The Editors: Dr Steve Giles is Reader in German Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the 'Threepenny Lawsuit' (Peter Lang, 1998), Brecht on Art and Politics (co-edited with Tom Kuhn, Methuen, 2003), and numerous essays in sociological aesthetics, comparative literature and critical theory.
Dr Maike Oergel is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen. National Myth in 19th-century English and German Literature (de Gruyter, 1998) and articles on the construction of modern national identities, Romantic literary theory, the historical novel and Anglo-German intellectual relations.

Contents: Steve Giles: Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture - Gustav Frank: Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion and the Logic of German Counter-Cultures - Nicholas Saul/Susan Tebbutt: Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History - Maike Oergel: Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition - Carl Weber: Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt: Nestroy's Theatre in Times of Reaction and Revolt - Malcolm Humble: Das Reich der Erfüllung: A Theme in Wilhelmine Counter-Culture - David Midgley: 'Los von Berlin!' Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany - Margarete Kohlenbach: Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and the Jugendkulturbewegung - Colin Riordan: The Green Alternative in Germany 1900-1930 - Sabine Egger: The Roots of the East German 'Green' Movement in the 1950s - Stefan Busch: Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde: Repression und Regression in der Blut-und-Boden-Literatur - Steve Giles: Limits of the Visible: Kracauer's Photographic Dystopia - Jerome Carroll: The Art of the Imperceptible: A Discussion of the Aesthetics of Wolfgang Welsch - Carmel Finnan: The Challenges of Zürich's Autonomous Youth Movement - Matthias Uecker: Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen: Zur Politisierung der westdeutschen Literatur in den sechziger Jahren - Ingo Cornils: Writing the Revolution: the Literary Representation of the German Student Movement as Counter-Culture - Jamie Trnka: The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles - Gerrit-Jan Berendse: Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction: Melville's Moby Dick, Brecht's The Measures Taken and the Red Army Faction - Uwe Schütte: 'Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten': Der Mythos der RAF im Spiegel der Literatur nachgeborener Autoren - Moray McGowan: Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama der Neunziger Jahre: Drei Beispiele.

The essays in this volume are based on papers given at an International Symposium held at the University of Nottingham in September 2001. They investigate aspects of German and central European culture from the late eighteenth century to the contemporary era, dealing with aesthetic forms such as narrative, theatre, poetry and photography in the context of counter-cultural institutional and theoretical initiatives. These include the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century roots of 1960s and 1970s counter-culture and terrorism as well as anti-modern, anti-urban and green movements since the turn of the twentieth century. The volume also deals with new conceptions of art and the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the left and right which emerged in the wake of modernism. Other focal points are alternative political movements since the 1960s, notably the Red Army Faction and its literary affiliations.