Germany's Other Modernism

European modernism is generally seen as having originated only in the great cities, but in the years before World War I, the small city of Jena incubated its own modernist movement. This "Jena Paradigm" coalesced around the visionary publisher Eugen Diederichs and included writers such as Helene Voigt-Diederichs and young intellectuals like Rudolf Carnap, Wilhelm Flitner, Hans Freyer, Karl Korsch, and Elisabeth Busse-Wilson. Now in English translation, Meike G. Werner''s deeply contextual, methodologically innovative study opens up a world of innovation, showing a wider spectrum of modernist culture than the exclusive focus on metropolitan centers has allowed.