History

By Anne-Marie O'Connor The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. The Award-Winning Nazi Art Theft SagaWinner of the Marfield National Award for Arts WritingWinner of a California Book Award “Fascinating. . . . A mesmerizing tale of art and the Holocaust.” —The Washington Post“Writing with a novelist’s dynamism, O’Connor resurrects fascinating individuals and tells a many-faceted, intensely affecting, and profoundly revelatory tale of the inciting power of art and the unending need for justice.”—Booklist, starred review“O’Connor skillfully filters Austria’s troubled twentieth century through the life of Klimt’s most beloved muse. . . . A nuanced view of a painting whose story transcends its own time.” —BookforumContributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government.When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world.Paperback349 pagesVintage Books, 20155.2 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9781101873120Art History, Nonfiction

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece [Paperback]

By Robert Beachy Winner of the 2015 Randy Shilts Award“Excellent and richly documented. . .Beachy’s work must [be] considered in the larger context of a shift in cultural studies. . .Fascinating.” —V.R. Berghahn, The New York Times Book Review“Beachy enlarges our understanding of how the international gay-rights movement eventually prospered, despite the setbacks that it experienced not only in Nazi Germany but also in mid-century America.” —The New Yorker “A superb work of historical reclamation–by far the best account we have of the formative years of homosexual identity and emancipation, it is brilliantly researched and beautifully written.” —Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, CUNY In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day. Paperback352 pagesVintage, 20155.2 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9780307473134German History, Cultural Studies

Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity

By Katharina von Ankum"A landmark work of German cultural studies. The richness of the material is dazzling: each of the essays opens up new areas of scholarly inquiry and connects, in surprising and illuminating ways, with other essays in the volume."—Maria Tatar, author of Lustmord"These are thought-provoking readings of the 'New Woman's' encounters with modernity in Weimar culture."—Atina Grossmann, author of Reforming SexBringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies. Paperback264 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19976 x 0.6 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9780520204652German History, Women's Studies, Gender Studies

Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture

Edited by Iain Boyd Whyte & David Frisby “Rich and engrossing. . . . Berlin’s transformation takes place vividly before our eyes.”—Andrew Mead, The Architectural Review"Metropolis Berlin is a superb collection of important texts. The selections are at once representative and delightfully off-beat; the editorial signposts are helpful but do not discourage rogue exploration or thematic innovation by the reader; and the presentation (from translation quality to layout design) is excellent. An absolute no-brainer, a must-have for every library, Germanist, and lover of Berlin."—Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature“Metropolis Berlin evokes a kaleidoscopic panorama of impressions, opinions, and utopian hopes that constituted Berlin from the end of Imperial Germany to the rise of National Socialism. Iain Boyd Whyte and the late David Frisby invite the reader to be a flâneur in a truly great city, to marvel at the vitality of its urban spaces, and to listen to the cacophony of its voices and sounds. This extraordinary anthology of hundreds of documents tells the story of metropolitan Berlin by letting its inhabitants, visitors, and critics speak. A must have for every personal bookshelf and library.”—Volker M. Welter, Professor for Architectural History, University of California at Santa Barbara Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940 reconstitutes the built environment of Berlin during the period of its classical modernity using over two hundred contemporary texts, virtually all of which are published in English translation for the first time. They are from the pens of those who created Berlin as one of the world’s great cities and those who observed this process: architects, city planners, sociologists, political theorists, historians, cultural critics, novelists, essayists, and journalists. Divided into nineteen sections, each prefaced by an introductory essay, the account unfolds chronologically, with the particular structural concerns of the moment addressed in sequence—be they department stores in 1900, housing in the 1920s, or parade grounds in 1940. Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940 not only details the construction of Berlin, but explores homes and workplaces, public spaces, circulation, commerce, and leisure in the German metropolis as seen through the eyes of all social classes, from the humblest inhabitants of the city slums, to the great visionaries of the modern city, and the demented dictator resolved to remodel Berlin as Germania. Hardcover632 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20126 x 2 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520270374German History, Architecture, Urban Studies

Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940

By Marsha Meskimmon Original Price: $31.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Marsha Meskimmon furnishes a fresh perspective on the art of women in the Weimar Republic and in the process reclaims the lost history of a number of artists who have not received adequate attention—not only because they were women but also because they continued to align themselves with the modes of realistic representation the Expressionists regarded as reactionary. Reconsidering the traditional definitions of German modernism and its central issues of race politics, eugenics, and the city, Meskimmon explores the structures that marginalized the work of little known artists such as Lotte Laserstein, Jeanne Mammen, Gerta Overbeck and Grete Jurgens. She shows how these women's personal and professional experiences in the 1920s and 1930s relate to the visual imagery produced at that time. She also examines representations of different female roles—prostitute, mother, housewife, the "New Woman" and "garçonne"—that attracted the attention of these artists. Situating her exploration on a strong theoretical base, she ranges deftly over mass visual culture—from film to poster art and advertising—to create a vivid portrait of women living and creating in Weimar Germany.Paperback263 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19996.2 x 0.7 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780520221345Art History, German History, Gender Studies

We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism

By Otto DixOtto Dix (1891–1969) is considered one of the true lions of 20th-century art, a man who established himself as an uncompromising artist that refused to temper how he rendered the realities that he witnessed. Dix’s early works often depict the true brutalities of the WWI battlefields and trenches he served in for over three years, as well as the decadent underworld of 1920s Berlin.With the publication of this first of three volumes of an extensive selection of letters, the most comprehensive collection of Otto Dix texts at last comes into print in English. Encompassing well over 1,000 letters, and ranging from friends and family to other artists, collectors, colleagues, critics & biographers, the letters offer a personal portrait of six decades of the 20th century.Dix himself was a controversial figure throughout his life, and while he claimed never to write self-testimonials, the artist had much to say about the widest range of subjects in his private correspondence. Therein, we discover much about a figure who exhibited a gruff, often abrasive persona to many, a man who depicted war with unrepentant brutality yet who could at the same time pen the most romantic, schmaltzy letters to his wife and sketch amusing caricatures to his daughter.Following his experiences throughout WWI, Dix immediately took up with the dadaists in Dresden in 1919 and became an established figure as part of the Sezession. A few years later, after his first portrait commission in Dusseldorf in 1922, Dix met his future wife, Martha, with whom he would go on to raise three children, and who is one of the principle correspondents in this volume of letters. Some of his most significant work was produced in the 1920s, including his powerful Krieg (War) portfolio, for which the Nazis branded him a “degenerate artist” and forced him to resign his professorship in 1933. Condemned to internal exile, Dix thereafter resided in Hemmenhofen, in the extreme southwest part of Germany. Twelve years later, he would suffer further indignities from the Nazis when ordered to join the Volkssturm in 1945. Dix ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, again a survivor of a second harrowing cataclysm. After his release, from 1946 onwards, the painter lived between East and West Germany, never truly at home in either ideologically, yet he remained prolific, continuing to produce art until the end of his life, having lived through two World Wars as well as the “Cold War.”​This first volume covers the period 1904–1927 and the heart of it is a selection of Dix’s postcards from the WWI front written to his school friend in Dresden, Helene Jakob, a form of artistic reportage of uncanny power. Recipient of the Die schönsten Deutschen Bücher shortlist in 2014, Dix’s letters will prove to be of considerable interest to art historians, scholars of Expressionism, and aficionados of Dix, all of whom will encounter the artist as never before.Hardcover284 pages Contra Mundum Press, 20165.98 x 0.75 x 9.02 inchesISBN 9781940625188History, Literary Letters

Letters, Vol. 1 (Otto Dix)

By Stefan Zweig Translated by Anthea Bell Cover illustration by Edward Steichen Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. This new translation by award-winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig’s writing in arguably his most revealing work. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig traveled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide. Also available in German here. Paperback472 pagesNebraska University Press, 2013Originally published in 19415.5 x 1 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780803226616Biography, History, Travel

The World of Yesterday

By Joseph RothTranslated by Michael Hoffmann "Nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance."—Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review "A singular achievement of both journalism and literature, a travel guide composed by a...poet who captured a city at its most cosmopolitan—and on the brink of collapse."—Thane Rosenbaum, Washington Post Book World "There is a poem on every page of Joseph Roth."—Joseph Brodsky What I Saw, like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic. As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. Against the traditional portrayal of Berlin as an entrepôt of fun and transport, of government, nightlife, and literary glamour, Joseph Roth’s gritty depiction chronicles the lives of the city’s forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Paperback240 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 2004Originally Published in 19845.5 x 0.7 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780393325829History, German History

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

By Peter Vergo "Handsomely reproduces some of the work that so shocked the conservative Viennese public." —Observer"The continuing value of this seminal title is demonstrated by its publication as a fourth edition." —Library Journal"The go-to volume for the artists of the Vienna Secession." —St. Louis Post-DispatchThe artistic stagnation of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century was rudely shaken by the artists of the Secession. Their works at first shocked a conservative public; but their successive exhibitions, their magazine "Ver Sacrum", and their application to the applied arts and architecture soon brought them an enthusiastic following and wealthy patronage. This book traces the course of this development, of the Wiener Werkstätte that followed, and the individual works of the artists concerned. Peter Vergo quotes extensively from the writings of contemporary reviewers, critics and the artists themselves. He has eyewitness accounts of the exhibitions, the opening of the Secession building, the work in progress on the Palais Stoclet and Kabarett Fledermaus. The result is a documentary study of the successes and failures, hopes and fears of the members of an artistic movement which is still admired today.Hardcover285 pages | 150 color images, 75 black-and-white imagesPhaidon Press, 201510.2 x 1.1 x 11.8 inchesISBN 9780714868783Austrian History, Art History, Viennese Secession, Wiener Werkstätte

Art in Vienna 1898-1918

By Carl E. Schorske “A profound work…on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history”—H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review“Invaluable to the social and political historian…as well as to those more concerned with the arts”—John Willett, The New York Review of Books“A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing.”—Newsweek A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born. Paperback432 pagesVintage, 19806.1 x 0.9 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780394744780Austrian History

Fin De Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture

By Frederic Morton “A remarkable and unusual slice of history.”—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times“As lush, beguiling, and charming as an emperor’s waltz”—Publisher’s Weekly On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed height of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still. Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents—and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler. Paperback352 pagesPenguin Books, 19805 x 0.6 x 7.1 inchesISBN 9780140056679Austrian History

A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

By Amos Elon “Brilliant, far-reaching, passionate. . . sweeping and marvelously detailed. . . finely, intimately, movingly drawn. . . a book for the ages.” —The New York Times“[Elon] is a master of the telling anecdote. . . One should be grateful for what Elon has done.” —Los Angeles Times“A work packed with beautifully sketched portraits, and constructed with a practiced eye for memorable, well-executed anecdotes.” —The New York Times Book ReviewIn this important work of historical restoration, Amos Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons, and activists. In engaging, brilliantly etched portraits of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and many others, Elon traces how a small minority came to be perceived as a deadly threat to German national integrity. Paperback464 pagesPicador, 20035.6 x 0.9 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780312422813Art History, Biographical, German History

The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933

By Volker WeidermannTranslated from German by Carol Brown Janeway “Intimate . . . Weidermann gives us a glimpse of what was, to many of these writers, a brief but rare home.”—Claire Hazelton, The Guardian“Potent and melancholy . . . Weidermann has combed letters, books, diaries, and reminiscences and used them to tell his sad tale as if it were a novel."—Michael Prodger, The Times, London“Dazzling. . . Graceful. For such a slim book to convey with such poignancy the extinction of a generation of ‘Great Europeans’ is a triumph.”—The Sunday Telegraph“Beautifully translated by Carol Brown Janeway . . . a short but vital calm-before-the-storm history, one that shines a valuable light on two of the 20th century’s finest writers . . . rich in insight and empathy. This is a sparkling gem.”—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star-Tribune It’s the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts “the summer before the dark,” when a coterie of artists, intellectuals, drunks, revolutionaries, and madmen found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war. Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. Hardcover164 pagesPantheon, 2016 5.4 x 0.8 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781101870266Literature, Biography, European History

Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark

By Joseph RothTranslated by Michael HoffmannWith a Comment by Elie Wiesel "[A] book of impassioned reportage and polemic...it is impossible not to feel a sympathetic wonder."—Michael Andre Bernstein, The New Republic "In these disturbing yet strikingly illuminating pages, the truth of Jewish destiny from long ago vibrates and sings..."—Elie Wiesel "[C]aptures and encapsulates Europe in those uncertain hours before the upheaval of a continent and the annihilation of a civilization."—Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel and Quandary One of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) wrote these evocative dispatches between the two World Wars. In them he warned of the false comforts of Jewish assimilation, laid bare the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, reflected on the concept of Jewish identity, and looked with foreboding at Germany’s future. The combined exigency and restrained contemplation of Roth’s writing have earned him comparisons to his more celebrated contemporaries Thomas Mann and Isaac Babel. Now brilliantly rendered by the award-wining translator Michael Hofmann, The Wandering Jews offers a unique view of the European Jewish experience at a critical juncture of world history. Paperback168 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 2001Originally Published in 19275 x 0.5 x 7.5 inchesISBN 9780393322705History

The Wandering Jews: The Classic Portrait of A Vanished People

By Joseph RothTranslated by Michael Hofmann At one time an underground hero in the world of journalism, with prose on a par with Tolstoy and Kafka, Joseph Roth now looms large in the pantheon of European literature. Indeed, the last five years have seen a major Roth revival culminating in Report from a Parisian Paradise, a haunting epitaph by the greatest foreign correspondent of his age. An exile in Paris, Roth captured the essence of France in the 1920s and 1930s. From the port town of Marseille to the erotic hill country around Avignon. Report from a Parisian Paradise―superbly translated by Michael Hofmann―paints the sepia-tinted landscapes, enchanting people, and ruthless desperation of a country hurtling toward dissolution. Roth's book is not only a paean to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work of transcendent philosophical clarity. Paperback303 pagesW.W. Norton and Company, 20055.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780393327168Journalism, History

Report from a Parisian Paradise

By Pieter M. Judson “Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.”—Tim Blanning, The Wall Street Journal“Crisply written and nuanced… With invigorating precision, [Judson] analyses how the state was built up by various forces working simultaneously from above and below. His view is not blurred by the unhelpful nostalgia with which so many accounts are suffused.”—Adam Zamoyski, Literary Review“Strongly revisionist and effortlessly wide-ranging, Judson’s book offers a strikingly original interpretation of Austria-Hungary as an empire rather than a collection of hostile national groups. This powerful insight should change how we think about European history.”—Robert Nemes, author of Another Hungary: The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Across divides of language, religion, region, and history, ordinary women and men felt a common attachment to “their empire,” while bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and academics devised inventive solutions to the challenges of governing Europe’s second largest state. In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg Empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic. Judson examines their motives and explains just how wrong these rearguard critics were. Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and distance to bring stability and meaning to the far-flung empire. By supporting new schools, law courts, and railroads, along with scientific and artistic advances, the Habsburg monarchs sought to anchor their authority in the cultures and economies of Central Europe. A rising standard of living throughout the empire deepened the legitimacy of Habsburg rule, as citizens learned to use the empire’s administrative machinery to their local advantage. Nationalists developed distinctive ideas about cultural difference in the context of imperial institutions, yet all of them claimed the Habsburg state as their empire. The empire’s creative solutions to governing its many lands and peoples—as well as the intractable problems it could not solve—left an enduring imprint on its successor states in Central Europe. Its lessons remain no less important today. Paperback 592 pages Harvard University Press, 20186.2 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches ISBN 9780674986763Austrian History

The Habsburg Empire: A New History

By Stefan ZweigTranslated by Eden and Cedar Paul "Certainly no one can arise unmoved from the reading of this powerful work."—The New Republic"Stefan Zweig’s remarkable study of Marie Antoinette; A full-bodied biography which bids fair to be the definitive life of that tragic queen."—The New York Times"The most influential biography of Marie Antoinette."—The Guardian Stefan Zweig based his biography of Marie Antoinette, who became the Queen of France at the age of fifteen, on the correspondence between her and her mother, and her great love the Count Axel von Fersen. Zweig analyzes the chemistry of a woman's soul from her intimate pleasures to her public suffering as a Queen under the weight of misfortune and history. Zweig describes Marie Antoinette in the King's bedroom, in the enchanted and extravagant world of the Trianon, and with her children. And in his account of 'The Revolution', he describes her resolve during the failed escape to Varennes, her imprisonment in the Conciergerie and her final tragic destiny under the guillotine. Zweig's account has been the definitive biography of Marie Antoinette since its publication, inspiring Antonia Fraser and the recent film adaptation. Paperback592 pagesPushkin Press, 2017Originally published in 19325.1 x 1.5 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781906548308Literature, Biography, History

Marie Antoinette

At once an invaluable photographic record of life in Weimar Berlin and a timeless demonstration of the cinema's ability to enthrall on a purely visceral level, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City offers a kaleidoscopic view of a single day in the life of a bustling metropolis.Carl Mayer (The Last Laugh), influenced by the naturalistic Kammerspiel movement, envisioned "a melody of pictures" sprung from daily reality instead of the stylized artificiality of the studio-bound expressionist film. Following Mayer's rough outline, photographer Karl Freund deployed a team of cameramen to explore the avenues, alleyways and factories of Berlin and secure hidden-camera glimpses of the people and machinery that provide the city with its constant motion. The many hours of footage were then edited into a series of five acts, like movements of a symphony, by Walther Ruttmann as a continuation of his experiments with abstract motion.Berlin defined the formula of the "city symphony" film and according to John Grierson- the filmmaker/critic who coined the term "documentary" - "No film has been more influential, more imitated."Opus IA rare example of the German avant-garde cinema known as absoluter Film, Walther Ruttmann's hand-colored Opus I is an exploration of the geometry of movement within the frame and the sensory effect these abstract shapes evoke as they swell, streak and swim across the screen. Viewed alongside Berlin, Opus I seems a thumbnail sketch for the sweeping slice-of-life documentary, revealing the degree to which Ruttmann's 1923 film was more a spectacle of raw motion than a documentary portrait of Berlin's daily routines. Opus I is accompanied by Max Butting's 1922 score, adapted and conducted by Timothy Brock.Berlin, Symphony of a Great CityDirected by Walther RuttmanGermany 192762 MinutesBlack and WhiteSilentOpus IDirected by Walther RuttmannGermany 192210 MinutesColorSilent Flicker AlleyNTSC FormatISBN 889290092014Documentary, DVD

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City [DVD]

By Angus Robertson "From the 13th century till the end of World War I, a Habsburg ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Vienna as its capital city. No other royal dynasty has a record that can match that of the Habsburgs. Mr. Robertson holds that the key to the Habsburgs’ greatness was sheer continuity and the stability that comes with it; he even ascribes to them a sense of mission. There is something valid in Mr. Robertson’s endorsement of the city as a civilizational crossroads.”—The Wall Street Journal "[Angus Robertson's] love for the city is apparent in this panoramic account of Vienna as a cultural, intellectual, and political capital of Europe."—The New CriterionVienna is unique amongst world capitals in its consistent international importance over the centuries. From the ascent of the Habsburgs as Europe's leading dynasty to the Congress of Vienna, which reordered Europe in the wake of Napoleon's downfall, to bridge-building summits during the Cold War, Vienna has been the scene of key moments in world history.Scores of pivotal figures were influenced by their time in Vienna, including: Empress Maria Theresa, Count Metternich, Bertha von Suttner, Theodore Herzl, Gustav Mahler, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, John F. Kennedy, and many others. In a city of great composers, artists, and thinkers, it is here that both the most positive and destructive ideas of recent history have developed.From its time as the capital of an imperial superpower, through war, dissolution, dictatorship to democracy Vienna has reinvented itself and its relevance to the rest of the world.Hardcover464 pagesPegasus Books, 20226 x 1.6 x 9 inchesISBN 9781639361953Austrian History

The Crossroads of Civilization: A History of Vienna

By John Michael Greer Take an enlightening journey through occult history, exploring 100 dramatic incidents, arcane knowledge, and key historical figures from around the world. John Michael Greer delves into two millennia of tradition, from the earliest alchemists to pagan rituals; from the Philosopher’s Stone to Cabala, the first tarot, and the Knights Templar; and from the first horoscopes to fortune-telling trials and the birth of modern witchcraft, or Wicca. Each entry features a stunning image or intriguing item of ephemera. Hardcover224 PagesSterling, 20177 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9781454925774History, Occult

The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca

Edited by Dawn Ades The revolutionary Dada movement, though short-lived, produced a vast amount of creative work in both art and literature during the years that followed World War I. Rejecting all social and artistic conventions, Dadaists went to the extremes of provocative behavior, creating “anti-art” pieces that ridiculed and questioned the very nature of creative endeavor. To understand their movement’s heady mix of anarchy and nihilism—combined with a lethal dash of humor—it’s essential to engage with the artists’ most important writings and manifestos. And that is is precisely where this reader comes in. Bringing together key Dada texts, many of them translated into English for the first time, this volume immerses readers in some of the most famous (and infamous) periodicals of the time, from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Francis Picabia’s 391to Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz. Published in Europe and the United States between 1916 and 1932, these journals constituted the movement’s lifeblood, communicating the desires and aspirations of the artists involved. In addition to providing the first representative selection of these texts, The Dada Reader also includes excerpts from many lesser-known American and Eastern European journals. Compiled with both students and general readers in mind, this volume is necessary reading for anyone interested in one of the most dynamic and influential movements of the twentieth century. Please note that Rare/Out-of-Print titles are very limited in stock. Paperback320 pagesUniversity Of Chicago Press, 20066 x 0.9 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226006987Dadaism

The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology

By Lynn H. NicholasWinner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner of the 1999 Legion of HonorWinnter of the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award“Nicholas knows the art world as well as any military historian knows his battlefield . . . Her work deserves the widest reading.”—New York Times Book Review“At once fascinating and horrifying [with] a strong element of spine-chilling suspense.”—Los Angeles Times“Intriguing..suspenseful . . . a sensational story of moral courage and greatness of character in the face of pure evil.”—Houston ChronicleThe cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall—not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it.From the Nazi purges of "Degenerate Art" and Goering's shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of the Mona Lisa from Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, The Rape of Europa is a sweeping narrative of greed, philistinism, and heroism that combines superlative scholarship with a compelling drama.Paperback512 pagesVintage Books, 19955.2 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679756866Award-Winning, Art History

The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War

Edited by Mirjam Zadoff and Karolina KühnA volume examining queer lives caught between empowerment and stigmatization in early twentieth-century Germany.The contributions in this volume present the story of queer lives in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century—from the first emancipation movements around the turn of the century via attempts at self-empowerment in the Weimar Republic to the destruction of queer subcultures under the National Socialist regime and the continued discrimination against LGBTIQ+ persons in the postwar period. Since the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of people have self-assuredly championed the recognition of queer lifestyles. These pioneers formed collectives, made their voices heard, and questioned dominant gender categories politically, scientifically, and artistically. Through essays, interviews, and artworks, the authors and artists illustrate this struggle for recognition which was forcefully prevented and destroyed following the seizure of power by the National Socialists and almost forgotten after 1945.Paperback252 pagesHirmer, 20236.75 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9783777439921History, LGBTQ+, Gender and Sexuality

To Be Seen. Queer Lives 1900-1950

By Tilar J. Mazzeo"Set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of World War II, The Hôtel on Place Vendôme is the captivating history of Paris’s world-famous Hôtel Ritz—a breathtaking tale of glamour, opulence, and celebrity; dangerous liaisons, espionage, and resistance." —from Tilar J. Manzeo, the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot and The Secret of Chanel No. 5“Mazzeo pulls back the heavy curtains of the Ritz in Paris to reveal a steamy world of sex, drugs, partying and political intrigue.” ―Alan Riding, author of And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris“Mazzeo enthrallingly depicts a hotbed of both the magnificent and the mundane . . . Readers will enjoy Mazzeo’s fascinating collection of secretive, scheming historical characters, all under one elegant roof.” ―Publishers WeeklyWhen France fell to the Germans in June 1940, the legendary Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme—an icon of Paris frequented by film stars and celebrity writers, American heiresses and risqué flappers, playboys, and princes—was the only luxury hotel of its kind allowed in the occupied city by order of Adolf Hitler.Tilar J. Mazzeo traces the history of this cultural landmark from its opening in fin de siècle Paris. At its center, The Hotel on Place Vendôme is an extraordinary chronicle of life at the Ritz during wartime, when the Hôtel was simultaneously headquarters to the highest-ranking German officers, such as Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, and home to exclusive patrons, including Coco Chanel. Mazzeo takes us into the grand palace’s suites, bars, dining rooms, and wine cellars, revealing a hotbed of illicit affairs and deadly intrigue, as well as stunning acts of defiance and treachery.Rich in detail, illustrated with black-and-white photos, The Hotel on Place Vendôme is a remarkable look at this extraordinary crucible where the future of post-war France—and all of post-war Europe—was transformed. Paperback 320 pagesHarper Perennial, 2015 reprint5 x 8 inches ISBN 9780061791048History

The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

By Eric D. Weitz Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the twentieth century—one whose influence and inspiration still resonate today. Eric Weitz has written the authoritative history that this fascinating and complex period deserves, and he illuminates the uniquely progressive achievements and even greater promise of the Weimar Republic. Weitz reveals how Germans rose from the turbulence and defeat of World War I and revolution to forge democratic institutions and make Berlin a world capital of avant-garde art. He explores the period’s groundbreaking cultural creativity, from architecture and theater, to the new field of "sexology"—and presents richly detailed portraits of some of the Weimar’s greatest figures. Weimar Germany also shows that beneath this glossy veneer lay political turmoil that ultimately led to the demise of the republic and the rise of the radical Right. Yet for decades after, the Weimar period continued to powerfully influence contemporary art, urban design, and intellectual life—from Tokyo to Ankara, and Brasilia to New York. Featuring a new preface, this comprehensive and compelling book demonstrates why Weimar is an example of all that is liberating and all that can go wrong in a democracy. Paperback512 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20186 1/8 x 9 1/4 inchesISBN 9780691183053German History, Non-Fiction

Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Weimar Centennial Edition

By Elana Shapria "[Shapira] maps the possibility of thinking about Jewish agency in the arts while avoiding the temptation to essentialise Jewish identity, to homogenise Jewish attitudes, or to represent "the Jew" as a total personality whose positions are governed entirely by the fact of their Jewishness. Instead, she demonstrates how patrons were thinking through their Jewishness at the same time as they were positioning themselves in terms of class, gender and sexual identity, and were doing so at a time when all of these were topics of substantial dispute."—The Art Newspaper"Authoritative. . . . Shapira's documentation in primary and secondary sources is exhaustive. . . . Recommended."—Choice"Compelling and important. . . .Working from a truly astounding range of primary and archival sources, she brings to life the protagonists of her story with intimacy and richness of detail. Rarely has the active role of Jewish patronage been explored in such depth."—Ars Judaica A recent surge of interest in Jewish patronage during the golden years of Vienna has led to the question, Would modernism in Vienna have developed in the same fashion had Jewish patrons not been involved? In this provocative reexamination of the roots of Viennese modernism, Elana Shapira analyzes the central role of Jewish businessmen, professionals, and writers in the evolution of the city's architecture and design from the 1860s to the 1910s. According to Shapira, these patrons negotiated their relationship with their non-Jewish surrounding and clarified their position within Viennese society by inscribing Jewish elements into the buildings, interiors, furniture, and design objects that they financed, produced, and co-designed. This book uniquely treats Jewish identification within Viennese modernism as a matter of Jews' active fashioning of a new language to convey their aims for emancipation, along with their claims of cultural authority. Paperback336 pagesBrandeis University Press, 20166 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9781611689211Austrian History, Modernism, Design

Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna

By Michael White "With Generation Dada, White has presented readers with a powerful new portrait of an avant-garde that flourished in one of the most fraught cities of the early twentieth century." —Catherine Craft, Burlington Magazine“In a well researched, detailed examination of the Berlin avant-garde in the context of WWI, White . . . offers a fresh analysis of the key events and personal relationships that helped form the artistic practices of some of the central figures of the German Dada movement. In an informative but refreshingly accessible style, the author manages to pay close attention to the intricacies of cultural and historical context as well as the formal elements of the works themselves . . . demonstrating a keen eye for the relationship between content and form.” —ChoiceFor the Berlin Dadaists, their identity as a collective—Club Dada, to members—was an integral part of their artistic practice. But the circumstances that brought together the likes of George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Johannes Baader—renamed Propaganda Marshall, Monteurdada, Dadasoph, and Oberdada within the organization—have remained largely unexamined until now. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book documents the group'ss beginnings in wartime Berlin and reveals how these relationships influenced its provocative acts, which were inextricably tied to the era's chaos and brutality. Studying how the Dadaists saw themselves as a new generation—in contrast to their pacifist forebears, the Expressionists—the book sheds light on key developments and events, such as the First International Dada Fair, held in Berlin in 1920. It also offers the first serious consideration of the group's role in constructing its own legacy, even as the works were deliberately rooted in the ephemeral.Michael White is reader in the history of art at the University of York and is best known internationally for his research on the early-20th-century De Stijl group in the Netherlands. Hardcover382 pages | 20 color and 130 black-and-white illustrationsYale University Press, 20137.8 x 1.2 x 10 inchesISBN 9780300169034Art History, Dada, German History

Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War

By Peter Chametzky “Chametzky’s book offers an interesting theoretical analysis of German art. Its sources and documentation are abundant. Chametzky’s knowledge of German art is impressive.”—Yves Laberge, German Studies Review“Compelling. . . . [Chametzky includes] appropriate critical/theoretical and cultural/historical background throughout.”—Shelley Cordulack, Millikin University European Legacy"This engaging book asks fundamental questions about the object in history and how meaning in art is produced and altered over time. Seamlessly weaving together discourses on gender, the body, ethnicity, film, mass media, and art history, Chametzky deftly explores German art from modernism to post-modernism through cogent case studies drawn from the Wilhelmine, Weimar, Nazi, Cold War, and Reunification eras. His perceptive ventures into such areas as Dada, the machine, and hitherto overlooked Jewish utopian thought provide fresh insights on German art and culture."—Timothy O. Benson, author of Raoul Hausmann and Berlin DadaThis book provides a stimulating overview of twentieth-century German art, focusing on some of the period's key works by Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Willi Baumeister, Arno Breker, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. In Peter Chametzky's innovative approach, these works become representatives rather than representations of twentieth-century history. That is, the art here does not simply illustrate an argument, the art is the argument. Chametzky draws on both scholarly and popular sources to demonstrate how the works (and in some cases, the artists themselves) interacted with, and even enacted, historical events, processes, and ideas. He asserts the continued historical role of material art works in an era when less material forms—photography, film, television, video, digital images—have assumed the function of visually depicting contemporary history.Hardcover 286 pagesUniversity of California Press, 201010 x 6.8 x 1.1 inchesISBN 9780520260429Art History, German History

Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art

Edited by Anke Finger and Julie Shoults This collection, for the first time, explores women’s self-conceptions and representations of women’s and gender roles in society in their own Expressionist works. How did women approach themes commonly considered to be characteristic of the Expressionist movement, and did they address other themes or aesthetics and styles not currently represented in the canon? Women in German Expressionism centers its analysis on gender, together with difference, ethnicity, intersectionality, and identity, to approach artworks and texts in more nuanced ways, engaging solidly established theoretical and sociohistorical approaches that enhance and update our understanding of the material under investigation. It moves beyond the masculine, “New Man,” viewpoint so firmly associated with German Expressionism and examines alternative, critical, and divergent interpretations of the changing world at the time. This collection seeks to broaden the theorization, scholarship, and reception of German Expressionism by—much belatedly—including works by women, and by shifting or redefining firmly established concepts and topics carrying only the imprint of male authors and artists to this day. Paperback372 pagesUniversity of Michigan Press, 20236 x 0.84 x 9 inchesISBN 9780472039388Women's Studies, German Expressionism

Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism

By Katya Moytl “In her superb new study of Viennese women, Motyl explores the real-life practices of a range of ‘new women’ during and after the First World War. Moving beyond approaches that treat the ‘new woman’ as a discursive or political phenomenon, she instead explores women’s everyday life practices. By tracing her subjects’ bodily routines, Motyl’s remarkably original work gives radical new meanings to the concept of a ‘new woman.’” ―Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History Explores the emergence of a new womanhood in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In Embodied Histories, historian Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit. Paperback304 pages | 50 halftonesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20246 x 0.73 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226832166 Women's History, Vienna

Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894-1934

By Frank Tallis "Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker." - Publisher's Weekly (starred review)"Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring―among the best of innumerable Freud bios." - Kirkus (starred review)A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series.Some cities are like stars. When the conditions are right, they ignite, and burn with such fierce intensity that they outshine every other city on the planet. Vienna was one such city and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the birthplace of the modern mind and the way we live today. Long coffee menus and celebrity interviews are Viennese inventions. ‘Modern’ buildings were appearing in Vienna long before they started appearing in New York and the idea of practical modern home design originated in the work of Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The place, however, where one finds the most indelible and profound impression of Viennese influence is inside your head. How we think about ourselves has been largely determined by Vienna’s most celebrated resident, Sigmund Freud.In Mortal Secrets, Frank Tallis brilliantly illuminates Sigmund Freud and his times, taking readers into the mind of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, chronicling the evolution of psychoanalysis and opening up Freud’s life to embrace the Vienna he lived in and the lives of the people he mingled with from Gustav Klimt to Arnold Schönberg, Egon Schiele to Gustav Mahler. Mortal Secrets is a thrilling book about a heady time in one of the world’s most beautiful cities and its long shadow that extends through the twentieth century up until the present day.Hardcover 496 PagesSt. Martin's Press, 20246.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781250288950 Austrian History

Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind

Edited by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke “Excellent and engaging…It is a collection best read, in my opinion, from cover to cover, for this is the only way to fully appreciate how well its chapters cohere around its fragmented and protean subject.” ―Journal of Austrian Studies Sissi's World offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria. It investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in European cultural history.Sissi's World explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the Sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a Bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving Austrian empress, and the queen of Hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist.Despite the continuing fascination with “the beloved Sissi," the Habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. This collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media.Paperback408 pages | 30 black-and-white illustrationsBloomsbury Publishing, 20209 x 6 inchesISBN 9781501361685Austrian Royal History, Habsburg Empire

Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth

By Katy Hessel "Sweeping . . . Part revisionist history, part coffee-table book, part collective portrait, part archival treasure hunt."—Tiana Reid, The New York Times "The Story of Art Without Men is an extraordinary achievement that will have a disruptive cultural legacy and help determine the landscape for years to come." —Helena Lee, Harper’s Bazaar"[The Story of Art Without Men] should become a founding text in the history of art by women . . . Inspiring and indispensable."—Bidisha Mamta, GuardianInstant New York Times bestsellerThe story of art as it’s never been told before, from the Renaissance to the present day, with more than 300 works of art.How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the “readymade.” Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.Hardcover512 pagesW. W. Norton, 20236.4 x 9.6 inchesISBN 9780393881868 Art History, Women's Studies

The Story of Art Without Men

By Robert Musil & Klaus AmannTranslated by Genese Grill Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschluß Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil's political thought and his struggle, during the war years, to come to terms, to survive, and to find some way to bear witness. Amann recounts Musil's political trajectory, from fairly indifferent aesthete to socially-engaged supporter of the Weimar Republic and its liberal reforms, to critic of Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms, and as prescient sceptic about the "cultural optimism" of the Soviet experiment. Musil's ultimate stance—as a thinker who radically resists taking final stances - is that politics endangers culture and humanity by dictating to artists how they should write, think, paint, compose, and by instrumentalizing art in the interest of ideology. Paperback562 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20235 x 1.25 x 8 inchesISBN 9781940625546Literature, History

Literature & Politics

By Glenn KurtzNamed one of the best books of 2014 by NPR, The New Yorker, and The Boston Globe.The author's discovery of a brief 16mm film shot by his grandfather during a 1938 visit to his soon-to-be-extinguished birthplace in Poland unfolds like a detective story. Now the basis for the documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening. When Glenn Kurtz stumbles upon an old family film in his parents' closet in Florida, he has no inkling of its historical significance or of the impact it will have on his life. The film, shot long ago by his grandfather on a sightseeing trip to Europe, includes shaky footage of Paris and the Swiss Alps, with someone inevitably waving at the camera. Astonishingly, David Kurtz also captured on color 16mm film the only known moving images of the thriving, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, shortly before the community's destruction. "Blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead," he just happened to visit his birthplace in 1938, a year before the Nazi occupation. Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, fewer than one hundred would survive.Glenn Kurtz quickly recognizes the brief footage as a crucial link in a lost history. "The longer I spent with my grandfather's film," he writes, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." Every image, every face, was a mystery that might be solved. Soon he is swept up in a remarkable journey to learn everything he can about these people. After restoring the film, which had shrunk and propelled across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; and into archives, basements, cemeteries, and even an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield as he looks for shards of Nasielsk's Jewish history.One day, Kurtz hears from a young woman who had watched the video on the Holocaust Museum's website. As the camera panned across the faces of children, she recognized her grandfather as a thirteen-year-old boy. Moszek Tuchendler of Nasielsk was now eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler of Florida, and when Kurtz meets him, the lost history of Nasielsk comes into view. Chandler's laser-sharp recollections create a bridge between two worlds, and he helps Kurtz eventually locate six more survivors, including a ninety-six-year-old woman who also appears in the film, standing next to the man she would later marry.Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. "I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals." Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a poignant yet unsentimental exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world.Paperback432 pagesFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 20145.5 x 1.14 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9780374535797Polish-Jewish History, Memoir

Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film

By Agatha Schwartz, Helga Thorson This study offers an overview and critical analysis of emerging women's movements and of a feminist consciousness in women's literature across the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between its constitution as a Dual Monarchy in 1867 and its demise in 1918. It is the first one, on the one hand, to assemble, in the English language, information pertaining to the women's movement on the whole territory of Austria-Hungary while adding new and original research data to it; and to present, on the other hand, a selection from original feminist documents and women's literary texts in English translation from German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Italian. Taking into account the National, regional, trans-regional as well as international aspects of the various strands of the women's movement within the monarchy, the authors demonstrate the variety of women's emancipatory activism, ideas and creative output in this complex multiethnic and multi-lingual state, a topic, that on the whole is still little known within the English-speaking world. A comprehensive study of this kind is a unique contribution to both the history of the international women's movement and to women's writing. It offers a succinct analysis of the developments regarding the fight for women's educational, professional, and political rights among the many nationalities of the monarchy while also presenting original texts in translation that illustrate these and other struggles faced by women striving for emancipation during the last decades if the 19th and the beginning if the 20th century. Paperback 320 pages Ariadne Press, 20155.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches ISBN 9781572411876 Women's Studies, Criticism, History

Shaking the Empire, Shaking Patriarchy : The Growth of a Feminist Consciousness Across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

By A. Wess Mitchell "The story of the Habsburg Empire, which shaped key episodes of European history for several centuries, is one of endurance and finesse. A gripping and insightful work that yields lessons for statecraft in our own time."—Henry A. Kissinger "A compelling and long-overdue analysis."—Richard Bassett, author of For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619–1918 "This graceful account of Habsburg diplomacy . . . explains how the empire survived so long."—Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs The Empire of Habsburg Austria faced more enemies than any other European great power. Flanked on four sides by rivals, it possessed few of the advantages that explain successful empires. Yet somehow Austria endured, outlasting Ottoman sieges, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. A. Wess Mitchell tells the story of how this cash-strapped, polyglot empire survived for centuries in Europe’s most dangerous neighborhood without succumbing to the pressures of multisided warfare. He shows how the Habsburgs played the long game in geopolitics, corralling friend and foe alike into voluntarily managing the empire’s lengthy frontiers and extending a benign hegemony across the turbulent lands of middle Europe. The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire offers lessons on how to navigate a messy geopolitical map, stand firm without the advantage of military predominance, and prevail against multiple rivals. Paperback416 pages | 16 black-and-white illustrationsPrinceton University Press, 20196.1 x 1.1 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9780691196442Austrian History

The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire

By Edmund de Waal A New York Times BestsellerAn Economist Book of the YearCosta Book Award Winner for BiographyGalaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)“A family memoir written with a grace and modesty that almost belie the sweep of its contents: Proust, Rilke, Japanese art, the rue de Monceau, Vienna during the Second World War. The most enchanting history lesson imaginable.” —The New Yorker“A self-questioning, witty, sharply perceptive book . . . The Hare with Amber Eyes is rich in epiphanic moments . . . By writing objects into his family story [de Waal] has achieved something remarkable.” —Tanya Harrod, The Times Literary Supplement“Part family memoir, part Proustian confession, subtle, spare and elegant.” —Hilary Spurling, The Independent Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive. And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire. Paperback354 pagesPicador, 20115.5 x 1 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9781250811271Austrian History, Design

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

By Rudolf Kuenzli Dada developed in distinct periods and locations, providing the structure of the book. From Europe and New York during the First World War it spread to Eastern Europe and Japan in the 1920s. Its re-emergence as Neo-Dada in the 1950s and influence on Fluxus in the 1960s was linked to emigres such as Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter. Survey: International Dada expert Rudolf Kuenzli surveys Dada in its historical context and examines its significant impact and resonance in art and culture today. Linking visual art, performance and literature, this is a fresh treatement of Dada as the Dadaists saw it. A reassessment of one of the twentieth century's most revolutionary movements in the arts, Kuenzli's clear style is accessible to the scholar and the general reader. Works: Each image is accompanied by an extended caption. The book is organized chronologically and geographically around major explosions of Dada activity. From its inception in Zurich during the First World War, we follow Dada to New York, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris, Central and Eastern Europe, and Japan, finally looking at Neo-Dada. Arp's Automatic Drawing; Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Man Ray's assemblages; Francis Picabia's paintings linking machine and human form; collage with political comment from Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch; Kurt Schwitters' all-encompassing concept of Merz; Max Ernst; from the East, the graphics of Lajos Kassak and El Lissitzky; Okada Tatsuo's constructions and fireworks attached to the cover of Mavo magazine. A look at Neo-Dada includes Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning and the Happenings of Hi Red Center. Documents include a comprehensive collection of original Dada writings, researched at the International Dada Archive and sourced from around the world. Poetry, manifestos and statements are presented together with letters between Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp; Beatrice Wood describes 'The Richard Mutt Case' (the first exhibition of a urinal) to her readers of The Blind Man in 1917; and in recent interviews artists such as Allan Kaprow and Arman relate their Dada inheritance. Please note that Rare/Out-of-Print titles are very limited in stock Hardcover304 pagesPhaidon Press, 200610.2 x 1.5 x 11.8 inchesISBN 9780714844237Dadaism, Movements

Dada (Themes and Movements)

By Karl Toepfer "A massive achievement. . . . Toepfer respects the body, wants to understand movement as the primary medium of ideas, and gives women the central role they actually played in this aesthetic and intellectual discourse."—Marcia B. Siegel, author of The Shapes of Change Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars—nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of "modern identity."The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious "inner" conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an "empire" of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy.Toepfer presents the work of such well-known figures as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with less-known but equally fascinating body culture practitioners. His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism. Hardcover439 pagesUniversity of California Press; 19976 x 1.2 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520206632German History, Art History

Empire of Ecstasy

Original Price: $55.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Edited by Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Sabine Breitwieser History is constructed through the continual reinterpretation of artifacts that preserve historical events. But can these artifacts be taken as objective facts? For centuries, artists have offered through their work contrary meanings for both historical and contemporary events. In times or places of crisis, the power of art to depict harsh realities and new ways of understanding history have been particularly pronounced.Art/Histories looks at history through the lens of artworks from the sixteenth century to the present, including works from Otto Dix, Anselm Kiefer, Käthe Kollwitz, Alice Creischer, Jörg Immendorff, Felix Droese, and many others. Drawing on the world-class collections of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Sabine Breitwieser examines the stories these works tell about the events depicted, as well as the artists’ involvement with them. With nearly three hundred full-color illustrations, the book challenges many of the tools currently used to examine and evaluate history. Paperback204 PagesText in German and English Hirmer Publishers, 20149.5 x 0.8 x 11 inchesISBN 9783777422794History, Art History

Kunst/Geschichten Art/Histories

by James J. Sheehan "Sheehan covers a wide swath of aesthetic, architectural, and social history in his discussion of the growth, the purpose, and the reception of museums by the public in nineteenth-century Germany...[T]he author deftly presents the role of German art museums in all their complexity, yet succinctly summarizes their importance both for nineteenth-century Germans and their legacy today."—The Historian"James Sheehan is indeed a master of the historical craft. Clear organization, lucid prose, and the ability to balance a broadly sweeping narrative with close readings of specific subjects....This book is especially timely considering the revamping of Berlin museums. Relates such an important and intriguing history that one wishes the story were continued in detail up through the third Reich and into the postwar period."—Central European History"A fine survey...bringing together and properly ordering a wide range of material concerning the intellectual and institutional premises of the changing role of museums in the German art world."—The New Criterion Combining the history of ideas, institutions, and architecture, this study shows how the museum both reflected and shaped the place of art in German culture from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. On a broader level, it illuminates the origin and character of the museum's central role in modern culture.James Sheehan begins by describing the establishment of the first public galleries during the last decades of Germany's old regime. He then examines the revolutionary upheaval that swept Germany between 1789 and 1815, arguing that the first great German museums reflected the nation's revolutionary aspirations. By the mid-nineteenth century, the climate had changed; museums constructed in this period affirmed historical continuities and celebrated political accomplishments. During the next several years, however, Germans became disillusioned with conventional definitions of art and lost interest in monumental museums. By the turn of the century, the museum had become a site for the political and cultural controversies caused by the rise of artistic modernism. In this context, Sheehan argues, we can see the first signs of what would become the modern style of museum architecture and modes of display.The first study of its kind, this highly accessible book will appeal to historians, museum professionals, and anyone interested in the relationship between art, politics, and culture. Hardcover272 pages, 34 halftonesOxford University Press9.2 x 6.1 x 0.7 inchesISBN 9780195135725German History, Museum Studies

Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism

Edited by Anton Kæs, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg "This is an essential book for anyone teaching a course on the Weimar Republic, and advanced students should be advised to purchase it."—German History"The Weimar Republic Sourcebook is an invaluable resource for understanding one of the most important and resonant eras of the twentieth century. Since the Weimar debate has continued to repeat itself, albeit with less intellectual brilliance, this book is as much about the present as about the past. Here is the Weimar era in all its many-voiced and eloquent complexity: most of these texts, even those by the most famous names of the period, appear for the first time in English. This is an indispensable, enthralling, properly ambitious book."—Susan Sontag"The Weimar Republic Sourcebook will almost certainly transform the way the intellectual legacy of the Weimar Republic is thought about and taught in the English-speaking world."—Modernism/modernity A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power.Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.Paperback806 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19956.5 x 1.8 x 9.8 inchesISBN 9780520067752German History, Philosophy, Culture Studies

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

Editied by Phillip Prodger Between 1925 and 1938, photographer E.O. Hoppé traveled the length and breadth of Germany, recording people and places at one of the most tumultuous times in the country’s history. He photographed movie stars and captains of industry, workers and peasants, and captured the birth of the Autobahn and UFA film studios in its heyday. He saw the rise of fascism, the creation of vast new suburbs, and the displacement of people from their traditional ways of life. With unprecedented access to the country’s world-famous factories and industrial installations, he witnessed Germany as few others could—barreling headlong into the unknown. Moving, insightful, and deeply revealing, the full significance of Hoppé’s German work has been unknown until now. This volume combines photographs published in Hoppé’s legendary book of 1930, Deutsche Arbeit, with many new pictures never previously seen. From factory floor to the commuters of Berlin and Munich, Hoppé’s photographs reveal the profound social and economic tensions that preceded the Second World War. This publication uncovers Hoppé as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century photography, who introduced for the first time elements of typology, seriality and sequence, which have become key elements of contemporary photographic practice. Hoppé used his experience in Germany to develop a modern new style of photography—showing not just how things looked, but how it felt to be there. Hardcover240 pagesSteidl, 201511 x 1.2 x 12 inchesISBN 9783869309378Photography, German History, Documentary

The German Work

By Elyse Graham “A fascinating new study. . . Book and Dagger tells the story of four such recruits—and surveys many others—with an almost breathless sense of wartime romance and drama. It makes for entertaining, atmospheric reading.” — Wall Street Journal The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts. In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war. Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world. Hardcover400 pagesEcco, 20246 x 1.15 x 9 inchesISBN 9780063280847History, World War II

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II

By Anne Nelson One of the untold stories of the Holocaust—the nail-biting drama of Suzanne Spaak, who risked and gave her life to save hundreds of Jewish children from deportation from Nazi Paris to Auschwitz “vividly dramatizes the stakes of acting morally in a time of brutality” (The Wall Street Journal). Suzanne Spaak was born into the Belgian Catholic elite and married into the country’s leading political family. Her brother-in-law was the Foreign Minister and her husband Claude was a playwright and patron of the painter Renée Magritte. In Paris in the late 1930s her friendship with a Polish Jewish refugee led her to her life’s purpose. When France fell and the Nazis occupied Paris, she joined the Resistance. She used her fortune and social status to enlist allies among wealthy Parisians and church groups. Then, under the eyes of the Gestapo, Suzanne and women from the Jewish and Christian resistance groups “kidnapped” hundreds of Jewish children to save them from the gas chambers. Suzanne’s Children is the “dogged…page-turning account” (Kirkus Reviews) of this incredible story of courage in the face of evil. “Anne Nelson is superb at showing the upheavals in Europe since WWI through vivid, illuminating details…and she also masterfully describes the incremental changes in the Jews’ plight under the Occupation” (Booklist). It was during the final year of the Occupation when Suzanne was caught in the Gestapo dragnet that was pursuing a Soviet agent she had aided. She was executed shortly before the liberation of Paris. Paperback336 pagesSimon & Schuster, 20185.5 x 1 x 8.38 inchesISBN 9781501105333History, World War II

Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris

By Benjamin Carter Hett “[World War II's] proximate origins are the subject of Benjamin Carter Hett’s fast-moving, absorbing and aptly titled The Nazi Menace…Thanks to the author’s knack for the capsule biography, we gain fascinating insights into less obvious figures, among them Hugh Dowding, an eccentric and canny architect of Britain’s air defense network; Ernst von Weizsäcker, a senior German diplomat torn between his opposition to a general war and his support for German expansion; and Dorothy Thompson, the ferociously anti-Nazi American columnist and radio broadcaster.” ­­―The New York Times Book Review A panoramic narrative of the years leading up to the Second World War―a tale of democratic crisis, racial conflict, and a belated recognition of evil, with profound resonance for our own time. Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage. Paperback416 pagesSt. Martin’s Griffin, 20215.99 x 0.96 x 8.99 inchesISBN 9781250798763German History, World War II

The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War

By Benjamin Carter Hett "At a time of deep distress over the stability of democracy in America and elsewhere, Benjamin Carter Hett's chronicle of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler could not be more timely. 'The Death of Democracy' makes for chilling reading." -- Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post “[An] extremely fine study of the end of constitutional rule in Germany. . . . With careful prose and fine scholarship, with fine thumbnail sketches of individuals and concise discussions of institutions and economics, . . . [Benjamin Carter Hett] sensitively describes a moral crisis that preceded a moral catastrophe.” -- Timothy Snyder, The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen. Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany's leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler's hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship. Paperback320 pagesHolt Paperbacks, 20195.35 x 0.85 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9781250210869History, Weimar Republic

The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

By Christophe Koné“Uncanny Creatures contributes a new and novel theory of dolls and their relationship to the concept of the uncanny. It also contributes to the ongoing/emerging scholarship on gender and queer studies to the fields of German studies and art history.” — Nathan Timpano, University of Miami Germany held a monopoly on the manufacture and export of bisque toy dolls in Europe before WWI. Yet, dolls’ omnipresence in the material, visual, and literary culture of the modern German-speaking world has so far not been properly addressed. In demonstrating this cultural affinity for dolls, Christophe Koné draws upon a range of stories and seminal essays on dolls, as well as toys, sculptures, paintings, and photographs. He examines how E.T.A. Hoffmann’s romantic tale The Sandman (1815) has been a major source of inspiration for German-speaking doll makers because of how it centers imagination and inventiveness. Using Hoffmann’s tale as an early example of an amalgam between doll thinking and making in German culture, Koné shows how it initiated a genealogy of doll thinkers (Freud & Jentsch), writers (Rilke), painters (Kokoschka), photographers (Bellmer), and makers (Pritzel). Uncanny Creatures then explores how this unusual interest in human-like figures continues a long tradition of thought devoted to conceptualizing “things,” from Immanuel Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself to Martin Heidegger’s lecture on the thing, and Eduard Mörike or Rainer Maria Rilke’s thing-poems. Because dolls occupy a liminal space—not quite things and more than mere objects—they appear as uncanny creatures which have held a fascination for writers, thinkers, and artists alike. Uncanny Creatures moves past the Freudian discourse of fetishism to propose a new reading of doll artifacts in German culture centered on their ability to evoke a feeling of uncertainty and unsettlement in the viewer. Paperback184 PagesUniversity of Michigan Press, 20246 x 0.6 x 9 inchesISBN 9780472039739 German History & Theory

Uncanny Creatures: Doll Thinking in Modern German Culture

Edited by Lisa Marei Schmidt, Sabine Maria Schmidt, and Florence Thurmes Eine Aufständische für die Moderne. A Rebel for Modern Art Art collector, patron and arbiter – Hanna Bekker vom Rath (1893–1983) was a trailblazer for the artistic avant-garde and one of the most important female personalities in Germany during the pre-war and post-war modern periods. She was a friend of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ida Kerkorius and Paul Klee. This lavishly illustrated volume provides a lively picture of a remarkable woman. A refuge for modernism: Hanna Bekker vom Rath promoted the art of the Brücke artists and the avant-garde in a variety of ways. Even during the National Socialist era her “Blue House” in Hofheim served as an intimate space for exchanges and exhibitions for the artists who were her friends. After the war she founded the Kunstkabinett in Frankfurt, the city’s first postwar gallery, and she undertook numerous international journeys on behalf of modern art. The texts and images sketch a multi-faceted portrait of an “ambassador of art” and document the influence of her achievements. Paperback256 pages | 180 color IllustrationsText in English and GermanHirmer, 20247.8 x 10 inchesISBN 9783777443546 Monograph

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