Bøger af George Huppert

"e; . . . impressive and challenging reevaluation of the sixteenth-century origins of the Enlightenment."e; -Sixteenth Century JournalIn this book, George Huppert introduces the reader to a group of talented young men, some of them teenagers, who were the talk of the town in Renaissance Paris. They called themselves philosophes, they wrote poetry, they studied Greek and mathematics-and they entertained subversive notions concerning religion and politics. Classically trained, they wrote, nevertheless, in French, so as to reach the widest possible audience. These young radicals fostered a succession of disciples who expressed confidence in the eventual enlightenment of humankind and whose ideas would bear fruit two centuries later.

After discovering the autobiography of the Austrian communist and writer Hugo Huppert (1902-1982), historian George Huppert became absorbed in the life and work of this man, a Jew, perhaps a relative, who was born a few months after George's father and grew up just miles away. Hugo seemed to embody a distinctly central European experience of his time, of people trapped between Hitler and Stalin. Using the unvarnished account found in Hugo's notebooks, George Huppert takes the reader on a tour of the writer's life from his provincial youth to his education and radicalization in Vienna; to Moscow where he meets Mayakovski and where he is imprisoned during Stalin's purges; through the difficult war years and return to Vienna; to his further struggles with the communist party and his blossoming as a writer in the 1950s. Through all the twists and turns of this story, George remains a faithful presence, guiding the way and placing Hugo's remarkable life in context. Comrade Huppert is a story of displacement and exile, the price of party loyalty, and the toll of war and terror on the mind of this emblematic figure.

A work of genuine social history, this book leads the reader, as concretely as possible, into the real villages and cities of European society. It begins with a description of family and community structure, social conflict, and religious beliefs.