Joseph Peter Stern Livres

Le propos de l'auteur est de décrire ici non pas tant l'homme que la fascination qu'il exerça. Car pour Joseph Peter Stern, Hitler est un mythe fabriqué par Adolf Hitler lui-même et auquel celui-ci fut le premier à croire. Le langage de Hitler n'était pas uniquement celui du mysticisme nationaliste et raciste. Sa rhétorique ne reposait pas sur une maîtrise linguistique, une émotion contrôlée mais sur la combinaison et l'amoncellement d'images. Elle s'adressait à l'homme de la rue mais convenait aussi au spectacle politique : rassemblements de foules agitant des drapeaux sour le jeu des projecteurs. Il ne s'agissait plus d'une idéologie au sens strict du terme mais d'un mythe, d'une philosophie de l'histoire. Ce livre a valeur de leçon. Il montre toute la force d'un langage captieux et d'une violence insidieuse. Il indique qu'il suffit d'une volonté libre pour s'y opposer comme en témoigne l'action de certains résistants allemands.

This book studies individual works by twelve major writers of German modernism, including Thomas Mann, Musil, Brecht and Rilke, in relation to the history of the twentieth century. It explores the theme of the 'dear purchase', an ideal of moral strenuousness and sacrifice seen as characteristic of Germany after Nietzsche, and reveals the underlying flaw in this notion as a self-justifying value. In this context, it considers the renaissance of German poetry after 1900, the impact of the War of 1914, its aftermath in uncertainty and relativism, and attitudes to the Hitler period, and finally juxtaposes Mann's Felix Krull and Kafka's story Josephine as a deliverance from the value-system of the title. The Introduction, partly autobiographical, traces J.P. Stern's preoccupation with this interpretation of his material in many of the books he published (especially those concerned with Nietzsche and Hitler), and pays tribute to Wittgenstein's influence on his thinking.

Together with Marx and Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of the main sources of twentieth-century thought. His formulations that God is dead, that the world is the product of the will to power, and that true value lies in a morality of strenuousness, have become part of the European experience in our age. While most of Nietzsche's work takes the form of short 'reflections', he also tried to create a major mythology and attempted, finally, a comprehensive philosophical system. In his often contradictory writings— which are concentrated into the brief time-span 1872-88 — he directs his thought again and again at the function and value of truth. Nietzsche was an anti-systemic thinker, yet he understood and systematically 'unmasked' the ethic of praise and blame, of punishment and reward and of the agony of conscience. The book is an exhilarating examination of Nietzsche's work: in a series of analyses of his 'philosophical experiments' J.P. Stern elucidates Nietzsche's existentialism by reference to the main event of his life, and to his astounding range of styles and vision of language.

Franz Kafka Symposium (1983 Institute of Germanic Studies)

Kniha pojednávají o době a příčinách Hitlerova nástupu k moci. Populismus, chyby stávajících politiků a zěry, které jsou výstrahou i pro současnost