This is the second volume in a trilogy in which Stefan Zweig builds a composite picture of the European mind through intellectual portraits selected from among its most representative and influential figures. In 'Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche', Zweig concentrates on three giants of German literature to portray the artist and thinker as a figure possessed by a powerful inner vision at odds with the materialism and scientific positivism of his time, in this case, the nineteenth century. Zweig's subjects here are respectively a lyric poet, a dramatist and writer of novellas, and a philosopher. Each led an unstable life ending in madness and/or suicide and not until the twentieth century did each make their full impact. Whereas the nineteenth-century novel is socially capacious in terms of subject and audience, the three figures treated here are prophets or forerunners of modernist ideas of alienation and exile. Hoelderlin and Kleist consciously opposed the worldly harmoniousness of Goethe's classicism in favor of a visionary inwardness and dramatisation of the subjective psyche. Nietzsche set himself as a destroyer and rebuilder of philosophy and critic of the degradation of the German spirit through nationalism and militarism. Zweig's choice of subjects reflects a division in his own soul. The image of Goethe recurs here as the ultimate upholder of Zweig's own ideals: scientist and artist, receptive to world culture, supremely rational and prudent. Yet Zweig was aware that Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche were more daring explorers of the dangerous and destructive aspects of man that needed to be seen and comprehended in the clarifying light of poetry and philosophy.

The Struggle with the Daemon is a brilliant analysis of the European psyche by the great novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig. Zweig studies three giants of German literature and thought: Friedrich Holderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche – powerful minds whose ideas were at odds with the scientific positivism of their age; troubled spirits whose intoxicating passions drove them mad but inspired them to great works. In their struggle with their inner creative force, Zweig reflects the conflict at the heart of the European soul – between science and art, reason and inspiration. Both highly personal and philosophically wide-ranging, this is one of the most fascinating of Zweig’s renowned biographical studies.

Stefan Zweig’s literary portraits of three tormented giants of German literature, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche, contrasts them with Goethe who was anchored in place by profession, home and family. For Zweig, “everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles inevitably with his daemon” which Zweig describes as “the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being ... towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation and even self-destruction.” In these essays, Zweig depicts the tragic and sublime lifelong struggle by three great creative minds with their respective daemons.

The great writer and biographer's Stefan Zweig's work, The Fight with the Daemon, is a superb study of the European psyche. Friedrich Holderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche are three giants of German literature and thinking.They were powerful minds whose thoughts clashed with the logical positivism of their time; troubled souls whose intoxicating emotions made them insane but inspired them to great works.Stefan Zweig represents the tension at the core of the European soul - between science and art, cause and imagination - in their battle with their inner artistic power.This is the most interesting of his esteemed biographical studies, as it is both intensely intimate and philosophically wide-ranging.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski

The works and biography of Heinrich von Kleist have fascinated authors, artists, and philosophers for centuries, and his enduring relevance is evident in the emblematic role he has played for generations. Kleist’s prose works remain “utterly unique” seventy years after Thomas Mann described their singular appeal, his dramas remain “disturbingly current” four decades after E.L. Doctorow characterized their modernity, and twenty-first century readers need not read far before finding the unresolved questions of the current century in Kleist. Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Aesthetic Legacies explores examples of Kleist’s impact on artistic creations and aesthetic theory spanning over two centuries of seismic metaphysical crises and nightmare scenarios from Europe to Mexico to Japan to manifestations of the American Dream.

Why did Nietzsche claim to have "written in blood"? Why did Heidegger remain silent after World War II about his participation in the Nazi Party? How did Hölderlin's voice and the voices of other, more ancient poets come to echo in philosophy? Words in Blood, Like Flowers is a classical expression of continental philosophy that critically engages the intersection of poetry, art, music, politics, and the erotic in an exploration of the power they have over us. While focusing on three key figures—Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—this volume covers a wide range of material, from the Ancient Greeks to the vicissitudes of the politics of our times, and approaches these and other questions within their hermeneutic and historical contexts. Working from primary texts and a wide range of scholarly sources in French, German, and English, this book is an important contribution to philosophy's most ancient quarrels not only with poetry, but also with music and erotic love.

Despite a sustained and fruitful relationship with the classical philologists of his day, Martin Heidegger's status among classicists has long since been strained, especially in the Anglophone tradition. Heidegger and Classical Thought reemphasizes both Heidegger's importance to classical discourse and the significance of classical discourse for Heidegger's own work. The essays found in this book demonstrate the depth and breadth of Heidegger's engagement with classical thought throughout his life, from his early engagements with Aristotle and Plato to his profound readings of the early Greek thinkers. At the same time, this book shows how reading Heidegger's interpretation of classical thought offers new and innovative ways to approach and study antiquity.

Volume three of Culture & Civilization continues a pattern in this annual series of dealing with major themes of the past, with a strong sense of how the everyday world of the second decade of the twenty-first century impacts cultural history and civilizations pushing up against each other. A constant theme throughout is the immediate impact of Globalism: in economics, government, manners, styles, egalitarianism in political demands, and terrorism as a response to democratic systems. Each in its own way has coalesced to bring discourse on civilization levels back into vogue. Global issues in size, scope, and scenario are herein placed on exhibition once again. Among the noteworthy contributions are substantial articles by Jason Powell, Global Aging; Tony Leon, Liberal Democracy in Africa; Yoaz Hendel, Terrorism and Piracy; Norman Manea and Paul Hollander, "Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall"; Aleksander Kwasniewski, "World Views of the European Union"; Gregg Rickman, "The Nazi Religion and the Holocaust"; and Walter Laqueur, "Europe's Road to the Mosque". This volume features special essays on Jean Francois Revel's Uncommon Insight; John Maynard Keynes Revisited; Stefan Zweig: Master Builder of the Spirit; and Inside Shakespeare's Hamlet. As with the previous volumes, the writings are brilliantly realized in form with serious content to match. Threading a needle between abstracted empiricism that dominates present science policy and speculative metaphysics that offers little else than a great vision of the world, this volume of Culture & Civilization on Globalism charts a space for which there is a felt need by large publics, responded to by serious social science specialists capable of addressing such interests in historically meaningful contexts.

This volume is comprised of 14 contributions, which are revised and expanded versions of lectures held at an international conference on Stefan Zweig that took place in Israel in 2004. The essays focus on Zweig's biographical writings (for example Erasmus and Fouché), as well as on several aspects of his literary works that have been neglected since the revival of academic studies of his writings and career commenced some 25 years ago. These include: Zweig's conception of the daemonic, Zweig and Christianity, the discourse of love in his writings, Zweig as an Austrian eulogist, his understanding of theater, etc. Contributors from Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Slovenia, and Israel bring refreshingly diverse perspectives and new concerns to this scholarly project. With contributions from Vera Apfelthaler, Matjaz Birk, Denis Charbit, Sarah Fraiman-Morris, Mark H. Gelber, Jacob Golomb, Bernhard Greiner, Gert Kerschbaumer, Hanni Mittelmann, Klaus Mueller, Michel Reffet, Ingrid Spoerk, Robert Wistrich.