Things I’ve been Reading the Past Decade
 to Prepare Writing a Novel about for a Trip to Germany (Part I)
Read Part I here.
Martin Buber, Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim) (1948)
Solomon Maimon, Autobiography (1800)
Johann Herder, God, Some Conversations (1787)
Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1978)
Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805
Friedrich Schiller, Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)
–––––. “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry,†(1795)
–––––.
William Tell (1804)
Charles E. Passage, Friedrich Schiller: World Dramatists (1975)
Johann Goethe, Goethe’s Letters to Zelter
–––––. Götz von Berlichingen (1773)
–––––. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774)
–––––. Iphigenieauf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris) (1779)
–––––. Italienische Reise (Italian Journey) (1816–17)
–––––. Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth from My Own Life) (1811–1830)
–––––. Novella
(1828)
–––––. Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), “Preface to the First Edition of 1810.â€
–––––. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) (1795)
–––––. Faust Part I (1808)
–––––. Faust Part II (1832)
Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s Weltanschauung (1897)
–––––. Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception) (1886)
–––––. Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit (Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom) (1895)
–––––. Education as a Social Problem (1919)
–––––. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1922)
–––––. Mysticism and Modern Thought (1928)
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Preface to Phenomenology†(1807)
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms [taken from Parerga and Paralipomena] (1851)
Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, (1870-1873)
––––-. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit ofMusic (1872) (1886)
–––––. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
–––––.
Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations) (1873–1876)
–––––. Toward a Genealogy of Morality (1886)
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher,Psychologist, Antichrist (1950)
–––––. Discovering the Mind Vol. II
– Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber (1981)
***
Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society) (1887)
Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works Vol. III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences [~1865-1911] (2002)
Max Weber, Essays in Sociology [~1900-1920] (1946)
Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) (1961)
Benedetto Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx (1900)
E.
M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over
Germany (1935)
Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (1929)
Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Selections from the Prison Notebooks) (1929–1935)
****
Victor Lefebure, The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War (1923)
Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1902–1908)
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917)
Heinrich Mann, Im Schlaraffenland (Berlin: in the Land of Cockaigne) (1900)
Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan (Man of Straw) (1918)
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)
–––––. “Germany and the Germans†(1945)
Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann (1979)
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1923)
Martin Buber & Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und das Wort (Scripture and Translation) (1926)
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
Arnold Zweig, Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa) (1927)
Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1929)
Jaroslav Hasek, Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka zasvětové války (The Good Soldier: Schweik) (1930)
Karl Kraus, Half-truths & One-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms [~1900-1936] (1976)
Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1900)
Carl Jung, The Jung Reader [1918-1930] (2012)
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1940)
Moritz Julius Bonn, The Wandering Scholar (1940)
Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game and Other Stories (1941)
H.G. Atkins, German Literature Through Nazi Eyes (1941)
Ernie Pyle, This is Your War: The Story of G. I. Joe (1943)
Martin Foss, The Idea of Perfection in the Western World (1946)
Karl Jaspers, The Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951)
Elie Wiesel, Night (1960)
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971)
Walter Laqueur, Weimar: a Cultural History, 1918–1933 (1974)
–––––. The Terrible Secret: An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (1980)
–––––. Best of Times, Worst of Times: Memoirs of a Political Education (2009)
Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers (1974)
Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) (2002)
Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (2006)
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961)
–––––. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975)
–––––. The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. (1981)
What Germans Thought of American Football Coaches 100 Years Ago:
(At Least According to Max Weber):
Written in about 1917:
The American boy learns unspeakably less than the German boy.
In spite of an incredible number of examinations, his school life has not had the significance of turning him into an absolute creature of examinations, such as the German.
For in America, bureaucracy, which presupposes the examination diploma as a ticket of admission to the realm of office prebends, is only in its beginnings.
The young American has no respect for anything or anybody, for tradition or for public office—unless it is for the personal achievement of individual men.
This is what the American calls “democracy.†This is the meaning of democracy, however distorted its intent may in reality be, and this intent is what matters here.
The American’s conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage. And that is all.
To be sure, if the teacher happens to be a football coach, then, in this field, he is a leader. But if he is not this (or something similar in a different field of sports), he is simply a teacher and nothing more. And no young American would think of having the teacher sell him a Weltanschauung or a code of conduct.
Now, when formulated in this manner, we should reject this. But the question is whether there is not a grain of salt contained in this feeling, which I have deliberately stated in extreme with some exaggeration. ––Max Weber (1864–1920)[1]
[1] Max Weber, “Science and Politics,†From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1958) 149–50.