Search Results

There was an important distinction among émigré legal scholars in England (very few came to Scotland in the first place), between those scholars who were already well established in their academic careers in Germany before they had to emigrate and those who had not completed their preparation for an academic career, although they might already have taken their doctorates in law before they left Germany. The former continued their research and writing, insofar as circumstances allowed, but were not normally appointed to formal professorships. There seemed to be no movement to create personal chairs for them, and there was a feeling that however good their understanding of English in general, their spoken English was insufficient for lecturing on a regular basis. Fritz Heinrich Schulz is a good example of the older generation. This chapter offers personal recollections of Schulz and other émigré legal scholars who escaped Germany and went to Britain: Guenter Treitel, Otto Lenel, Fritz Robert Pringsheim, Francis A. Mann, David Daube, and Walter Ullmann.

This chapter presents the author's personal recollections of German refugees in Oxford, England. He came to Oxford as a student in 1937, his subject of study being Greek and Latin Languages and Literature. He was well aware of the problem of the German refugees, but as a student he had little opportunity for personal contact with those of them who were in Oxford. Among the scholars whose lectures he attended, however, two or three stood out, and one of them was Eduard Fränkel. Among the earliest refugees to find a place in Oxford after 1933 were physicists. Oxford at that time did not have a strong physics faculty. The leading professor was F. A. Lindemann, who was himself by origin from Berlin and had well-established contacts in scientific circles in Germany. Refugee lawyers who were most successfully acclimatised were the few who were young enough and flexible enough to re-equip themselves as English lawyers, notably Otto Kahn-Freund and Francis A. Mann. Other émigré lawyers who had found refuge in Oxford were Martin Wolff, Fritz Heinrich Schulz, and Fritz Robert Pringsheim.

Fritz Schulz (1879–1957) was one of the most successful Roman law scholars in Germany when the Nazi rule ended his career in 1933. Forced into early retirement, he and his wife held out in Germany until 1939, when they escaped first to Leiden (The Netherlands) and then, by a narrow margin, to Oxford. There the family was kept afloat by a patchwork of support, coming mainly from Oxford University Press, whose Kenneth Sisam unlocked funds of the American Rockefeller Foundation for a full range of outstanding émigré scholars, from Balliol College and friends like F. A. Mann. Free from professorial duties, Schulz wrote two remarkable books, widely translated and reprinted ever since. He was the first to understand the Roman lawyers' writings as expressions of a professional, ‘scientific’ activity, opening up Roman law as a field for the study of history of science.

This chapter examines the presentation of modernist night in the novels of Polish writer Bruno Schulz. It explains that Schulz conjures up this modernist night in order illustrate the temporal anomalies of narrative art and to assemble a catalog or stamp album of the developments in 20th century culture that he witnesses from the perspective of Polish “minor literature”. His discourse provides early 20th century Western culture the retrospect that the character of Father Jacob achieves through incarceration in Schulz's Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.

This chapter argues that despite a communications environment increasingly organized around digital networks, there is a compelling case for extending the BBC's public service remit. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, successive cuts to public expenditure have seen a major contraction in the public information and cultural facilities previously available in local communities. These cuts render the maintenance of public service broadcasting as a comprehensive cultural and informational resource open to all and free at the point of use more essential than ever. Secondly, this is particularly true of households on low incomes. Thirdly, users accessing commercially provided ‘free’ digital facilities now encounter a system where the most popular online, activities are dominated by a handful of mega corporations — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple — all based outside the UK and generating profits by harvesting and selling users' personal data. According to the former president of the European parliament Martin Schulz, these companies must not be allowed to shape the new world order.

The epilogue reenlists Levinas for a final inventory of examples about reading and materiality. Perhaps by default, “the book in hand” is the expression to which previous chapters have had most recourse. It reminds us of where the book lies at any given time in its use, the fact that we take it and hold it and that it literally depends on such tangency as the shared border between its agency and ours. The epilogue returns to the question first posed in the prologue about the reading of grave-stones: into what meaningful adjacency are we ourselves drawn, reading in others’ footsteps and traces, and how, in being “joined” to its project, could we be said, ethically, to “have made something happen?”

“Meaningful Adjacencies” initiates the first in a series of textual couplings that populate the book: a passage about the Jewish cemetery in Bad Kissingen from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants in conjunction with Reflecting Absences, Michael Arad’s architectural design for the September 11th Memorial. On display in these two memorial texts (or through transactions prompted of their readers) are some of the tropes developed over the next eight chapters. They are (1) corporeality—making palpable contact with the literary artifact in one’s hands; 2) the tact inside of tactility; (3) ethical proximity—the nearness and enigmatic tug of meaningful adjacency that stops short of coincidence; (4) difficult reading—a semiotic order not transparently apprehended; (5) limit cases from which one may work backward toward norm or definition; and finally, (6) a “coming and going” (va-et-vient) between the everyday and the holy. Such are the criteria proposed by the book for literary language and for sacred scripture alike—“the difficult and the holy”—which, according to the rabbinic formula for the relationship between text and human touch, make the hands impure.

The paper explores practices and notions of spiritual empowerment that inspire and refract the interaction between supporters of the Muslim renewal movement Ansar Dine in Mali and their leader, the charismatic preacher Sheikh Haidara. Sheikh Haidara’s acolytes produce and circulate various religious paraphernalia, along transnational ties of trade and proselytizing, and thus create a religious community that connects fellow acolytes in Guinea, Ivory Coast, France and US-American cities, among them New York and Chicago. Particularly popular items are wall decorations, bumper stickers and dress accessories that bear, in green letters on a white background, the logo of the movement, as well as passages from suras, various quotes, portraits and honorific titles of Sheikh Haidara and his family. By teasing out the complexities of the relationship that Sheikh Haidara’s followers posit between religious paraphernalia, touch, and the bodily mediation of charismatic power, the paper makes a sustained argument for an understanding of the materiality of religious objects, and of people’s engagements with them, as an important site and medium for the making and remaking of religious attachment, community and authority. Furthermore, by paying close attention to believers’ material and social practices in settings conventionally conceived as belonging to the realm of mundane daily life, the paper enters a plea for reconceptualizing the sites, means, and forms of “religious” experience, in Muslim West Africa and, possibly, beyond.

This chapter focuses on the legal battle between the Federal League and organized baseball during the period June 1914–December 1914. Following its loss in the Chief Johnson case, the Federal League continued to recruit players from the big leagues, starting with outfielder Armando Marsans of the Cincinnati Reds. Marsans, who was signed by the St. Louis Federals, was followed by New York Yankees pitcher Al Schulz and Chicago White Sox first baseman Hal Chase, both of whom defected to the Buffalo Federals. The Chicago Federals were able to secure pitcher Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators, but Johnson repudiated his contract with them and returned to Washington. The Federals vowed to pursue legal action to enforce Johnson's contract with the ChiFeds. This chapter discusses the litigation involving the Federal League and the major leagues, its impact on both parties, and the reactions of the baseball press and fans to the legal dispute.

This chapter examines the foundational literary influences reflected in the Quay Brothers’ films. The Quay Brothers’ film narratives were influenced by the arts including: painting, early optical experiments, puppetry, literature, surrealism, expressionism, and Baroque architecture to musical structures, as well as Polish poster design, dance, and illustration. Their film narratives are centered on isolated objects, such as puppets with the use of visual metaphors to let people experience a visible miniature world of the animated lifeless objects. The Quay Brothers derived their use of visual metaphors through the three literary techniques of James Joyce. These include palimpsests, portmanteau words, and polyglot puns. The animation techniques of Quay Brothers were also inspired by Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, and Bruno Schulz.

This chapter discusses the research and studio processes from where the Quay Brothers’ films were conceived. Quay Brothers used a kind of research that lets them reinvent visual compositions derived from cinematic origins in order to create an authentic cinematic style. Some cinematic origins include the physical and tangible objects, such as objets trouves or old objects, faded fabrics, and Marcel Duchamp’s artworks which reflect history. The reflected history of these objects is used to structure each and every part of the films of the Quay Brothers; for instance, in their creation of the film Street of Crocodiles. Critics described the film as a realm composed of objects, puppets, and miniatures that move within an uncertain collaged space. The Quay Brothers used Bruno Schulz’s writings to present time as another factor, affecting the manipulation of their films’ collaged spaces.

This chapter focuses on Christian Norberg-Schulz, one of the most influential architecture theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a key interpreter of phenomenology in general and of Martin Heidegger in particular for architectural audiences. Through his carefully staged photo-essays, Norberg-Schulz theorized the history of architecture as the recurrence of visual patterns. The chapter argues that his photo[historio]graphy was fundamentally antihistorical; it attempted to ward off critical reflection by concealing its own historical construction. Norberg-Schulz passed off his photographs as universally valid visions of a timeless natural order that modern architects were invited to return to, in order to escape history.

This chapter explores the numerous and heretofore overlooked physical, personal, and psychological areas of overlap between Mo Testa in Dykes to Watch Out For and Linus van Pelt in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Many of Mo’s signature traits and hallmark qualities are ones she shares with Linus: from her insecurity and intellectualism to her philosophical nature and her role as reflective commentator for the group. Indeed, even Mo’s penchant for striped clothing can be seen as taking a sartorial cue from Linus, who is always clad in a t-shirt with strikingly similar horizontal stripes. While Bechdel never identified Schulz as an inspiration for her work nor the Peanuts gang as a model for her DTWOF crew, the suggestive echoes between Mo and Linus seem too numerous to be merely coincidental. Exploring the similarities between Mo and Linus reveals a compelling kinship between Bechdel’s work and one of the most well-known strips in the history of American comics, while it also sheds new light on the relationship that DTWOF has to its socio-cultural milieu.