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Taking up the Torch
English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multicultural Commitments

Edward Timms
Edward Timms is best known for his two-volume study Karl Kraus – Apocalyptic Satirist (Yale University Press). He is also co-author (with Saime Göksu) of Romantic Communist (Hurst) and (with Deborah Schultz) of Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period (Routledge). In 2005 he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to scholarship and in 2008 he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Arts and Sciences.

“The chapter on Sussex University in the early 1960s is a beautifully written, movingly personal account of those heady days which almost hurt me to read – so much of it was doomed.” John Röhl, the distinguished historian and biographer of Kaiser Wilhelm II (CUP)

Taking up the Torch is an unusual narrative in that it successfully combines subjectivity – how an English person was led by a sequence of educational developments, personal encounters and historical constraints to become the founder of the German-Jewish Centre at the University of Sussex; and objectivity – a book that introduces English and American readers to important and evolving fields of historical and cultural studies through intellectual autobiography.
… It documents the formative experiences of a scholar who was to become a pioneering teacher and researcher in the field of German culture and politics. The aim is to relate the shaping of self to the drift of history in a period of radical social change, extending from the refugee crisis caused by Hitler’s seizure of power through the ordeals of the Second World War to post-war reconstruction, and the transformation of Britain into a modern multicultural society. The focus is on the formative role of institutions: vicarage childhood, Anglican schooling, Cambridge and other university environments – especially the new map of learning at Sussex University in the 1960s. The book concludes with an account of the formidable challenges facing British universities fifty years later.
… The ‘Torch’ in the title alludes to the transmission of a radical intellectual tradition and to a specific commitment to the study of Die Fackel, the satirical journal edited by Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 to 1936. From this emerged the innovative agenda developed by the Centre for German-Jewish Studies.

Part One: Origins 1. Prelude at the Parsonage Clerical duties and country pleasures – The destruction of Jerusalem – Gas masks and germs 2. A Vicarage Childhood Liberty Hall – Valiant soldiers – Irregular schooling, irrepressible dreams 3. Lessons of Boarding School Religious foundations – The language of the enemy – Questions of vocation 4. Colleges, Languages and Mentors Gates of knowledge – Distant love – From Beit Library to Falmouth Bay 5. Searching for the New Germany Encounters and explorations – Surviving the snow – Critical reorientations 6. City, Masks and Torch Strategies for research – Fieldwork in Vienna – Irony and tenderness Part Two: Dialectics 7. Sussex in the Sixties Subverting the Establishment – The new landscape of learning – On the crest of a wave 8. Breakthroughs in Brighton Talking to strangers – The ABZ of love – Between two worlds 9. Crossing the Threshold Conversations in College – Emotional lifelines – Across the Bosphorus 10. Cultural Revolutions Self-reflection and the student revolt – Academic radicals and the long march – Between East and West 11. Cambridge Transformed New wine in old bottles – The rules of the game and the challenge of dialectics – Circles of creativity 12. German Developments and Austrian Alternatives Hegel, Heine and the divided self – Marx or Freud? – The multnational ideal 13. Adventures in the Archives Personal interviews and family papers – David Josef Bach – Wittels and the child woman 14. When the Walls Came Down Part Three: Synergies 15. Sussex at the Turn of the Century 16. Romantic Communists and Wandering Jews 17. Multiculturalism and Mobility Epilogue: Connecting the Past with the Future Sources and Acknowledgements Index of names

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