Schottenfreude is a unique, must-have dictionary, complete with newly coined words that explore the idiosyncrasies of life as only the German language can. Ever thought, There should be a German word for that? Well, thanks to the brilliantly original mind behind Schott’s Original Miscellany, now there is. In what other language but German could you construct le mot juste for a secret love of bad foods, the inability to remember jokes, Sunday-afternoon depression, the urge to yawn, the glee of gossip, reassuring your hairdresser, delight at the changing of the seasons, the urge to hoard, or the ineffable pleasure of a cold pillow? A beguiling, ideal gift book for the Gelehrte or anyone on your list—just beware of rapidly expanding (and potentially incomprehensible) vocabularies.

In 18th-century Germany philosophers were occupied with questions of who we are and what we should be. Can the individual fulfill its vocation or is this possible only for humanity as a whole? Is significant progress towards perfection in any way possible for me or just for me as part of humanity? By following the origin and nature of these debates, this collection sheds light on the vocation of humanity in early German philosophy. Featuring translations of Spalding's Contemplation on the Vocation of the Human Being in its first version from 1748 and an extended translation of Abbt's and Mendelssohn's epistolary discussion around the Doubts and the Oracle from 1767, newly-commissioned chapters cover Johann Gottfried Herder's inherently cultural concept of the human being, Immanuel Kant's transformative interplay of moral and natural aspects, and the notion of metempsychosis in Fichte's work inspired by two neglected philosophers, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Georg Schlosser. Opening further lines of inquiry, contributors address questions about the adaptations of Spalding's work that focus on the vocation of women as wife, mother or citizen. Exploring the multitude of ways 18th-century German thinkers understand our position in the world, this volume captures major changes in metaphysics and anthropology and enriches current debates within modern philosophy.

The Call of Human Nature documents and analyzes the wide use of scatological themes and metaphors in an equally wide range of writings. The Rollfinkes' claim that the obscene expressions used by Americans emphasize sexual elements, whereas Germans stress the scatological. For many modern German authors, scatalogical images, metaphors, and motifs serve their purposes more effectively than would other metaphors.

The Faustian bargain—in which an individual or group collaborates with an evil entity in order to obtain knowledge, power, or material gain—is perhaps best exemplified by the alliance between world-renowned human geneticists and the Nazi state. Under the swastika, German scientists descended into the moral abyss, perpetrating heinous medical crimes at Auschwitz and at euthanasia hospitals. But why did biomedical researchers accept such a bargain? The Nazi Symbiosis offers a nuanced account of the myriad ways human heredity and Nazi politics reinforced each other before and during the Third Reich. Exploring the ethical and professional consequences for the scientists involved as well as the political ramifications for Nazi racial policies, Sheila Faith Weiss places genetics and eugenics in their larger international context. In questioning whether the motives that propelled German geneticists were different from the compromises that researchers from other countries and eras face, Weiss extends her argument into our modern moment, as we confront the promises and perils of genomic medicine today.

Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world.

A new 2023 translation into American English from the original manuscript of Nietzsche's 1878 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches/ Human, All Too Human. This is volume 3 in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche from Newcomb Livraria Press.This chronological, systematic set of Nietzsche's works is the first ever bilingual "Hauptwerke" or complete major works of Nietzsche published in English & the original German. Human, All too Human was first published in 1878 on the 100th anniversary of Voltaire’s death, a second expanded edition was published in 1886 with a preface and consolidated versions of his Miscellaneous Opinions and Sayings (1879) and The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880). These two works are sometimes published separately. This edition is the second extended edition with both volumes. Human, All too Human is primarily an “Aphorismensammlung”, a collection of aphorisms. Across 350 small sections, Nietzsche deals with a vast range of topics, some trivial and some ancient- music, various artists including Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the Reformation, reason and logic, German idealism as a whole and the dwindling of Metaphysics. Human, all too Human, is Nietzsche’s first coordinated attack on Metaphysics itself. He is tremendously dismissive of German Criticism and Idealism and is not interested in being a logician in this tradition, but shows a deep understanding of the fields even in his short dismissal of them. Moral sentiments he understands in a Darwinian-historical sense, emerging from physical need and intellectualized in Metaphysics, and we see here the beginnings of his concept of the Wille zur Macht and the übermensch.

With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there, Andrew Zimmerman argues, that the battle lines of today's "culture wars" were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of "freak shows," Zimmerman demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies. Scholars of anthropology, European and intellectual history, museum studies, the history of science, popular culture, and colonial studies will welcome this book.