Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing

In Five Portraits, one of the most acute critical thinkers of our time presents essays on five of the most important writers of the past hundred years: Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. The result is a remarkable examination of a moment when these writers, caught between the dream of creating an abiding masterpiece and the reality of a brutal culture fascinated by apocalyptic catastrophe, deliberately put themselves and their work at the center of the storm. Written in elegant and jargon-free prose, Michael Andre Bernstein's essays create a vivid image of an epoch whose aspirations and torments continues to shape the world we inhabit today.

"This slim volume of deftly written essays is sure to knock many a full-length study of any of the five German writers under discussion off the shelf." --Library Journal

"It is always welcome to have a new book that reaches out beyond the academic field of German studies, and encourages a wider readership to engage with the work of German-language writers. . . . These five essays (written originally for the New Republic) represent an admirable attempt to engage with the work of complex thinkers." --Times Literary Supplement