The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling a...

An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity.Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war,...

**How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more?This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The *New York Times)—*of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs a...

Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism.During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism....

In 1996, in the middle of watching an ill-tempered football match between England and Germany, Philip Oltermann's parents tell him that they are going to leave their home city Hamburg behind and move to London.Inspired by his own experience of both countries, Philip Oltermann looks at eight historical encounters between English and German people from the last two hundred years: Helmut Kohl tries to explain German cuisine to the Iron Lady, the Mini plays catch-up with the Volkswagen...

This chronicle of renowned composer Richard Wagner and his descendants features "a cast of characters who are positively operatic in their histrionics" ( The Guardian).Richard Wagner was many things—composer, philosopher, philanderer, failed revolutionary, and virulent anti-Semite—and his descendants have carried on his complex legacy.In his "lively and wry" history of the legendary composer and his family, biographer Jonathan Carr also offers fasc...

A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands'Spectacular' Observer**'A remarkable portrait'**GuardianW. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The E...

Hans Fallada was a drug addict, womanizer, alcoholic, jailbird and thief. Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including Alone in Berlin, portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a powerful humanity.This acclaimed biography, newly revised and completely updated, tells the remarkable story of Hans Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen. Jenny Williams chronicles his turbulent life as a writer, husband...

The House of Wittgenstein is the grand saga of a brilliant and tragic Viennese family whose members included a famous philosopher and the world's greatest one-handed classical pianist.The Wittgenstein family was one of the wealthiest, most talented, and most eccentric in European history, held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty, and the upheaval of two world wars. Of the eight children, three committed suicide; Paul...

One of the most dynamic capital cities of the twenty-first century, Berlin also has one of the most tumultuous modern histories. A city that came of age, in many senses, with the cinema, it has been captured on film during periods of exurberance, devastation, division and reconstruction. World Film Locations: Berlin offers a broad overview of these varied cinematic representations.Covering an array of films that ranges from early classics to contemporary star vehicles, thi...

Max Beckmann is widely acknowledged as one of Germany's leading twentieth-century artists. A figurative painter throughout his career, Beckmann depicted the world around him with an unparalleled intensity. His art emerges directly from his experiences of the First and Second World Wars, the political upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Nazism, exile in Amsterdam and his final emigration to the United States. By capturing the objects and events that surrounded him, Beckmann hoped ...