Die Blechtrommel

The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel) is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is part of Grass' Danziger Trilogie (Danzig Trilogy).
Contents



The story is about the life of Oskar Matzerath, who writes his autobiography from memory while in a sanitorium during the years 1952-1954. However, Oskar's memories begin before those of ordinary people. The story starts with his own birth, when Oskar sees the light of "two sixty-watt bulbs" in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "auditory clairvoyant babies", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". At age three he receives a tin drum for his birthday and decides, after observing the obtuseness and duplicity of the adult world, to will himself not to grow up. As a result, he retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, the Holocaust, several love affairs, and the world of postwar Europe. Through all this the tin drum remains his treasured possession, and he is willing to kill to retain it.

Oskar considers himself to have two "presumptive fathers" - his mother's husband Alfred, a member of the Nazi Party, and her secret lover Jan, a Polish citizen of Danzig who is executed for defending the Polish Post Office in Danzig during the Nazi invasion of Poland. Oskar's mother having died, Alfred marries Maria, a woman who is secretly Oskar's first mistress. After marrying Alfred, Maria gives birth to Oskar's possible son, Kurt. But Oskar is disappointed to find that the baby persists in growing up, and will not join him in ceasing to grow at the age of three.

During the war, Oskar joins a troupe of performing dwarfs who entertain the German troops at the front line. But when his second love, the diminutive Roswitha, is killed by Allied troops in the invasion of Normandy, Oskar returns to his family in Danzig where he becomes the leader of a criminal youth gang. The Russian army soon captures Danzig, and Alfred is shot by invading troops after he goes into seizures while swallowing his party pin to avoid being revealed as a Nazi.

Oskar moves with his widowed stepmother and their son to Düsseldorf, where he models in the nude with Ulla and works engraving tombstones. He falls in love with the saintly Sister Dorothea, a neighbor, but fails to seduce her. Still devoted to his little tin drum, Oskar becomes a virtuoso jazz drummer and achieves fame and riches. One day while walking through a field he finds a severed finger: the ring finger of Sister Dorothea, who has been murdered. He then meets and befriends Vittlar. Oskar allows himself to be falsely convicted of the murder and is confined to an insane asylum, where he writes his memoirs.

[edit] Themes

[edit] Art versus war

World War II is compared with Oskar's art and music. The implied statement is that art has the ability to defeat war and hatred. Oskar escapes fighting through his musical talent. In chapter nine: The Rostrum, Oskar manages to disrupt the Nazi rally by playing his drums. Oskar plays a rhythm which is more complex and sensual than the march step of the rally. Despite his disruption of the activities of the Nazi party, the power of his music remains ambiguous. It seems that the music of the drum is simply disruptive, and not purely a moral force aligned against the Nazis. This is especially evident in another component of Oskar's music, his voice. As a substitution for singing, Oskar's voice is a terrible scream which exerts incredible power. Oskar's voice has the power to break glass, which he uses as the leader of a gang of criminals to rob stores by breaking their front windows. Grass's magical poetic imagery subtly aligns with political/ cultural events, and the reader realizes that Oskar is somehow an embodiment of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass which signaled the unmasked aggression of the Nazi Party. Ultimately Oskar remains a complex, magically symbolic character, embodying both the wish to dismantle the emergent Nazi party as well as the aggression of the party itself. Grass beautifully elucidates the paradox and schizophrenia of post war German consciousness.

[edit] Horrors of the Nazi regime

The Tin Drum covers the period from the 1920s through the 1950s and ranges from Danzig to Cologne, Paris and Normandy. Grass describes the actions of the Nazi regime from Kristallnacht to the execution of the survivors of the Polish Post Office.

Great Yuezhi

The Yuezhi or Rouzhi (Chinese: 月支, pinyin: yuè zhī or ròu zhī; also 月氏, pinyin: yuè shì or ròu shì), also known as the Da Yuezhi or Da Rouzhi (Chinese: 大月支, dà yuè zhī or dà ròu zhī, "Great Yuezhi"), were an ancient Central Asian people.

They are believed by most scholars to have been an Indo-European people,[5] and may have been the same as or closely related to the Tocharians (Τοχάριοι) of Classical sources.[6] They were originally settled in the arid grasslands of the eastern Tarim Basin area, in what is today Xinjiang and western Gansu, in China, before they migrated to Transoxiana, Bactria and then northern South Asia, where they formed the Kushan Empire.Contents [hide]
1 Name
2 Origins
3 The Yuezhi exodus
4 Settlement in Transoxiana
5 Invasion of Bactria
6 Expansion into the Hindu-Kush
7 Foundation of the Kushan empire
8 Presumed Yuezhi rulers
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References

12 links


[edit]
Name

Since the character yuè (月) can stand for the character ròu (肉) in pictograms, it may not mean "moon" here. The character seems to have derived originally from ròu, "meat", as a character component.[7] However, if the form Yuezhi (月氏) is accepted, the name translates literally as "moon clan", from yuè (月), "moon" and shì (氏), "clan" or "race".

There are numerous theories about the derivation of the name Yuezhi and none has yet found general acceptance.[8][9] According to Zhang Guang-da the name Yuezhi is a transliteration of their own name for themselves, the Visha ("the tribes"), being called the Vijaya in Tibetan.[10].

[edit]
Origins

The first known reference to the Yuezhi was made in 645 BCE by the Chinese Guan Zhong in his Guanzi 管子(Guanzi Essays: 73: 78: 80: 81). The dates of this book are disputed however, and it may date to as late as 1st century BCE.[11] The book described the Yuzhi 禺氏, or Niuzhi 牛氏, as a people from the north-west who supplied jade to the Chinese from the nearby mountains of Yuzhi 禺氏 at Gansu.[12] The supply of jade from the Tarim Basin from ancient times is indeed well documented archaeologically: "It is well known that ancient Chinese rulers had a strong attachment to jade. All of the jade items excavated from the tomb of Fuhao 妇好 of the Shang dynasty, more than 750 pieces, were from Khotan in modern Xinjiang. As early as the mid-first millennium BCE the Yuezhi engaged in the jade trade, of which the major consumers were the rulers of agricultural China." (Liu (2001), pp. 267-268). The suffix "Di" or "Zhi" (Chinese:氐) was generally used to describe the Di people, "Western barbarians", in Chinese annals.

Rouzhi/Yuezhi (lit. "Rou(maybe Meat, but not Moon) People")[citation needed] was the name used continuously by ancient Chinese historians to designate the tribe throughout its migrations, from the time it was in the eastern Tarim Basin area (7th to 2nd century BCE[citation needed]) to the time it ruled the Kushan Empire in India (1st-3th century CE). Note that this was not the Old Chinese pronounciation used at the time, but Mandarin.

According to former USSR scholar Zuev, there was a Queen among the large Yuezhi confederation who added to her possessions the lands of the Tochar (Pinyin: Daxia) on the headwaters of the Huanghe circa 3rd century BCE. According him, the Chinese chronicles began referring to the queen's tribe as the Great Yuezhi (Da Yuezhi), and to call the Daxia/Tochars the Lesser Yuezhi (Pinyin: Xiao Yuezhi). Together, they were simply called Yuezhi. In the 5th century CE, a scholar and translator monk Kumarajiva, while translating texts into Chinese, used the name "Yuezhi" to translate "Tochar". In the middle of the 2nd century BCE the Yuezhi conquered Bactria, and the Ancient Greek authors inform us that the conquerors of Bactria were the Asii and Tochari tribes. Bactria then in the Chinese chronicles began to be called the country of Daxia, i.e. Tocharistan and the language of Bactria/Tocharistan began to be called "Tocharian"." [13]

The Yuezhi are also documented in detail in Chinese historical accounts, in particular the 2nd-1st century BCE "Records of the Great Historian", or Shiji, by Sima Qian. According to these accounts:
"The Yuezhi originally lived in the area between the Qilian or Heavenly Mountains (Tian Shan) and Dunhuang, but after they were defeated by the Xiongnu they moved far away to the west, beyond Dayuan, where they attacked and conquered the people of Daxia and set up the court of their king on the northern bank of the Gui [= Oxus] River. A small number of their people who were unable to make the journey west sought refuge among the Qiang barbarians in the Southern Mountains, where they are known as the Lesser Yuezhi.",[14]

The Qilian and Dunhuang original homeland of the Yuezhi have recently been argued not to refer to the current locations in Gansu, but to the Tian Shan range and the Turfan region, 1,000 km to the west, Dunhuang identified with a mountain named Dunhong listed in the Shanhaijing.[15]

The Yuezhi may have been a Caucasoid people, as indicated by the portraits of their kings on the coins they struck following their exodus to Transoxiana (2nd-1st century BCE), and especially the coins they struck in India as Kushans (1st-3rd century CE). However, no direct records for the name of Yuezhi rulers are known to exist (only Chinese accounts mention the name), and some doubt on the accuracy of their first coins.[16]

Ancient Chinese sources do describe the existence of "white people with long hair" (The Bai people of the Shan Hai Jing) beyond their northwestern border, and the very well preserved Tarim mummies with Caucasian features found at the ancient oasis on the Silk Road, Niya, often with reddish or blond hair, today displayed at the Ürümqi Museum and dated to the 3rd century BCE, have been found in precisely the same area of the Tarim Basin.[17]

The Indo-European Tocharian languages also have been attested in the same geographical area, and although the first known epigraphic evidence dates to the 6th century CE, the degree of differentiation between Tocharian A and Tocharian B, and the absence of Tocharian language remains beyond that area, tends to indicate that a common Tocharian language existed in the same area of Yuezhi settlement during the second half of the 1st millennium BCE.

According to one theory, the Yuezhi were probably part of the large migration of Indo-European speaking peoples who were settled in eastern Central Asia (possibly as far as Gansu) at that time. The nomadic Ordos culture, who lived in northern China east of the Yuezhi, are another example. Also the Caucasian mummies of Pazyryk, probably Scythian in origin, are located around 1,500 kilometers north-west of the Yuezhi, and dated also to around the 3rd century BCE.[citation needed]

According to Han accounts, the Yuezhi "were flourishing" during the time of the first great Chinese Qin emperor, but were regularly in conflict with the neighbouring tribe of the Xiongnu to the northeast.

But we failed to be and acquired flat insted of it

we saw many cyberpunk syndrome late 70's to early 80's
999 was dystopian cyberpunk anime same as
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
we took it granted that our life
will also get such phase change near future.
But we failed to be and acquired flat insted of it.
Retro-futuristic things must be always newest
than recent sitiuation for us.
Tag
cyberpunk,yappy,L.A.Metal,Roy Batty,
Neue kunst,999,postmodern,thomas mann,
Techno,dystopia,jurgen habermas,

Nozick:Popper:Kukathas:etc

Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 ? January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. Schooled at Columbia, Princeton, and Oxford, he was a prominent American political philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. He did additional but less influential work in such subjects as decision theory and epistemology. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. He was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from Russia, and married the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 ? September 17, 1994) was an Austrian and British[1] philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is known for repudiating the classical observationalist/inductivist account of scientific method by advancing empirical falsification instead; for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy"[2] and for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the "open society" possible.

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 - June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytical tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject.


Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: ??????? ????? ??? Omorto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933), is an Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, "for his contributions to welfare economics" for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, and political liberalism.


Ronald Dworkin, QC, FBA (born December 11, 1931) is an American legal philosopher, currently professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law, and former professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. He is known for his contributions to legal philosophy and political philosophy. His theory of law as integrity is one of the leading contemporary views of the nature of law.
Chandran Kukathas, Philip Pettit

John Rawls

John Rawls John Rawls Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy Full name John Rawls Birth February 21, 1921 Death November 24, 2002 (aged 81) School/tradition Analytic philosophy Main interests Political philosophy Liberalism · Justice · Politics Notable ideas Original position Reflective equilibrium Overlapping consensus Public reason Influenced by[show] John Locke · Jean Jacques Rousseau Immanuel Kant · Charles Darwin · H.L.A. Hart Isaiah Berlin George Santayana Influenced[show] Thomas Nagel · Thomas Pogge Thomas Scanlon · Josh Cohen · Amartya Sen Christine Korsgaard · Martha Nussbaum · Albert Borgmann · Will Kymlicka · Ronald Dworkin John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999), and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). Rawls was a recipient of the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's thought "helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself." [1] Contents [hide] * 1 Early life * 2 Career * 3 Later life * 4 Contribution to political and moral philosophy * 5 Writings o 5.1 A Theory of Justice o 5.2 Political Liberalism o 5.3 The Law of Peoples * 6 Publications o 6.1 Bibliography o 6.2 Articles o 6.3 Book chapters o 6.4 Reviews o 6.5 Further reading * 7 Awards * 8 See also * 9 References * 10 Footnotes * 11 External links [edit] Early life John Borden (Bordley) Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the second of five sons to William Lee Rawls and Anna Abell Stump. Rawls attended school in Baltimore for a short time before transferring to Kent School, an Episcopalian preparatory school in Connecticut. Upon graduation in 1939, Rawls attended Princeton University, where he became interested in philosophy, and was elected to the The Ivy Club. In 1943, he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree and joined the Army. During World War II, Rawls served as an infantryman in the Pacific, where he toured New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan; There, he witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. After this experience, Rawls turned down an offer to become an officer and left the army as a private in 1946. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy. Rawls married Margaret Fox, a Brown graduate, in 1949. They shared an interest in indexing; they spent their first holiday together writing the index for a book on Nietzsche, and Rawls wrote the index for A Theory of Justice himself. [edit] Career After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950, Rawls taught there until 1952, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University (Christ Church), where he was influenced by the liberal political theorist and historian Isaiah Berlin and the legal theorist H.L.A. Hart. After returning to the United States, he served first as an assistant and then associate professor at Cornell University. In 1962, he became a full professor of philosophy at Cornell, and soon achieved a tenured position at MIT. In 1964 he moved to Harvard University, where he taught for almost forty years, and where he trained many of the leading contemporary figures in moral and political philosophy, including Thomas Nagel, Onora O'Neill, David Lyons, Thomas Hill, Joshua Cohen, Christine Korsgaard, Susan Neiman, Thomas Pogge, Elizabeth S. Anderson, Barbara Herman, and Paul Weithman. [edit] Later life Rawls suffered the first of several strokes in 1995, which severely impeded his ability to continue working. Nevertheless, he was still able to complete a work entitled The Law of Peoples, which contains the most complete statement of his views on international justice, before his death in November 2002. [edit] Contribution to political and moral philosophy Rawls is noted for his contributions to liberal political philosophy. Among the ideas from Rawls' work that have received wide attention are: * Justice as Fairness, which consists of the liberty principle, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle. * The original position. * Reflective equilibrium. * Overlapping consensus. * Public reason. There is general agreement in academia that the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 was important (some would say vital) to a revival, during the 1960s and 1970s, in the academic study of political philosophy. His work has crossed disciplinary lines, receiving serious attention from economists, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and theologians. Rawls has the unique distinction among contemporary political philosophers of being frequently cited by the courts of law in the United States and referred to by practicing politicians in the United States and United Kingdom. [edit] Writings [edit] A Theory of Justice Main article: A Theory of Justice In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to reconcile liberty and equality in a principled way, offering an account of "justice as fairness." Central to this effort is his famous approach to the seemingly intractable problem of distributive justice. Rawls appeals to the social contract. What principles of justice would we agree to if we desired to cooperate with others, but would also prefer more of the benefits, and less of the burdens, associated with cooperation? Justice as fairness is thus offered to people who are neither saintly altruists nor greedy egoists. Human beings are, as Rawls puts it, both rational and reasonable. Because we are rational we have ends we want to achieve, but we are reasonable insofar as we are happy to achieve these ends together if we can, in accord with mutually acceptable regulative principles. But given how different our needs and aspirations often are, how can we find principles that are acceptable to each of us? Rawls gives us a model of a fair situation for making this choice (his argument from the original position and the famous veil of ignorance), and he argues that two principles of justice would be especially attractive. We would, Rawls argues, affirm a principle of equal basic liberties, thus protecting the familiar liberal freedoms of conscience, association, expression, and the like (included here is a right to hold and use personal property, but Rawls defends that right in terms of our moral capacities and self-respect,[2] not by appeal to a natural right of self-ownership, thus distinguishing his account from the classical liberalism of John Locke, and the libertarian stance of Robert Nozick). But we would also want to ensure that, whatever our station in society, liberties represent meaningful options for us. For example, formal guarantees of political voice and freedom of assembly are of little real worth to the desperately poor and marginalized in society. Demanding that everyone have exactly the same effective opportunities in life is a nonstarter: achieving this would almost certainly offend the very liberties that are supposedly being equalized. Nonetheless, we would want to ensure at least the "fair worth" of our liberties: wherever one ends up in society, one wants life to be worth living, with enough effective freedom to pursue personal goals. Thus we would be moved to affirm a second principle requiring fair equality of opportunity, paired with the famous (and controversial) difference principle. This second principle ensures that those with comparable talents and motivation face roughly similar life chances, and that inequalities in society work to the benefit of the least advantaged. Rawls held that these principles of justice apply to the "basic structure" of fundamental social institutions (courts, markets, the constitution, etc), a qualification that has been the source of some controversy and constructive debate (see, for instance, the important work of Gerald Cohen). Rawls further argued that these principles were to be lexically ordered, thus giving priority to basic liberties over the more equality-oriented demands of the second principle. This has also been a topic of much useful debate among moral and political philosophers. Finally, Rawls took his approach as applying in the first instance to what he called a "well-ordered society ... designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice". [3] In this respect, he understood justice as fairness as a contribution to "ideal theory," working "out principles that characterize a well-ordered society under favorable circumstances" [4] Much recent work in political philosophy has asked what justice as fairness might dictate (or indeed, whether it is very useful at all) for problems of "partial compliance" under "nonideal theory." Does Rawls's theory tell us much useful about what we should do in societies already characterized by profound injustices, deep distrust, material deprivation, and the like? [edit] Political Liberalism Main article: Political Liberalism Rawls' later work focused on the question of stability: could a society ordered by the two principles of justice endure? His answer to this question is contained in a collection of lectures titled Political Liberalism. In Political Liberalism, Rawls introduced the idea of an overlapping consensus — or agreement on justice as fairness between citizens who hold different religious and philosophical views (or conceptions of the good). Political Liberalism also introduced the idea of public reason — the common reason of all citizens. In Political Liberalism Rawls addressed the most common criticism leveled at The Theory of Justice — the criticism that the principles of justice were simply an alternative systematic conception of justice that was superior to utilitarianism or any other comprehensive theory. This meant that justice as fairness turned out to be simply another reasonable comprehensive doctrine that was incompatible with other reasonable doctrines. It failed to distinguish between a comprehensive moral theory which addressed the problem of justice and that of a political conception of justice that was independent of any comprehensive theory. The political conception of justice that Rawls introduces in Political Liberalism is the view of justice that people with conflicting, but reasonable, metaphysical and/or religious views would agree to regulate the basic structure of society. What distinguishes Rawls' account from previous conceptions of liberalism is that it seeks to arrive at a consensus without appealing to any one metaphysical source of his own. Hence the idea of "political liberalism", contrary to John Locke or John Stuart Mill, who promote a more robust cultural and metaphysical liberal philosophy, Rawls' account is an attempt to secure the possibility of a liberal consensus regardless of the "deep" religious or metaphysical values that the parties endorse (so long as these remain open to compromise, i.e., "reasonable"). The ideal result is therefore conceived as an "overlapping consensus" because different and often conflicting accounts of morality, nature, etc., are intended to "overlap" with each other on the question of governance. Rawls also modified the principles of justice to become the following (with the first principle having priority over the second, and the first half of the second having priority over the latter half): 1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value. 2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. These principles are subtly modified from the principles in Theory. The first principle now reads 'equal claim' instead of 'equal right', and he also replaces the phrase 'system of basic liberties' with 'a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties.'