278 Besprechungen / Reviews senting Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema,» and «Towards the New Wave: Gender and the Critique of Popular Cinema,» framed by an Introduction and Epilogue. Together the three sections build a convincing argument as to the central role played by gender in the reconstruction of German society and the reconstruction of a German film language after World War II. The first section «Relegitiminzing the Cinema» focuses on the problems of reestablishing a viable national cinema in the aftermath of the war. Baer gives critical readings of The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), Film Without a Title (1948), Love ’47 (1949), and Epilogue (1950). The second section «Art on Film» revisits postwar aesthetic debates as they play themselves out on the big screen in relation to gender construction in Willi Forst’s The Sinner (1951), Alfons Stummer’s The Forester of the Silver Wood (1955), and Veit Harlan’s Different from You and Me (1957). And the third section «Towards the New Wave» looks at the self-critical nature of Engagement in Zurich (1957), The Girl Rosemarie (1958), and The Bread of Those Early Years (1962). The book is clearly written and accessible to scholars and students in a variety of fields from film studies to German history and/ or gender studies. The focus on individual films in each chapter makes the book a must-have for those working on postwar film as the chapters can stand alone even as they contribute to broader arguments put forth in the book as a whole. As an increasing number of German Studies scholars pay closer attention to popular culture and its effects in postwar Germany, they will be building directly and indirectly on Baer’s book. University of Kentucky Jeff Rogers D EBORAH H OLMES AND L ISA S ILVERMAN (E DS .): Interwar Vienna: Culture Between Tradition and Modernity. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. 310 pp. $ 75. While Germany’s Weimar Republic and its capital Berlin have been the focus of intensive historical, sociocultural, economic, and political study, Austria’s First Republic (1919-34) and the significance of Vienna continue to remain in Weimar’s shadow with respect to grasping the cultural-historical importance of the Austrian interwar period for understanding European modernity. The appearance of Interwar Vienna: Culture Between Tradition and Modernity in 2009 brings much-deserved attention to this fifteen-year period of Austrian cultural history and its significant contributions for examining the political, economic, and sociocultural tumult that both characterized the period and underpinned European modernity. Edited by Deborah Holmes, lecturer in German at the University of Kent, and Lisa Silverman, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the volume reflects the same interdisciplinary atmosphere that marked the interwar period in Vienna in terms of the interconnectedness «of public events and personal lives - including the related political and social influences that shaped the cultural products of these years» (10). With an eye toward illuminating the position of culture - defined broadly as the arts, humanities, and intellectual life - within the dominant sociopolitical tensions between the Social Democrats of «Red Vienna» and the Christian Socialists, who CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 278 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 278 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18 Besprechungen / Reviews 279 dominated politics within the rest of the country and would eventually take unyielding political control in 1934, Interwar Vienna places its reader into the midst of this tendentious cultural conversation with essays that reveal «an intense consciousness of being ‹in between,› of representing a provisional state of affairs, [which] informed many of the creative and social products of the interwar period. Initially this sense of being in a state of transition could be positive, as it was for the Social Democrats, who believed they were one step closer to an ideal socialist society, or indeed for German nationalists, who felt Austria should now work toward becoming or joining a solely German nation. […] None of these possible responses remained mutually exclusive; it was perfectly possible to find optimism, nostalgia, and apprehension in any single reaction from practically any political viewpoint.» (8) It is through this focus on the liminal features bound up within the cultural and political facets of Vienna’s interwar atmosphere that Holmes and Silverman’s volume provides a much more nuanced understanding of cultural life within a constellation of competing political discourses, social projects, and economic uncertainties. The collection consists of twelve essays from thirteen contributors and examines case studies from the worlds of dance, theater, film, music, and literature against the backdrop of forces related to cultural and economic politics, race and Jewishness, which formed central tensions throughout the First Republic’s existence. Divided into four sections Interwar Vienna presents an organizing logic that hopes to provide in the first two sections the interwoven sociocultural, political, and historical foundation with which to read more closely the cultural examples taken up in the final two sections. Here Edward Timm’s essay reassessing the interconnected networks of intellectual creativity that existed among a range of cultural circles and thinkers, regardless of political affiliation, finds immediate resonance with Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman’s co-authored examination of the interrelationship between science, metaphysics, and faith in the perceived Jewishness of the Wiener Kreis. And John Warren’s historical study of cultural decline with the less-than-peaceful dissolution of the social democratic Red Vienna and the rise of Austrofascism in Vienna in the mid-1930s coincides well with Paul Weindling’s exploration of the divergent Austrian eugenics movement and its role in questions of public health and social welfare alongside issues related to racialized medicine within both the socialist Red Vienna and the German nationalist camps. The cohesion of the collection falters somewhat in bridging between the historical approaches of these first four essays and the close reading analyses crucial to the examination of the literary, filmic, and performative examples of the volume’s remaining eight essays. This minor consideration aside, the essays themselves each offer insightful interpretations of their respective subjects and serve well as both stand-alone articles and as demonstrative of the sociocultural and political tensions bubbling beneath the surface in Vienna. Readers progress through a series of insightful contributions that range in scope from investigations of literature (Ernst Weiss, Rudolf Brunngraber, Otto Neurath, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Blei, and John Lehmann) to analyses of discrete cultural forms of dance (the Viennese free dance movement), film (1920s Viennese/ Austrian silent film), theater (venue-based political exploration of interwar Viennese theater history), and music (the impact of Schönberg’s Vienna on CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 279 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 279 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18 280 Besprechungen / Reviews German music). While Interwar Vienna: Culture Between Tradition and Modernity thrives on the interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival approach that an edited volume provides, it would benefit from an editorial conclusion, if only to reiterate and comment further on the connections drawn across the individual contributions and across Holmes and Silverman’s engaging introduction. This slight concern aside, the volume will find a ready readership primarily among scholars interested in the interdisciplinary field of Austrian studies encompassing film and literary studies, music and performance studies, theater history, and political science and history. Arizona State University Daniel Gilfillan H ANS A DLER AND W ULF K OEPKE (E DS .): A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. 489 pp. $ 90. This book which contains seventeen articles by nineteen contributors is a milestone for international Herder scholarship. It is the first such volume available in English and a historic breakthrough. It meets the goal of the experienced editors, Hans Adler and the late Wulf Koepke, to convey a comprehensive picture of the life and the works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). The editors have dared to tackle an overdue and onerous task in correcting an entire gamut of historical mistakes in previous misrepresentations of Herder. They have engaged a panel of experienced contributors from various disciplines and countries (including the United States of America, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland) to write this monumental but accessible and appealing volume. It is laudable that the editors address the mistakes of outdated Herder reception in their introduction and the contributors follow through in the same vein in their individual articles. The volume, therefore, serves as a corrective to earlier attempts to provide a presentation of Herder and his work as a whole in a field still dominated by the biography of Rudolf Haym (first published in 1877). Although Haym’s work is not without its merits, it unfortunately left a negative impression of Herder and proved a misleading resource for many generations to come. Adler and Koepke comment on Haym: «He depicted Herder as a thinker of the second order, one who already at the age of 21 had lost contact with the avant-garde of the early 1770s, Kant above all» (1). Haym represented Herder through the lens of Kant, who had been Herder’s professor in Königsberg and who claimed «in a malicious review» of the first two volumes of Herder’s Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91) that Herder merged poetry and philosophy in illegitimate ways. Therefore, it is finally time to make Herder’s work fully understood in its own right. This book does just that. It also corrects the cliché of Haym’s one-sided emphasis on Herder’s role in the Sturm und Drang movement while ignoring his later developments. Adler and Koepke’s volume further challenges effectively Haym’s verdict on Herder’s jealousy of Goethe and Schiller. Adding to the severe misreadings of him by Haym, Herder was even more severely wronged in his reception history through his exploitation by the Nazis who misused his concepts of «Nation» and «Volk» for their own fascist purposes. Arnd Bohm in his contribution on «Herder and Politics» explains that there are «two most CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 280 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 280 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18