Gregory Maertz Livres

Exploring themes of love, loss, illness, and recovery, this poetry collection reflects on personal experiences against the backdrop of nature and art. The author employs formal structures like sonnets and ballads to create emotionally charged narratives. Richly descriptive and infused with enchantment, the poems draw from the author's memories and dreams, featuring evocative locations such as the Isle of Lewis, the Hawaiian Islands, and historic sites in New Jersey. The collection offers a deep connection to the natural world and personal mythology.

Exploring the interplay of Romanticism across various disciplines, this collection of nine essays delves into literature, philosophy, and cultural politics from the Renaissance to Modernism. The first part highlights connections between figures like Sir Thomas Browne and Kierkegaard, and traces influences from Schopenhauer on Tolstoy and Rodin on Rilke. The second part focuses on British radicalism and American transcendentalism, examining William Godwin's life and contributions, as well as the impact of German literature on women writers like Wollstonecraft and Eliot.

In the first chapter on the German military’s unlikely function as an incubator of modernist art and in the second chapter on Adolf Hitler’s advocacy for “eugenic” figurative representation embodying nostalgia for lost Aryan racial perfection and the aspiration for the future perfection of the German Volk, Maertz conclusively proves that the Nazi attack on modernism was inconsistent. In further chapters, on the appropriation of Christian iconography in constructing symbols of a Nazi racial utopia and on Baldur von Schirach’s heretical patronage of modernist art as the supreme Nazi Party authority in Vienna, Maertz reveals that sponsorship of modernist artists continued until the collapse of the regime. Also based on previously unexamined evidence, including 10,000 works of art and documents confiscated by the U. S. Army, Maertz’s final chapter reconstructs the anarchic denazification and rehabilitation of German artists during the Allied occupation, which had unforeseen consequences for the postwar art world.

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon stemmed from a cult of personality central to nineteenth-century cultural politics. This work reconstructs the culture wars surrounding Goethe’s authority, revealing a hidden chapter in intellectual history from the late eighteenth century to the dawn of Modernism. It highlights the roles of both marginal and canonical writers and critics, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe became an empowering cultural platform that challenged the notion of British literature's self-sufficiency. Engaging with German authors through translation and review offered literary enfranchisement and a model of development where 're-writers' evolved into original writers via an apprenticeship in translation. The critical writings examined reveal that textual analysis plays a minor role; instead, a robust cult of personality emerges, alongside a framework for hero-worship ideology that is more thoroughly explored in the cultural and political landscape of twentieth-century Europe.