Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains

Todd Presner

April, 2007
Cloth, 368 pages, 29 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14012-6
$46.50 / £27.50

"Beautifully crafted... [Presner’s] superbly grounded work engages its texts and its readers so well." — Kevin S. Amidon, German Studies Review

"Todd Presner's Mobile Modernity is outstanding, impeccably organized, strikingly original, and beautifully written. The book achieves the perfect balance between theoretical sophistication and readability." — Jonathan Hess, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This book belongs to the next wave of German cultural studies in that it is radically interdisciplinary just as it effortlessly crosses national and linguistic, and even temporal, boundaries." — Scott Spector, University of Michigan

"Reading the texts of a culture that could only achieve its Germanness by being so utterly Jewish, along the lines of the 20th-century's terminal mass migrations, Todd Presner's book opens our 21st-century eyes to a new way to narrate—and to be obsessed with—the Holocaust, i.e. that which will never be arrested in concepts because it forever exceeds our conventional thought and imagination." — Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

Related Subjects

• European History
• Judaism
• Literary Criticism and Theory

Series

• Cultures of History

About the Author

Todd Samuel Presner is an associate professor of Germanic languages and Jewish studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Criticism, and he has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

top of page