POSSIBLE TERM PAPER SUBJECTS

Bertolt Brecht (playwright):

• Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Thomas Kuhn and Steve Giles (London, 2003).
• Martin Esslin, Brecht, a Choice of Evils: A Critical Study of the Man, His Work, and His Opinions (London and New York, 1984).
• Ronald Speirs, Bertolt Brecht (New York, 1987).

Marlene Dietrich:

• Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York, 1992).

• Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich's ABC (Garden City, 1962): reminiscences and observations on life in the style of aphorisms.

• Judith Mayne, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture (Minneapolis, 2000): see especially chapter one on Marlene Dietrich and The Blue Angel.

·      Otto Dix (artist from a working-class background):

• Brigid Barton, Otto Dix and “Die neue Sachlichkeit,” 1918-1925 (Ann Arbor, 1981).
• Linda McGreevy, The Life and Works of Otto Dix, German Critical Realist (Ann Arber, 1981).
• Olaf Peters, ed., Otto Dix (New York, 2010) –catalogue with scholarly articles for a superb recent museum exhibit assembled by the Neue Galerie in New York.

Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus:

•  Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus, 1919-1933 (Cologne, 1998).

• Eva Forgacs, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (Budapest, 1995).

• Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years (Urbana, 1971).

• Peter Gay, Art and Act: On Causes in History (New York, 1976), Section Three, “Gropius: The Imperatives of Craft.”

• Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (New York, 1937).

George Grosz (comsymp artist):

• George Grosz, George Grosz, an Autobiography (New York, 1983).
• Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton, 1991).
• Barbara McCloseky, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton, 1997).

Martin Heidegger (recommended for philosophy majors):

• Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia, 1989).
• Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, ed. Elzbieta Ettinger (New Haven, 1995): correspondence with a brilliant young Jewish graduate student.
• Bernd Martin, ed., Martin Heidegger und das 'Dritte Reich'.  Ein Kompendium (Darmstadt, 1989): useful documentary reader on Heidegger's involvement in the Nazi Party in 1933.
• Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger (New York, 1993).

Karen Horney (psychoanalyst):

• Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold Kelman (New York, 1993): anthology begins with two trail-blazing critiques from the 1920s of Freud's concept of "penis envy."
• Susan Quinn, A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney (New York, 1987).
• Janet Sa, Mothers of Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein (New York, 1991).

Ernst Jünger (“conservative revolutionary” war novelist):

• Ernst Jünger: Compare his first autobiographical war novel, Storms of Steel (1922), with his later reflection on the Nazi seizure of power, On the Marble Cliffs.
• Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley, 1999).
• Thomas Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945 (Durham, 1996).

Käthe Kollwitz (comsymp artist):

• Elizabeth Prelinger, Käthe Kollwitz (Washington, 1992).
• Mina Klein, Käthe Kollwitz: Life in Art (New York, 1975).
• Käthe Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Hans Kollwitz (Evanston, 1988).

Thomas Mann (Germany’s greatest novelist, who had a radical brother, Heinrich):

• Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann (New Haven, 1979).
• Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann: A Biography (New York, 1995).
• Thomas Mann:  Trace the evolution of his views on the relationship between art and politics in the following novellas and stories: “Tonio Kröger,” “Disorder and Early Suffering,” “Death in Venice,” and “Mario and the Magician.”

Carl Schmitt (brilliant legal philosopher who for a time served Hitler):

• Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, 1983): a fairly sympathetic portrait.
• Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, 2004).
• William Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, Maryland, 1999): a harsh critique.
• Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, and Legality and Legitimacy (explore his critique of the Weimar constitution in these recent English translations of his classic essays).

Gustav Stresemann (politician and German foreign minister, 1923-29; the quintessential Vernunftrepublikaner).

• Hans Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (Baltimore, 1954): a skeptical view of Stresemann as an unreformed nationalist, biding his time.
• Robert Gratwohl, Stresemann and the DNVP: Reconciliation or Revenge in German Foreign Policy, 1924-1928 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1980).
• Gustav Stresemann, Gustav Stresemann: His Diaries, Letters, and Papers, ed. Eric Sutton, 3 vols (London, 1935-1940).
• Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman (Oxford, 2002): an admiring biography that depicts Stresemann as a genuine convert to democracy and international reconciliation.