Gregory Maertz

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe’s authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers...

From the early years of the Weimar Republic until the collapse of Hitler’s regime, demonizing modernist art as a symptom of the corruption of German culture was a standard trope in National Socialist propaganda. But how consistent and thorough was Nazi censorship of modernist artists? Maertz’s pioneering research unearths the persistence of recognizable modernist styles in painting and sculpture produced under the patronage of the Nazi Party and German government institutions, even after the...

Gregory Maertz has written extensively on Romantic and Modern literature, art, and ideas. In these nine related essays, he investigates the expression of Romanticism in literature, philosophy, and cultural politics from the Renaissance to Modernism. The comparative essays in Part One examine the affinity between the religious logic of Sir Thomas Browne and Søren Kierkegaard; Tolstoy’s enduring attraction to Schopenhauer’s thought; Rilke’s debts to the sculptor Rodin; the identification of an...