New Books In German Studies

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill.” And it explains victory: “We won the war because we, individually and there communally, were healthy.” And it suggests a program for political progress: get healthy and stay that way. It’s an old idea. We find it among the Greeks, the Romans, and throughout the various 19th- and early 20th-century programs for “national renewal” that swept Europe and Asia. In his excellent book Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford UP, 2010), Erik Jensen explores how Germans of the Weimar era were seduced by this “self-wellness = national-wellness” logic. They’d lost