Un-Civilizing Processes?: Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias

by Mary Fulbrook (Editor)

The collapse of the supposedly 'civilized' German nation into the 'barbarism' of Hitler's Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of 'the Germans' is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes - patterns of state formation, changing social structures - and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias's notion of the 'civilizing process', the essays collected here explore moments of excess and transgression, moments when the very boundaries of 'civilization' are both constructed and challenged. Inter-disciplinary contributions - on topics ranging from medieval laughter, cursing and swearing, through to music, the bourgeois self, and aspects of modern violence - highlight the complexity of inter-relations between the individual imagination and creativity, on the one hand, and the brute facts of political power and social structural inequalities, on the other; and develop new insights into the changing patterns of culture and society in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present. Table of Contents Mary The Character and Limits of the Civilizing Process Sebastian Laughter and the Process of Civilization in Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzival' Geraldine (Un-)Civilized The Regulation of Cursing and Swearing in German through the Ages Martin Civilization, Un-Civilization, On Goethe's 'Faust' Susanne The Pre-Colonial Race and Revolution in Literature of the Napoleonic Period Mark Violence and Transgression in Modern Wars Ernest Civilization in the Dining Table Manners in Thomas Mann's 'Buddenbrooks' Maiken The Civilizing

302 pages, Hardcover

First published April 29, 2007

About the author

Mary Jean Alexandra Fulbrook (née Wilson) is a British academic, historian and author. Since 1995, she has been Professor of German History at University College London. She is a noted researcher in a wide range of fields, including religion and society in early modern Europe, the German dictatorships of the twentieth century, Europe after the Holocaust, and historiography and social theory.