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        Humanities & Social Sciences

        HOMECOMING

        by Wolfgang Büscher

        In the middle of the woods, in the middle of Germany: Wolfgang Büscher‘s fascinating journey into its very core. Night after night, a boy stands at the window of his parents’ house and watches the sun as it disappears from view behind the rolling hills in the west. He roams through the woods with his friends, building wooden shacks which the foresters destroy. It’s the early sixties. Decades later, Wolfgang Büscher makes his childhood dream come true. He moves to the woods and experiences spring, summer and autumn there. An aristocratic family on the border of Hessen and Westphalia where Büscher grew up allows him to stay in a hunting lodge in the middle of the woods, in the middle of Germany.  This is where he puts up his camp bed. He has no electricity or running water. He prepares himself for quiet times alone, chopping wood and making fires, the odd hunting expedition, hiking, a marksmen’s festival, extreme loneliness and a nighttime blackness never seen in the city. The year takes an unexpectedly dramatic turn as storms, heat and plagues of beetles kill half of the woods. And something else happens which turns everything on its head: Büscher’s mother dies that summer, meaning the house he grew up in is left empty, but full of memories. This is a homecoming more existential than he could have imagined. A book far removed from the deafening din of today‘s world. An exploration of a nation, floods of memories and a “sentimental education” all rolled into one - literary, perceptive and overwhelming.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2021

        Critical design in Japan

        Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde

        by Ory Bartal

        This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.

      • Trusted Partner
        February 2024

        The Wigmaker of Königsberg

        A difficult friendship with Immanuel Kant

        by Michael Lichtwarck-Aschoff

        It is said that all the ladies in Königsberg had a crush on Kant. How one coifs one’s intellectual giants, one’s occidental luminaries. Although at the time, Kant employed a Huguenot wigmaker to style his hair. Of whom not much is known. Except that he would have liked to get rid of the wigs and replace them with a short back and sides. And that he tried to comply practically with the idea of enlightenment. But with Kant’s sentences the great philosopher only ever addressed the enlightenment-driven rulers of Europe, and never the people of Africa, whose diff erent skin colour alone proved to Kant that they could not reach a higher level of civilisation on their own. But he and Kant only really fell out seriously over Esther, the pleasing and seductive maid...

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2019

        Contemporary Korean cinema

        Culture, identity and politics

        by Hyangjin Lee

        The first in-depth, comprehensive study of Korean cinema offering original insight into the relationships between ideology and the art of cinema from East Asian perspectives. Combines issues of contemporary Korean culture and cinematic representation of the society and people in both North and South Korea. Covers the introduction of motion pictures in 1903, Korean cinema during the Japanese colonial period (1910-45) and the development of North and South Korean cinema up to the 1990s. Introduces the works of Korea's major directors, and analyses the Korean film industry in terms of film production, distribution and reception. Based on this historical analysis, the study investigates ideological constructs in seventeen films, eight from North Korea and nine from South Korea.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2022

        Understanding governance in contemporary Japan

        by Masahiro Mogaki

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2017

        Asia in Western fiction

        by Robin Winks

        Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.

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        Health & Personal Development
        July 2021

        Everything harder than everyone else

        by Jenny Valentish

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        June 2012

        Geschichten aus Japan

        by Hermann Hesse

        »Das Japan, von welchem diese Geschichten erzählen, existiert heute nicht mehr. Die Ideale, auf welchen der Bau jener überaus kraftvollen, dabei so schönheitsfrohen Kultur errichtet war, sind heute zum Teil schon veraltet und vergessen, zum Teil bestehen sie noch als Reste der Vergangenheit, deren Macht täglich mehr schwindet. … Die Geschichten unsres Buches zeigen das alte, vergangene, schöne Japan, wie es einmal war, das Japan der adligen, kriegerischen, aristokratischen Ideale.« Hermann Hesse

      • Trusted Partner
        April 1988

        Denken in Japan

        by Masao Maruyama, Wolfgang Seifert, Wolfgang Schamoni, Wolfgang Schamoni, Wolfgang Seifert, Wolfgang Schamoni

        Die vorliegende Arbeit gilt in Japan seit ihrer Veröffentlichung im Jahre 1957 als eine der wichtigsten kritischen Untersuchungen der intellektuellen Struktur des modernen Japan und ist gleichzeitig selbst ein bedeutendes Dokument der japanischen Geistesgeschichte nach dem Kriege.

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        April 1989

        Im Schatten des Siegers: Japan

        by Ulrich Menzel

        Im August 1945 lag das japanische Kaiserreich am Boden zerstört und hatte keine andere Wahl, als sich in die (fast) bedingungslose Kapitulation zu fügen. 50 Jahre später, am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, stand Japan im Zenit seines wirtschaftlichen Erfolges, und die USA, ebenso wie Europa, sah sich erneut der »japanischen Herausforderung« ausgesetzt. Wie war dieser welthistorisch so bemerkenswerte Aufstieg im Schatten des Siegers möglich? Was sind seine kulturellen, politischen und sozialen Grundlagen?

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2012

        New frontiers

        Imperialism's new communities in East Asia, 1842–1953

        by Robert Bickers, Andrew Thompson, Christian Henriot, John Mackenzie

        In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were literally and figuratively established. Newly available in paperback, this pioneering and comparative study of Western and Japanese imperialism examines European, American and Japanese communities in China and Korea, and challenges received notions of agency and collaboration by also looking at the roles in China of British and Japanese colonial subjects from Korea, Taiwan and India, and at Chinese Christians and White Russian refugees. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the history and anthropology of imperialism, colonialism's culture and East Asian history, as well as contemporary Asian affairs. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        August 2023

        The Maid

        by Prose, Nita

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        August 1998

        Unterwegs in der Hölle

        Zwei Erzählungen

        by Prose, Francine

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        August 2024

        Ein mysteriöser Gast

        Zimmermädchen Molly Gray ermittelt

        by Prose, Nita

        Aus dem Englischen von Alice Jakubeit

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