What was it that fascinated the three painters? In an environment suppressed by provincial, deadlocked standards, Fränzi embodied the kind of freedom that was maintained only in distant archipelagos, a freedom that expressed uninhibited nudity and the joy of movement. A celebration, an inspiration for the painters.

A groundbreaking history of the Nazi research institute whose work helped lead to the extermination of millionsIn 1935, Heinrich Himmler established a Nazi research institute called The Ahnenerbe, whose mission was to send teams of scholars around the world to search for proof of Ancient Aryan conquests. But history was not their most important focus. Rather, the Ahnenerbe was an essential part of Himmler's master plan for the Final Solution. The findings of the in...

Drawing on a great wealth of newly available sources, this definitive biography recounts the eventful life of a great writer spoilt by success—a life lived in the shadow of two world wars, and which ended tragically in a suicide pact.Matuschek examines three major phases in the life of the world-famous Austrian author—his years of apprenticeship, his years of success as a professional working writer in Salzburg, and finally his years of exile in Britain, the USA and Brazil.In...

The Bauhaus movement (meaning the “house of building”) developed in three German cities - it began in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, then continued in Dessau, from 1925 to 1932, and finally ended in 1932-1933 in Berlin. Three leaders presided over the growth of the movement: Walter Gropius, from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer, from 1928 to 1930, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, from 1930 to 1933. Founded by Gropius in the rather conservative city of Weimar, the new capital of Germany, which had ju...

"A triumph of science writing, a well crafted, deeply researched story of politics, ethics, and the fascinating lives of humans and bees." —Jonathan Eig, New York Times–bestselling authorWe think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the locati...

For Peter Selg, if Anthroposophy to be a living reality, we must learn to know and love Rudolf Steiner as he appeared to those who knew and loved him: namely, as a spiritual teacher. To help us do so, he gathered recollections of those of who knew Steiner personallyhistorical witnesses to the living phenomenon of the figure of the teacher. It is his hope that these firsthand accounts will help readers see and experience the amazing, ever-mysterious person that Rudolf Steiner wasa dynamic, ene...

Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany explores the world of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the female section within the Hitler Youth that included almost all German girls aged 10 to 14. The BDM is often enveloped in myths; German girls were brought up to be the compliant handmaidens of National Socialism, their mental horizon restricted to the "three Ks" of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, and church).Dagmar Reese, however, depicts another picture of life in the BDM...

Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931) made bold statements about photographic pioneers such as David Octavius Hill and Nicéphore Niépce, and the social and historical context of their work. This first selection of Benjamin’s writings on photography includes a new translation of this influential essay as well as a range of Benjamin’s other writings, both published and unpublished, some of which are translated into English for the first time here.Esther Lesl...

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsi...

Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtur...

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the greatest painter of the Romantic movement in Germany, was perhaps Europe’s first truly modern artist. His melancholy landscapes, often peopled by lonely wanderers, represent experiments towards a radically subjective art, one in which, as Friedrich wrote, the painter depicts not ‘what he sees before him, but what he sees within him.’ Yet in their awesome power to capture the individuality of visible forms Friedrich’s pictures also accept and express ...

The self-appointed “leader” of the artists’ group Die Brücke (Bridge), founded in Dresden in 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a key figure in the early development of German Expressionism. His first works show the influence of Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Jugendstil, but by about 1909, Kirchner was painting in a distinctive, expressive manner with bold, loose brushwork, vibrant and non-naturalistic colours and heightened gestures. He worked in the studio from sketches made very rap...