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Subject Area: Literature-Memoir/Memoirs
Malloy, Joseph1991 0-88946-579-7 272 pages
Will do much to improve the reputation of Constanze Mozart, who has been vilified as having been an unworthy wife to one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time and has been blamed for his poverty and his less-than-glorious, premature death. Although a work of fiction and historical surmise, Diez' Constanze, Formerly Widow of Mozart stays close enough to the sparse biographical details of Constanze's life that the book has a tone of veracity and authenticity that is augmented by Malloy's footnotes and afterword.
Gluck, Andrew L.
2026 1-4955-1363-7 164 pages
Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt were a strange pair indeed! Jaspers, the cool psychiatrist/philosopher and Arendt, the hot-headed polemicist who preferred to call herself a political theorist despite her extensive philosophical training. Jaspers was practically monolingual though he could read English with a dictionary. Arendt was fluent in many languages. Both valued original thought and they were somewhat contemptuous towards the imitative. What seemed to unite them, aside from emotional factors, was their concern for humankind, their sheer intellectual prowess and curiosity, and their willingness to dialogue.
The correspondence between the two goes far beyond the question regarding Nazi war criminals. Though my thesis centers upon the concepts of banality of evil and metaphysical guilt, it also involves the Jewish question and Zionism, something that may invoke a great deal of controversy nowadays. This was necessitated by the Jewish reaction to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and by her response to it. The book also deals with my own country, the U.S.A. and some unfortunate recent events.
Van Cleve, John W.
2024 1-4955-1308-4 192 pages
The Fables and Tales and the Swedish Countess were ensconced in the German canon of literature well into the nineteenth century. But Gellert’s renown faded in the twentieth, a development that can be traced in part to the profound disillusionment and cynicism that set in after the World Wars and the Holocaust. It is understandable that the continent that produced philosophical optimism in the eighteenth century and Auschwitz in the twentieth would find much of the thinking of Enlightenment figures like Gellert naïve, even passé. Saxony was one of the many states large and small that belonged to the vast and slowly failing Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the capital of which was Vienna.