Forthcoming From NGC


Issue #154 (Feb 2025)


The 154th issue of New German Critique brings together work on literary criticism, literature, film, and philosophy. The issue opens with Martin Elsky’s investigation of the figure of the Jew as “unheimlich” in Erich Auerbach’s landmark 1938 essay “figura,” whereby the very method of figural interpretation is recast as a form of Jewish homelessness. Then, marking the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death, Stefani Engelstein homes in on Kafka’s medical record, especially tubercular lung sounds, to read “The Burrow,” one of his last stories, as a reflection on the author’s legacy. Continuing with the centrality of the body for early twentieth-century literature, Julien Farout reads Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain as a theater of embodiment, staging less a critique of prewar decadence and more a “new mind-body entity” that challenges the ascendency of disembodied technology. The issue proceeds with two essays on film: Martin Kagel’s analysis of how the silent or unspoken aspects of Andreas Dresen’s Stilles Land (1992) serve as indications of trauma, resistance, and utopian desire; and Olivia Landry’s exploration of a new subject in German cinema after 2010: the Jewish revenge plot, which opens new possibilities and positionalities. The question of possibility also informs Andrzej Frelek’s revisitation of Adorno’s 1962 essay “Progress,” in which he probes that work’s relevance not only for our current dialectic of freedom and unfreedom but also for our rapidly overheating planet. This issue of NGC concludes with Waldemar Bulira’s extensive interview with Ágnes Heller, conducted in the last years of her life, titled: “Intellectuals, Philosophy, and Politics in Dark Times.”



Table of Contents


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