was born in so she was four when Hitler came to power and 16 when the Third Reich collapsed and Hitler killed himself. She became an adult in the German Democratic Republic East Germany , first a zealous socialist and later a skeptical even dissident citizen-writer when it came to the actions of the government. City of Angels is a novel but a very autobiographical one. Wolf had a fellowship at the Getty in the s, here called The Center, to work on materials related to her Stasi files.

Two things surprise her when she is reviewing her files, but one discovery that is not surprising is that friends had informed on her. Who did was interesting to her, but that some of her friends were among the informers was expected. Such was the state of things in the GDR under the thumb and relentless eye of the Stasi. The surprises were that along with the yards of folders on her as a dissident was a smaller file of her own contributions as an informer and that, almost forty years later, she had no recollection of her informing until she saw the file.

When it becomes public everyone concerned wonders how could she, of all people, have done it. She, on the other hand, wonders how could she have forgotten this? How did she not have even vague worries about what the released files would reveal? She mixes and befriends the fellows at the Center, the news of her informing becomes public and the public reacts, and she becomes familiar with Los Angeles as a pedestrian, scholar, and driver. This exploration of setting and people and her following of TV coverage of politics allows Wolf to provide a critical and, at times, affectionate view of the United States.

She doesn't overplay or equate different abuses but she is true to her skeptical and challenging self in criticizing American capitalism for its tolerance of social and economic inequality and its own history of abuses of its democratic values. One unbalanced and nuance free note occurs in the recounting of an occasion when Soviet and American publishers each had objections to different passages in one of her novels and she notes that the offending passages were left in the Soviet translation but deleted from the American edition.

She remembers that it had to do with Vietnam but that the deletion came without her knowledge and against her will, which seems oddly fuzzy. Plus scores of books highly critical of American involvement in Vietnam were published during and after the war so one can't quite imagine what she must have written that an American publisher would have reacted to unless it was something specific to an individual that might have led to lawsuits.

It may be ironic but the incident doesn't make any kind of case that the state of freedom of expression in the two countries was in any way similar. A brief, weak moment in the book. The book is challenging. Victoria Hotel, and episodes of Star Trek and this density of shifting of time and reference sometimes leaves you uncertain of where you are. Plus, Wolf, or her narrator, often refers to herself in the second person. Despite the challenge, the book is rewarding, provocative and fascinating. Who precisely are these anonymous victors? Even in her early years as a socialist and writer her individuality and questioning rubbed party professionals the wrong way.

The urge to purity that troubles her, past and present, comes with an unabashed entitlement to own up at all costs. The above observation is powerful and well heeded regardless of the situation. Never trust the pure. They see only black and white. There is no restraint of conscience, law, or empathy. Dieses Buch ist mir nicht leicht gefallen. Um sich besser zurecht zu finden, Dieses Buch ist mir nicht leicht gefallen. Trotzdem greifen die einzelnen Teile puzzle-artig ineinaner und ergeben ein Ganzes. Die Geschichte selbst ist schwer zu greifen.

Es ist ein Buch, das mich zum nachdenken und nachforschen und neugierig werden angeregt hat. The story has a lot that is close to my heart: But still it was hard to read. As a left socialist she could only be irritated by the place The story has a lot that is close to my heart: As a left socialist she could only be irritated by the place and that was interesting to observe. I liked her descriptions of the European emigrants in LA. During her time in Los Angeles Wolf's Stasi file was publically revealed suggesting that from to she had "informed" against others.

The writer is at a loss to explain it and the issue of whether she did or didn't is left moot. Wolf, rather unconvincingly, claims she "repressed the memory": Can someone forget something like that? That they gave me a code name? That I wrote a report? And by the way: A person can forget anything. They need to, in fact. We cannot live without forgetting? It was such a long time ago. And what makes you think you know what was important to you back then? But please, be careful. No one will take that responsibility off your shoulders. And also, excuse me for saying so, you are going through a psychological crisis.

It would be a mistake though to reduce this book to a tale about someone suddenly finding themselves on "the wrong side of history" and squirming to justify past mistakes. It explores the history of someone, who for the most part, struggled against increasing repression - Wolf variously found herself courted and then shunned by the East German government throughout her career. She refused, however, to abandon her country or socialism at the time of the G. There are some interesting passages in City of Angels about the Cold War and the alleged advantages of German "reunification" which created a crisis for Wolf.

She argued for social reform in East Germany but thought the dismantling of the G. She was harshly criticized from both East and West. By contrast, Wolf's year in America seems to be taken up with impromptu dinner parties where she is endlessly engaged in dull conversation with colleagues. She hangs around second hand bookshops seeking out rare publications in German and to my surprise seems to get ripped off blind! She retreats to her apartment whenever she can. Her interest in American culture and society doesn't seem to run very deep.

Her limited English language skills, for which she apologises throughout the book, creates even more of a barrier. Her thinly veiled boredom and inability to widely or easily communicate combine to make for observations which are thin and not very original. There are lots of criticisms made of the many homeless on LA's streets which become tiresome. Predictably there is a great deal of discussion about the German artists and intellectuals who sought refuge from the Nazis in the 30s and 40s. Wolf's curious focus on Thomas Mann's "secret" questions about his sexuality provides her with an opportunity to raise the issue of her own "secret" - that as a past Stasi informer.

Wolf circles around the issue but fails to get to the heart of the matter concerning her own culpability: But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption.

Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering. This is where Wolf soars as a writer: So they rattle, but why did it take us so long to realize that? We have to live following an uncertain inner compass, without any appropriate moral code.

Walther von der Vogelweide

Only we cannot keep deluding ourselves any longer. Freud", is suggestive of the need for a writer - for any honest person - to not fear exposure when confronted with adversity, accusations or perhaps even their own guilt. To make the inside visible. Dec 18, A'Llyn rated it really liked it. A long, thoughtful reflective look at life in East Germany compared to the United States, forms of government, memory, love, chance, art A bit slow, but rewarding.

Walther von der Vogelweide - Wikipedia

Very interesting to read her thoughts about "life under a dictatorship. Dit heb ik opgegeven na bladzijden De protagonist boeide me niet meer en er waren onnavolgbare gedachtelijnen, zinnen en uitweidingen. Ik voelde me steeds dommer worden. Threaded thickly with melancholy, loneliness, giddiness. We had to become one with this thousand-eyed creature of legend in two equal parts, five lanes each, racing toward each other and then past each other, seemingly missing each other by a hair's breadth; had to attune our spirit to the other parts of this creature driving along in front of us, behind us, to either side--a creature that ruled us all and cruelly punished every individual movement, every mistake, as we saw show Threaded thickly with melancholy, loneliness, giddiness.

We had to become one with this thousand-eyed creature of legend in two equal parts, five lanes each, racing toward each other and then past each other, seemingly missing each other by a hair's breadth; had to attune our spirit to the other parts of this creature driving along in front of us, behind us, to either side--a creature that ruled us all and cruelly punished every individual movement, every mistake, as we saw shown on television night after night.

I didn't then know, and would not have believed, that sympathy gets weaker when excessive claims are made upon it. That it doesn't grow back to the same extent after you give it out. That people, without realizing it or wanting it, develop protective techniques against self-destructive sympathy. It was as though the substance of the world, whatever that might mean, were eluding me. I lived between two realities: Jun 11, Full Stop added it Shelves: For decades both occupied a unique position of moral and artistic authority on the world stage. Both attempted in their writings to work meaningfully though a history so beset with atrocities that nuanced accounts can too often be edged out by more psychologica http: Both attempted in their writings to work meaningfully though a history so beset with atrocities that nuanced accounts can too often be edged out by more psychologically and emotionally comforting broad strokes.

In both cases, a set of biographical disclosures later in life challenged this authority: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy for a contemporary example of this phenomenon. Of course, the real lesson to be drawn from these cases — the lesson which the most bellicose critics at the time of the revelations obstinately refused to consider — is that the intersection of art, history, and biography is far more complicated than we would like to admit. Sep 03, SemneBune rated it it was amazing. Freud — SemneBune http: Sep 12, Berna rated it liked it. If you generally want more differentiation in your own thinking this book will help you to achieve that.

It clearly helps to move away from a black and white thinking to a much more colourful picture of life and what we see around us. The most important part of this book to me is how she deals with the allegations by the media against the author relating to a conversation she had 30 years ago. So very thought provoking and challenging to understand her thoughts. Also an Most highly recommended. Also an interesting insight in the city of Los Angeles and comparison to Germany.

I will never finish this book.


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  • City of Angels or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.
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  • Splat the Cat: The Rain Is a Pain: I Can Read Level 1.
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It started out interesting. Oh the Ossie and the Wessie should be friends. The Ossie and Wessie world views should meld into a new Germany. But the book falls flat and spins in circles. I certainly could not get out of its author's self involved thought patterns. There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, journalist, and film dramatist Christa Wolf was a citizen of East Germany and a committed socialist, Mrs.

Wolf managed to keep a critical distance from the communist regime. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor. In , she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. They had two children.


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  • La prisión de los espejos (Narrativa) (Spanish Edition)?
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