Joseph Peter Stern Boeken

Together with Marx and Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of the main sources of twentieth-century thought. His formulations that God is dead, that the world is the product of the will to power, and that true value lies in a morality of strenuousness, have become part of the European experience in our age. While most of Nietzsche's work takes the form of short 'reflections', he also tried to create a major mythology and attempted, finally, a comprehensive philosophical system. In his often contradictory writings— which are concentrated into the brief time-span 1872-88 — he directs his thought again and again at the function and value of truth. Nietzsche was an anti-systemic thinker, yet he understood and systematically 'unmasked' the ethic of praise and blame, of punishment and reward and of the agony of conscience. The book is an exhilarating examination of Nietzsche's work: in a series of analyses of his 'philosophical experiments' J.P. Stern elucidates Nietzsche's existentialism by reference to the main event of his life, and to his astounding range of styles and vision of language.

This book studies individual works by twelve major writers of German modernism, including Thomas Mann, Musil, Brecht and Rilke, in relation to the history of the twentieth century. It explores the theme of the 'dear purchase', an ideal of moral strenuousness and sacrifice seen as characteristic of Germany after Nietzsche, and reveals the underlying flaw in this notion as a self-justifying value. In this context, it considers the renaissance of German poetry after 1900, the impact of the War of 1914, its aftermath in uncertainty and relativism, and attitudes to the Hitler period, and finally juxtaposes Mann's Felix Krull and Kafka's story Josephine as a deliverance from the value-system of the title. The Introduction, partly autobiographical, traces J.P. Stern's preoccupation with this interpretation of his material in many of the books he published (especially those concerned with Nietzsche and Hitler), and pays tribute to Wittgenstein's influence on his thinking.

Professor Stern seeks to expose the roots of the Hitler myth. He performs thoroughly and brilliantly the examination that Kenneth Burke saw as a crying need on the brink of World War II. The questions Professor Stern asks are fundamental and still of the first importance in our own society. How could a predominantly sober, hardworking, and well-educated nation be persuaded to follow Hitler and his inhuman and destructuve program? What was the source of his immense popularity? Why were his public utterances so powerfully persuasive? What were the shared assumptions behind "The Final Solution," Operation Barbarossa, "The Night of the Long Knives"? Professor Stern has done a pioneering study of the rhetoric of Nazism, a rhetoric that coupled words and action. He examines the speeches, writings, and conversations of Hitler and places them in the context of traditional beliefs of the society into which Hitler, the "ideal outsider," made his way. With terrifying logic his career emerges as the creation of a man who translated the private sphere of sentiment into the public sphere of political action, the will to power into a weapon of mass hypnosis.

Franz Kafka Symposium (1983 Institute of Germanic Studies)

Kniha pojednávají o době a příčinách Hitlerova nástupu k moci. Populismus, chyby stávajících politiků a zěry, které jsou výstrahou i pro současnost