Author: Elisabeth Sifton File Type: epub During the twelve years of Hitlers Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who didthe pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyiand offer new insights into the fearsome difficulties that resistance entailed. (Not forgotten is Christine Bonhoeffer Dohnanyi, Hanss wife and Dietrichs sister, who was indispensable to them both.) From the start Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi efforts to bend Germanys Protestant churches to Hitlers will, while Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the Justice Ministry and then in the Wehrmachts counterintelligence section, helped victims, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, and was an important figure in the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. The strength of their shared commitment to these undertakingsand to the people they were helpingendured even after their arrest in April 1943 and until, after great suffering, they were executed on Hitlers express orders in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich collapsed. Bonhoeffers posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison and other writings found a wide international audience, but Dohnanyis work is scarcely known, though it was crucial to the resistance and he was the one who drew Bonhoeffer into the anti-Hitler plots. Sifton and Stern offer dramatic new details and interpretations in their account of the extraordinary efforts in which the two jointly engaged. No Ordinary Men honors both Bonhoeffers human decency and his theological legacy, as well as Dohnanyis preservation of the highest standard of civic virtue in an utterly corrupted state. **

Author: Oded Nir File Type: pdf A Marxist history of Israeli literature, tracing the relations between economic, social, and aesthetic transformations. Signatures of Struggle offers a unique perspective on Israeli literature, bringing Marxist cultural critique to bear on a field from which it has hitherto been absent. Oded Nir moves beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism the relation of literature to national ideology. Rather than reproducing the usual narrative in which fiction resists the nations goals, Nir demonstrates how, in each historical moment, literary engagement with national ideology is a means to think through social tensions or contradictions internal to Israeli societyto solve in imagination problems that threaten the social order. Focusing on moments of transformation, Nir argues that the 1950s crisis of realism was the result of the failure, rather than the success, of the collective transformative project of the haluzim, the settler vanguard of Zionism. In the 1980s, the postmodern turn expressed a crisis of social imagination, whose origin was the incorporation of Palestinians into the Israeli economy after the 1967 war. Finally, he shows that the ways in which history is imaginatively reworked in contemporary Israeli fiction can only be understood through the context of 1950s and 1980s literature. Authors analyzed include Yigal Mossinsohn, Nathan Shaham, Hanoch Bartov, Yehudit Hendel, Orly Castel-Bloom, Yehudit Katzir, David Grossman, Yehoshua Kenaz, and Batya Gur. Oded Nir is Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. **