After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present - Hardcover

"Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a true international figure-a Bavarian Romance scholar with an American career that extends to literary theory, cultural history, and history of ideas. . . . His ambitious new book on mood, philosophy of history, and contemporary analysis is an interesting and peculiar example of what the humanities can also create." -- Frederik Stjernfelt * Weekendavisen * "This book is willfully 'disheveled,' for lack of a better word. That is, it insists on and performs-successfully, I believe-a purposeful entanglement between autobiography and literature." -- Francoise Meltzer * Critical Inquiry * "This is a fascinating and important book-important because of the way it connects a certain postwar mood with literary and personal examples. I am familiar with a good deal of Gumbrecht's previous work, and as far as I know, this is the first time he has directly addressed the situation of Germany after the Second World War in such a way. The courage, and intellectual honesty, it has taken to write After 1945 are impressive indeed." -- Francoise Meltzer * University of Chicago * "This is no ordinary book. . . . Recommended. All levels of students through faculty" -- R. C. Conard * Choice * "Quirky, superbly composed, and nuanced. . . . A totally original meditation on how our sense of time has changed over the last two-thirds of a century." -- Harold Bloom * Yale University *

Through a bold combination of meticulous historiographical research and autobiographical material, this book characterizes the post-World War II era as a time of "latency" during which there emerged a new "chronotope," or change in our relationship to time.