Friedrich Kittler’s farewell words of 15 July 2011, delivered at the original building of the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he had taught during the final eighteen years of his academic career, are of course not among his most intellectually important texts. Rather, this address belongs to those documents whose specific status and relevance depends on a temporal relation to their author’s life dates. Kittler’s death on 11 October 2011 made the improvised Sophienstraße address his last public statement and thus gave it the aura of a legacy. What he said to his students and a few colleagues on that occasion is a random snapshot that, due to the posthumously dramatic perspective from which it conjures up his personality for us, has become a monument. As such, as a monument and as a legacy, I want to comment on those few sentences pronounced shortly before the end of his life by one of my dearest and most admired friends from my own German generation of scholars and intellectuals.

Although it is probably apocryphal, the etymology deriving obscene from the Latin ob and scena has proved to be enduring because it gets at something in the phenomenon itself. Thus derived, the “ob-scene” would be something opposed to the main event, or, as Svetlana Boym put it, “something played offstage with respect to the performance.” Whatever else obscenity is, it is something that is visible when properly it shouldn’t be, something that shouldn’t hold our attention but does. If we watch a performance with our minds fastened on whatever the obscene object is, then we’re not watching the performance right. That doesn’t mean that the obscene should be hidden; it means that it shouldn’t be, even as hidden. No one sits in a serious theatrical performance hoping for a wardrobe malfunction. The very imagination that would contemplate this possibility would strike us as obscene. If you know obscenity when you see it, that is at least in part because the obscene does not occur to you as viewable before it comes into view. In this respect, being obscene differs from being  perverse, which means to avail yourself of something prohibited by the law of the father but  perfectly in view as prohibited. In what follows, I will tryto argue for ballet as an obscene object in post-Wagnerian drama, musical or otherwise. Although this claim is part of a larger argument, I will  focus primarily on a failed collaboration between two post-Wagnerians, Richard Strauss and Frank Wedekind.

Beyond Reason relates Wagner’s works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

• Winner of the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association
• Winner of the Fraenkel in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library, London
• Winner of the Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women’s Historians  

The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of this impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War.

Based on vast research in untapped archival, oral, and private sources, Burned Bridge reveals the hidden origins of the Iron Curtain, presenting it in a startling new light. Historian Edith Sheffer's unprecedented, in-depth account focuses on Burned Bridge-the intersection between two sister cities, Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany's largest divided population outside Berlin. Sheffer demonstrates that as Soviet and American forces occupied each city after the Second World War, townspeople who historically had much in common quickly formed opposing interests and identities. The border walled off irreconcilable realities: the differences of freedom and captivity, rich and poor, peace and bloodshed, and past and present. Sheffer describes how smuggling, kidnapping, rape, and killing in the early postwar years led citizens to demand greater border control on both sides--long before East Germany fortified its 1,393 kilometer border with West Germany. It was in fact the American military that built the first barriers at Burned Bridge, which preceded East Germany's borderland crackdown by many years. Indeed, Sheffer shows that the physical border between East and West was not simply imposed by Cold War superpowers, but was in some part an improvised outgrowth of an anxious postwar society.

In a ceremonial address at the Annual Meeting of the German Rectors' Conference in Kaiserlautern, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht addressed "The eternal crisis of the humanities -- is there an end in sight?" on May 11, 2015.

As Peter Longerich's definitive biography of Joseph Goebbels is published in English translation, Stanford emeritus professor James J. Sheehan provides an overview of Goebbels' contributions to the Third Reich and reviews Longerich's efforts, including those involved in the heroic undertaking of evaluating Goebbels 32 volumes-worth of diary in the May 13, 2015 edition of The New York Times.

"Atlantik, Pazifik: die imaginäre ErschlieBung der Ozeane im Zeitalter der Segelschifffarht" is chapter 32 of the book Handbuch Literatur & Raum, edited by Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler and published by De Gruyter Reference.

This handbook examines the relationship between literature and space, taking into account particularly literary presentations of spatiality.