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 Padraig Rooney "At last a biography in English of one of the most interesting women of the twentieth century! Schwarzenbach was so far ahead of her time that we are only now beginning to catch up to her. Little happened in the early decades of the twentieth century to which she didn't have a connection. What a life! And what a great way Padraig Rooney has told it." —Carlos Dews, editor of The Collected Works of Carson McCullers “An empathetic portrait of an audacious woman.” —Kirkus Reviews Annemarie Schwarzenbach was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable women, possibly the greatest sexual and political radical of the 1930s. But until now she’s been largely ignored. Born to a wealthy family in Switzerland, as a teenager she rebelled against her domineering pro-Nazi mother. She immersed herself in the antifascist, queer and artistic circles of the German diaspora of the 1930s. Her edgy glamour and androgynous beauty turned heads in the lesbian nightclubs of Weimar Berlin, on the ski slopes of St. Moritz, and in New York's luxury hotels and jazz bars. Constantly on the move, Annemarie chronicled the low and dishonest decade leading to war through her unique journalism, writing and photography. Her work was as adventurous and uncompromising as her personal life, and reveals a deep courage, intelligence, and ambition tragically curtailed by her untimely death. Hardcover332 pagesPolity, 20256.3 x 1.4 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9781509566297Biography

Rebel Angel: The Life and Times of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

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 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 Rudi Ekkart and Eefke Muller Looted Art & Restitution relates the history of the trade, looting and restitution of works of art from the Netherlands before, during and after World War II. Looted Art & Restitution relates the history of the trade, looting and restitution of works of art from the Netherlands before, during and after World War II. Countless artworks ended up in German hands during the occupation. The allies recovered a large number of works of art to the Netherlands after the war. It was the Dutch government’s task to return looted or forcibly sold works to their original owners. The mostly Jewish claimants, however, often encountered bureaucratic and unwilling authorities. Meanwhile, most of the artworks were distributed over museums and depots or auctioned off. It was not until the late 1990s that, in accordance with international developments, the restitution policy became much more humane and a search for the rightful owners was implemented. Hardcover216 pagesWaanders, 20246.69 x 0.9 x 9.45 inchesISBN 9789462624986History, Restitution

Looted Art & Restitution: The Exodus and Partial Return of Dutch Art Property During and After World War II

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 with text by Nicholas Sawicki and Marie Rakušanová Preface by Zuzana Jürgens Text by Alexander Klee, Marek Nekula, and Miroslav Halak Journey through Kafka’s Prague and discover the art, architecture, media and performances that influenced the author’s oeuvre What did Franz Kafka see and do, whom did he meet and what did he read while roaming the streets of Prague? Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka brings the world of turn-of-the-century Czechoslovakia and its cultural milieu to life. The author’s home city was a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences, from local painting and sculpture to architecture, monuments and popular visual media including advertisements, photography and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. This illustrated publication immerses us in Kafka’s world; by following in his footsteps and looking through his eyes, we gain a new understanding of his thoughts, philosophies and inspirations. Hardcover224 pages | 231 color and 16 tri-tone IllustrationsKant, 20258.25 x 11.25 inchesISBN 9788074374265Exhibition Catalogue, Biography

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language

Edited by Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Kirsten Degel Foreword by Kirsten Degel and Poul Erik Tøjner Included text by Anthony Lane, Catherine Wermester, Werner Möller, Herbert Molderings, Patrick Rössler, Angela Lampe, Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Döblin, Irmgard Keun, Bertolt Brecht, Marieluise Fleisser, Vicki Baum, and Hans Fallada A sweeping journey through the roaring art and culture of the Weimar Republic. At the center of this volume are the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists—Otto Dix, George Grosz and Albert Renger-Patzsch—and the groundbreaking photographer August Sander, in particular his famed series People of the 20th Century, which portrayed both prominent and anonymous Germans from all parts of society in a simple and matter-of-fact pictorial style. Sander and the Neue Sachlichkeit artists both pursued an anti-Expressionist aesthetic, embracing social engagement and a rejection of romantic idealism. The Cold Gaze also looks at the extraordinary writers associated with the Weimar Republic, such as Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada, Erich Kästner and Christopher Isherwood. Further points of focus by a range of contributing writers include Germany’s Americanization during this period; Marcel Breuer’s innovations in furniture design; the invention and ascent of the Futura font; the Weimar cult of technology; and much more.This richly illustrated catalog unfolds a period that was at once euphoric and harsh, an extraordinary moment in modernity birthed in the shadows between two world wars.Hardcover128 pages | 70 color and 77 black-and-white photosLouisiana Museum of Modern Art, 202310.25 x 8.5 inches ISBN 9788793659599 New Objectivity, German Art

The Cold Gaze: Germany in the 1920s

By Rose-Carol Washton Long "An indispensable anthology that immediately renders its predecessors obsolete. With its gathering of public and private documents, it carries us through the rise and fall of one of the great upheavals of modern art." —Robert Rosenblum, New York University"These essays, including many previously unavailable in English, are rich with startling new insights into the German Expressionist psyche. Elucidating the artists' view of government, the role of women in modern society, and their own ambivalence about the effectiveness of abstract art, this anthology is essential reading for all scholars and students of twentieth-century art." —Joan Marter, author of Alexander CalderGerman Expressionism, one of the most significant movements of early European modernism, was an enormously powerful element in Germany's cultural life from the end of the Wilhelmkine Empire to the Third Reich. While the movement embraced such diverse artists as E. L. Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz, all the participants shared an almost messianic belief in the power of art to change society. Rose-Carol Washton Long has drawn together over eighty documents crucial to the understanding of German Expressionism, many of them translated for the first time into English. Rose-Carol Washton Long is Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among her books is Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style. Paperback 370 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19955.9 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520202641Art History, Expressionism

German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism

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 Rainer Metzger It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich’s rising star in theater and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought.This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin’s Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded Kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money.Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch’s Journalists; Lotte Jacobi’s Hands on the Typewriter; Otto Dix’s Portrait of Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens’s Project Alexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. Along the way, we explore both the utopian yearnings and the more ominous economic and political realities which fueled the era’s escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labor, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism.Hardcover96 pagesTaschen, 20178.4 x 0.5 x 10.3 inchesISBN 9783836550505Art History, German History

Berlin in the 1920s

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 E. Amy BullerForeword by Professor Kurt Barling A lesson from history that is needed today more than ever. Darkness over Germany delivers a stark warning from history of how a man with little political experience rose up as a voice of a disenfranchised people. In this powerful book, a pioneering young woman, Amy Buller, recounts the hopes and fears of Germans engulfed in the rise of fascism during the 1930s. During the years leading up to the outbreak of war, Buller defied her critics and social norms by leading delegations of British intelligentsia to Germany to learn about and confront the appeal of the Nazis. The book tells the stories of the Germans whom Buller met, including their positivity about the forces uniting the country, and their terror that Hitler was the man at the helm. Darkness over Germany is Amy Buller's recollection of these unlikely encounters and her analysis of how National Socialism took hold. It tells a remarkable and largely forgotten story of British-German relations in the 1930s. The book speaks resonantly of the need to stay vigilant and maintain dialogue in times of change and discord. Paperback254 pagesInterlink Publishing, 201813.2 x 1.8 x 21.6 cmISBN 9781623719968German History, Non-Fiction

Darkness Over Germany: A Warning from History

By Katharina Rich Perlow At various times throughout her adult life in the United States, Katharina Rich Perlow was asked how her family survived World War II in Vienna, Austria. She was reluctant to conjure up the harrowing events of her childhood—until now. As the number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust diminishes rapidly, and for the sake of her children and grandchildren, Katharina felt compelled to tell her story. Her memoir is the story of six-year-old Katharina, her two older siblings, her Catholic mother and her Jewish father, forcibly moved from a quiet, small-town life into a tiny apartment in the heart of wartime, working-class Vienna. It is the story of her soon-to-be widowed mother trying desperately to conceal from neighbors the secret that meant the difference between life and death. Despite being deprived of all the normal hallmarks of childhood, including school, social life, and even food, Katharina tells her story from the point of view of the energetic, curious, and insightful girl that she was, and the woman she was to become. From learning to dance the waltz in her tiny kitchen, to hiding in the catacombs during the Allied bombing, this is a story of bravery, family sacrifice, and survival under the most horrific of circumstances—and ultimately, of hope and resilience. Paperback202 pagesWalter Press, 20146 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780615926292Memoir, Biography, Austrian History

Obstructed View: A Memoir of a Young Girl Growing Up in Wartime Vienna

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 Marjorie Perloff "One of our finest critics and a tireless advocate for the avant-garde….To have this memoir now is a boon."—Andrew DuBois, Harvard ReviewA fascinating memoir of refugee flight and survival, intellectual yet highly personal, by one America's eminent literary critics.The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie—who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal. Paperback224 pagesNew Directions, 20045.2 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9780811215718Memoir, Biography, Austrian History

The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir

By Eric R. Kandel “In a polymathic performance, a Nobel laureate weaves together the theories and practices of neuroscience, art and psychology to show how our creative brains perceive and engage art—and are consequently moved by it . . . A transformative work that joins the hands of Art and Science and makes them acknowledge their close kinship.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “A fascinating synthesis of art, history, and science that is also accessible to the general reader. A distinctive and important title that is also a pleasure to read”—Library Journal, Starred Review “Eric Kandel’s training as a psychiatrist and his vast knowledge of how the brain works enrich this thoroughly original exploration of the relationship between the birth of psychoanalysis, Austrian Expressionism, and Modernism in Vienna.”—Margaret Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art. Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history. Hardcover656 pagesRandom House Publishers, 20126.6 x 1.6 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781400068715Austrian History, Art History, Psychology

The Age of Insight

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 Meriel Schindler An extraordinary memoir of a Jewish family spanning two world wars and its flight from Nazi-occupied Austria. Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family’s fate in Innsbruck, Austria, and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history. The Lost Café Schindler re-creates the journey of an extraordinary family, whose relatives included the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother when she was dying of breast cancer; the Kafka family; and Alma Schindler, the wife of Gustav Mahler. The narrative centers around the Café Schindler, the social hub of Innsbruck. Famous for its pastries, home-distilled liquors, live entertainment, and hospitality, the restaurant attracted Austrians from all walks of life. But as conditions became untenable for Jews in Austria during the Nazi era, the Schindlers were forced to leave, and their café was expropriated. Meriel reconstructs the color and vibrancy of life in prewar Innsbruck against the majestic backdrop of the Austrian Alps, as well as the creeping menace and, finally, terror of the Nazi occupation. Ultimately, The Lost Café Schindler is a story of tragic loss—several relatives disappeared in Terezín and Auschwitz—but also one of reclamation and reconciliation. Beautifully written, it is an unforgettable portrait of an era and a testament to the pull of family history on future generations.Hardcover432 pagesW.W. Norton, 20215.04 x 1.18 x 7.72 inchesISBN 9780393881622Austrian History, Memoir

The Lost Café Schindler: One Family, Two Wars, and the Search for Truth

By Mel Gordon When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. It is the visual scrapbook and inspired design source of hit television series, Babylon Berlin.Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” This edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”). Paperback300 pagesFeral House, 20088 x 0.8 x 11 inchesISBN 9780922915965German History

Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

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 Peter Gay “Absorbing . . . [Peter Gay] has recaptured the spirit of this exciting decade and he provides a reliable guide to it.”—Walter Laqueur, New York Times Book Review“A virtuoso performance, not the least because it has captured, with the greatest possible economy, a culture whose origin and essence were closely intertwined with its politics.”—Peter Jacobsohn, The New Republic A seminal work as melodious and haunting as the era it chronicles.First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century. Vivid and eminently readable, Weimar Culture is the finest introduction for the casual reader and historian alike.Paperback224 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 20015.5 x 0.6 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780393322392German History, Culture Studies, Non-Fiction

Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

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 William M. Johnston "The Austrian Mind is the first book in English or in German to analyze both in depth and in breadth the intellectual history of the Hapsburg Monarchy between 1848 and 1938. Based upon an impressive command of primary and secondary published sources, Johnston's book is a tour de force. In 400 pages of text the author evaluates the contribution of Austro-Hungarian intellectuals to economic, legal, and social theory, to the arts, to philosophy, to literature and criticism, and to medicine."—Annals "It is hard to write about this encyclopedic and uncommonly informative and stimulating study in anything but superlatives, for it is equally brilliant in conception and execution. . . . it is replete with detail, remarkably accurate, and lucidly written."—Modern Austrian Literature "A most readable and lively discussion of the complex systems of though current at the time and the way they interconnect. . . The rich intellectual achievement of the old Austria, in all its diversity and unity, in its characteristic boldness and ambiguity, is impressively demonstrated."—Journal of European Studies The Austrian Mind is the first book in English or in German to analyze both in depth and in breadth the intellectual history of the Hapsburg Monarchy between 1848 and 1938. Based upon an impressive command of primary and secondary published sources, Johnston's book is a tour de force. In 400 pages of text the author evaluates the contributions of Austro-Hungarian intellectuals to economic, legal, and social theory, to the arts, to philosophy, to literature and criticism, and to medicine. Paperback540 pagesUniversity of California Press, 19835.5 x 1.4 x 8 inchesISBN 9780520049550Austrian History

The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938

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

By Frederic Morton “The detail surrounding the many people involved in the slice of history building up to World War I is amazing…This book, with its accounts of the activities of many countries' politicians and the culture of Vienna at the time, explains what was going on so well that you almost feel as though you are there.”—Costa Mesa Daily Pilot“A book about war and madness…A fascinating and well-written account of the social origins and context of [World War I].”—Huffington Post"While we're still marching through the centennial of the First World War, this is the perfect time to delve into the history, not just of the war itself but of the world that produced it. Frederic Morton's vivid portrait of antebellum Vienna begins with the intrigues and tensions roiling the Hapsburg capital in 1913 and ends with the breakdown of diplomacy among the Great Powers and the outbreak of war in the fall of 1914. Along the way, he introduces the reader to major historical figures of the twentieth century."—The Federalist, "Notable Books of 2016" Thunder at Twilight is a landmark of historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of extraordinary city of Vienna—and in the life of twentieth century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived in Vienna on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph—and soon the bullet that killed the Archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more. Paperback400 pagesDa Capo Press, 20146 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780306823268Austrian History, Non-Fiction

Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

By Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin "A brilliantly conceived project admirably brought off."—Peter Caws"A striking premise...challenging, new, and useful."—The New York Times This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of its dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de-siècle gaiety and its corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Ludwig Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Klimt, and Oskar Kokoschka, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic, lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. Paperback315 pages Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 19965.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9781566631327 Austrian History, Theory, Philosophy

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

By Michael HaasA Financial Times Best Book of 2023: Classical Music“A deeply thoughtful, intensely detailed and clearly argued exploration. . . . This is not only a fascinating book, but an essential one, which will hopefully inspire further studies.”—Jessica Duchen, Engelsberg Ideas“Michael Haas is absolutely brilliant. His devotion to giving voice to the many creators who were brutally silenced during World War Two is inspiring and essential work. He does this with passion and knowledge.”—Marin Alsop“With great curiosity and empathy, Michael Haas illustrates climactic moments as these Jewish refugees lingered between worlds, lost countries and roots, and searched for new and old identities.”—Ute LemperWhat happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience?In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler’s Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile—composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today’s repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape—and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.Hardcover416 pages | 15 black-and-white images6.12 x 9.25 inchesYale University Press, 2023ISBN 9780300266504Jewish History, Music History

Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers who Fled Hitler

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 x 9.25 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 Ehrhard Bahr “Each chapter in Bahr's book is capable of standing alone, but the author also invokes ideas, incidents and personalities in each chapter that strike sparks off the material in other chapters. . . . Weimar on the Pacific is a brilliant tour de force of intellectual history and cultural criticism, both audacious and accomplished.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“This is a wonderful book. . . . The writing is distinguished by a profound knowledge of its many subjects, an infectious interest, and a sharp eye for telling details, all of which bring the material alive.”—Modern Language Review“This important book--of meticulous and impressive research, refined analysis, and lucid organization and writing--is demanding, a challenge to the author’s peers and yet rewarding also for the generally educated reader.”—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles’s influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through. Paperback382 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20085.9 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520257955German History, Literature

Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

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

By Peter Gay “A masterful work of cultural history . . . and it’s truly a pleasure to read.”—Mia Fineman, Slate“A sweeping survey . . . offering shrewd analyses.”—William Grimes, The New York Times “Peter Gay is perhaps our leading historian of culture and ideas.”—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles TimesModernism explores the shocking cultural rebellion that, beginning in the late 1850's, transformed the staid worlds of art, literature, music and architecture with its relentless assault on traditional forms. In chronicling the artistic revolution, Modernism is a celebration of many of our most memorable and prominent subversives who forever changed the course of Western culture.Hardcover 610 pagesWW Norton & Co., 20076.6 x 1.8 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780393333961Art History, Modernism

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy; From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond

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 Iryna Vushko “Iryna Vushko gives us a beautifully crafted analysis that explains—through carefully drawn biographical studies—the very diverse and often constructive ways in which the legacies of the Habsburg empire shaped the subsequent development of not only different national ideologies and cultures in Central Europe, but also the way in which Europe is thought and dreamt.”—Harold James, author of Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization “With gentle prose and deep research, Iryna Vushko gives us the inheritance of the Habsburg monarchy. In this study of political Europeans formed by it, she deepens our understanding of the nation-state and European integration. Few monographs work so profoundly to reshape the history of the twentieth century.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century This book is a collective portrait of twenty-one key statesmen who came of age during the Habsburg Empire. They include the cofounder of Austro-Marxism and the Austrian republic’s first foreign minister, the cofounder of the European Union after the Second World War, the founder of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini’s ambassador to Vienna. Some survived the First World War and the resulting geographical divisions in their homelands, and some went on to serve in politics and governments throughout Europe. Taken together, the stories of these men offer readers a window on broad issues of European history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—chiefly, how an imperial heritage, a shared vision of statehood and nationalism, and a commitment to peaceful conflict resolution helped establish enduring loyalty and unity despite the geographical fault lines resulting from the war. As Iryna Vushko explains, their stories also offer an increasingly nuanced understanding of the achievements and failures of the Habsburg Empire. Hardcover352 pages | 18 black-and-white illustrations Yale University Press, 20246.2 x 9.3 inchesISBN 9780300267556History

Lost Fatherland: Europeans between Empire and Nation-States, 1867-1939

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 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 Megan Brandow-Faller“Impeccably researched, The Female Secession is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on early twentieth-century Austrian art and to feminist art history. Brandow-Faller persuasively argues that the self-consciously feminine art produced by Women’s Academy artists should be understood as part of a feminist lineage that leads through the artwork of 1970s feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and on to that of craftivists of the twenty-first century.”—Bibiana Obler, author of Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber“This beautifully illustrated study brings new attention to the overlooked achievements of women artists in Vienna in the early twentieth century. It is a much-needed contribution to design history that illuminates the role of gender in Central European art education and professional practice.”—Rebecca Houze, author of Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War: Principles of DressDecorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession” created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.Hardcover304 pages | 27 color, 60 black-and-white illustrations Penn State University Press, 20208 x 10 x 1 inchesISBN 9780271085043Art History, Women Studies, Vienna

The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy

By A. Wess Mitchell "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 Elias Canetti “Perhaps the most revealing essay on Kafka ever published. At last Kafka is matched in thought and prose.”—The Times Literary Supplement Felice Bauer was Kafka’s first great love and the inspiration for his first great fiction. Six weeks after they met, he wrote "The Judgement" for her in one night of feverish activity. Kafka always inferred to the traumatic, public breaking-off of their engagement as his “tribunal,” and indeed he began work on The Trial within a month of that event.Kafka’s letters to Felice offer rare insights into the writer’s life and art. Elias Canetti’s brilliant and sensitive examination of this moving correspondence shows the origins of Kafka’s voice as a writer and his torment as a man. Paperback188 pagesSchocken, 1988Originally published in 19695.2 x 0.4 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9780805207057Literature, Biography, Non-Fiction

Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

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

Original Price: $26.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Benjamin Balint “Dramatic and illuminating...raises momentous questions about nationality, religion, literature, and even the Holocaust.”—Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic“Absorbing....Balint elegantly intercuts courtroom scenes with episodes from Kafka’s biography and cultural afterlife. He brings out every paradox of a judicial process that tried to tie down this most ambivalent of authors, the ultimate 'disaffiliated pariah,' to a fixed identity....Balint’s scrupulous and sardonic prose makes you love Kafka, and dread the law.”—The Economist“Kafka’s Last Trial is a fascinating inquiry into—and meditation on—the nature of artistic genius and the proprietary claims any one individual or country has on the legacy of that genius. Benjamin Balint is both a superb investigative journalist and a gifted cultural critic. This is that rarest of books: a scholarly work that is also compulsively readable.”—Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy Kafka’s Last Trial begins with Kafka’s last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924, Brod could not bring himself to burn the unpublished works of the man he considered a literary genius―even a saint. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction. The story of Kafka’s posthumous life is itself Kafkaesque. By the time of Brod’s own death in Tel Aviv in 1968, Kafka’s major works had been published, transforming the once little-known writer into a pillar of literary modernism. Yet Brod left a wealth of still-unpublished papers to his secretary, who sold some, held on to the rest, and then passed the bulk of them on to her daughters, who in turn refused to release them. An international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership of Kafka’s work: Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living but never entered, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts―brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political―that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts. Deeply informed, with sharply drawn portraits and a remarkable ability to evoke a time and place, Kafka’s Last Trial is at once a brilliant biographical portrait of a literary genius, and the story of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a hotly contested trial for the right to claim the literary legacy of one of our modern masters. Hardcover288 pagesW. W. Norton & Company, 20186.7 x 1.1 x 9.6 inchesISBN 9781324001317Biography, Literature

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