Joe Perry . Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 399. $49.95.
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 117; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.117.1.288
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Resumo“In 1815,” Joe Perry reports in his splendid account of Christmas's German career, “Caroline von Humboldt, wife of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the enlightened educator, philosopher, and Prussian diplomat, set up Christmas trees in her parlor on Unter den Linden” (p. 13). Caroline wrote a delightful account of the family's joyful Christmas celebration to the absent Wilhelm. One might assume that Caroline was recounting a timeless, or at least ancient, enormously popular, and emotionally charged family festival. In fact, she was recording a profound moment of dramatic cultural change. Christmas in Germany is actually a very new arrival, and it is thick with multiple and contradictory messages. Perry's book is not an accumulation of folkloric curiosities. It is, instead, a careful investigation from below of nineteenth and twentieth‐century cultural history, using Christmas as a portal to an array of densely entangled and often bitterly contested cultural issues. As Perry remarks, “German...
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