Scholars@Duke
Jakob Norberg

Jakob Norberg

Professor of German Studies
German Studies
jakob.norberg@duke.edu
116H Old Chemistry, BOX_90256, Durham, NC 27708
116H Old Chemistry, BOX_90256, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours Tues./Thurs. - 1:00p - 2:00p  

Selected Publications

Schopenhauer's Politics

Book · January 23, 2025 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) lived through an era of great political turmoil, but previous assessments of his political thought have portrayed him as a pessimistic observer with no constructive solutions to offer. By assembling and contextualizing Schop ... Link to item Cite

Revolutionary Romanticism: Carl Schmitt on Bettina von Arnim

Journal Article The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory · October 2024 This paper looks at Carl Schmitt’s critical analysis of Bettina von Arnim’s works in his book Political Romanticism (1919). Most of the political Romantics who Schmitt discusses are conservative, such as Adam Müller or the mature Friedrich Schlegel. Yet Sc ... Full text Cite

The Infinite Conversation: Carl Schmitt on Parliamentarism and Romanticism

Journal Article Telos · 2024 The paper examines the conceptual architecture of Carl Schmitt's 1924 work The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Schmitt famously argues that democracy and parliamentarism are distinct, and that democracy does not require parliamentary institutions. Less ... Full text Cite

Schopenhauer's Critique of the State

Chapter · October 31, 2023 Scholars have observed that Schopenhauer did not develop much of a political philosophy but have often failed to recognize that this is a deliberate deflationary strategy. Schopenhauer’s aim was to circumscribe the function of politics narrowly and assign ... Cite

The Mother Tongue at School

Chapter · September 4, 2023 This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth-century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogeni ... Link to item Cite

Herder and the Black Slave

Journal Article Monatshefte: fuer deutschsprachige literatur und kultur · 2023 We argue that Herder's often-ignored "Negro Idylls" in the tenth and final collection of his Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität are both politically significant and highly revealing of the limitations of Herder's political philosophy. The poems' compassio ... Link to item Cite

Schopenhauer on the Injustice of Slavery

Journal Article Schopenhauer Jahrbuch / Schopenhauer Yearbook · 2023 This essay reconstructs Schopenhauer’s understanding of slavery – how he defines it, why he considers it unjust, and under which conditions he thinks it is likely to arise. The essay explains how Schopenhauer views slavery both as a moral and political phe ... Cite

Schopenhauer's Critique of Nationalism

Journal Article German Quarterly · July 1, 2022 In his own era, Arthur Schopenhauer was criticized for his conspicuous lack of patriotism. The critics were correct in the sense that Schopenhauer was a lifelong anti-nationalist in a period of rising cultural and political nationalism. This article recons ... Full text Cite

The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism

Book · 2022 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are probably history’s most famous folklorists. Their collection of folk tales – the Children’s and Household Tales – is one of the world’s most translated literary works. Living in a time of upheaval and war, the Grimm brothers wer ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

After the collective: Judith schalansky on postsocialist patterns of thought

Journal Article Colloquia Germanica · June 1, 2021 Judith Schalansky’s novel The Giraffe’s Neck (2011) lucidly and trenchantly analyzes the logic underlying a hard turn from leftist to rightist ideology. Schalansky’s narrator is a disoriented and disaffected biology teacher who has experienced the collapse ... Cite

Der Philologenkönig: Zum Machtanspruch der Grimmschen Sprachwissenschaft

Journal Article WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung · 2020 Cite

Adorno and Postwar German Society

Chapter · 2020 From his return to Europe in 1949 to his death in 1969, Adorno was one of the most prominent public voices in West-Germany. As a professor and institute director, a frequently heard expert on radio, a prolific cultural critic, and even a sort of public cou ... Cite

German Literary Studies and the Nation

Journal Article German Quarterly · December 1, 2018 © 2018, American Association of Teachers of German This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation-building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundati ... Full text Open Access Cite

Anticapitalist Affect: Georg Lukács on Satire and Hate

Journal Article New German Critique · 2018 In his writings on satire, the Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács argued that hatred could function as an anti-capitalist affect. Hatred, he believed, equips the committed author with a set of traits – certainty, lucidity, endurance, and pitilessness – t ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Authorship and Ownership

Journal Article German Studies Review · 2016 Full text Open Access Cite

Late socialism as a narrative problem: Christoph Hein and the limits of the Novella

Journal Article German Studies Review · February 1, 2015 Christoph Hein's Der fremde Freund, published in the GDR in 1982, counts as a paradigmatic postwar German novella. While the text announces its genre membership explicitly, it fails, or perhaps refuses, to substantiate fully its initial self-categorization ... Full text Open Access Cite

Political Concepts

Chapter · October 6, 2014 The expression “political concepts” refers to a set of concepts essential to any serious reflection on political life. This set includes authority, democracy, equality, freedom, justice, power, and further concepts that represent fundamental political valu ... Cite

Concepts, Political

Chapter · January 1, 2014 The expression “political concepts” refers to a set of concepts essential to any serious reflection on political life. This set includes authority, democracy, equality, freedom, justice, power, and further concepts that represent fundamental political valu ... Full text Cite

Creative destruction: Karl kraus and the paradox of satire

Journal Article Seminar A Journal of Germanic Studies · February 1, 2013 Full text Open Access Cite

On Display: Conditions of Critique in Austria

Journal Article Journal of Austrian Studies · 2013 Postwar Austrian literature features an unusual number of writers whose literary attacks are directed at their own nation. How do we explain this high concentration of tirades in Austria? Thomas Bernhard's "Alte Meister" provides a possible answer. For Ber ... Open Access Cite

Der Text als Phrase: Schillerfeier und geflügelte Worte

Journal Article Sprache and Literatur · 2013 Open Access Cite

Arendt in crisis: Political thought in between past and future

Journal Article College Literature · December 1, 2011 For Hannah Arendt, a crisis occurs when we can no longer rely on the prejudices that ordinarily guide us through the world. Every crisis is, therefore, an occasion to reflect upon tradition. By eroding our shared background beliefe, however, the crisis als ... Open Access Cite

The Unconscionable Critic: Thomas Bernhard's Holzfällen

Journal Article Modern Austrian Literature · July 14, 2011 Through a reading of Holzfällen, this essay seeks to address a persistent problem in the work of Thomas Bernhard: the curious divergence of critique and rational argument. The novel presents a series of scornful attacks on a variety of people, places, obje ... Open Access Cite

The discreet community. Hugo von Hofmannsthal's der Schwierige

Journal Article Arcadia · July 1, 2011 In his comedy Der Schwierige, Hugo von Hofmannsthal imagines a community without chauvinism. The play's main protagonist Count Hans Karl Bhl claims that it is indecent to speak, and even to have experiences, and proposes an attitude of humility that would ... Full text Open Access Cite

Adorno's Advice: Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism

Journal Article · 2011 Adorno’s Minima Moralia was part of a publishing boom in the genre of advice literature in postwar West Germany. The combination of economic resurgence and attempted cultural restoration resulted in a widespread wish to master forming models of social inte ... Open Access Cite

Disappearing Socialism: Volker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte.

Journal Article Monatshefte: fuer deutschsprachige literatur und kultur · 2010 Open Access Cite

Disappearing Socialism: Volker Braun's Unvollendete Geschichte

Other · 2010 One aspect of the Cold War’s legacy has slipped from collective memory: the distinctly socialist arguments against the regimes of the East, for instance the GDR.Volker Braun’s 1977 novella Unvollendete Geschichte provides an instructive example of the curr ... Open Access Cite

“Haushalten”: The Economy of the Phrase in Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück

Journal Article The German Quarterly · September 2008 Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück examines the stereotypical speech patterns that help socialize individuals into stifling roles, but the narrator is gradually forced to recognize his inability to distance himself from t ... Full text Open Access Cite

No Coffee

Journal Article · 2007 A short history of coffee, and of civil society. What is it about coffee – and coffeehouses – that makes it so agreeable to the bourgeoisie? asks Jakob Norberg in a brief social history of the dark, rich brew. For Jürgen Habermas, the coffeehouse is a plac ... Open Access Cite

The Black Book: Karl Kraus's Etiquette

Journal Article · 2007 The conduct book stakes out the boundaries of correct behavior, making instructions for self-management available to anyone who strives for easy social integration. Given its close relation to the mores of the educated classes, it is a rather unlikely genr ... Open Access Cite

Philologisierung der Politik: Das Volk bei Jacob Grimm

Journal Article Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie Cite