Vol. 20 · No. 2 · Issue 63 · Summer 2002 · pp. 1-48 (48)
The Culture of CultureToward a German Variant of Performative Democracy
Charles S. Maier
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Vol. 20 · No. 2 · Issue 63 · Summer 2002 · pp. 1-48 (48)The Culture of CultureToward a German Variant of Performative Democracy Charles S. Maier
AbstractMarcel Reich-Ranicki, the German literary critic, recalls in his recent memoirs that at age ten, when he set out from his small town in Poland, his teacher said with tears in her eyes, "Mein Sohn, Du fährst in das Land der Kultur." Elias Canetti recalled in the first volume of his memoir-The Tongue Set Free-how when he was age eight, his mother, recently widowed, found fulfillment at the Burgtheater and left Manchester to take up residence in Vienna. Was it just the magic of the German language that transported these Jews and made literary overachievers of their children? A vision of metropolitan culture and assimilation? Culture was "the way 'in,'" as Louis Spitzer puts it in his book on marginality, Lives in Between. |