Before skyscrapers forever transformed the landscape of the modern metropolis, the conveyance that made them possible had to be created. Invented in New York in the 1850s, the elevator became an urban fact of life on both sides of the Atlantic by the early twentieth century. While it may at first glance seem a modest innovation, it had wide-ranging effects, from fundamentally restructuring building design to reinforcing social class hierarchies by moving luxury apartments to upper levels, ...

Mayday! Mayday! We are under attack! Main drive is gone! Please help… this is Far Trader Slowhand… Mayday! The clarion call of a Starship in distress cannot be ignored, but sometimes there's no one there to help. The crew of far trader Slowhand travels the dangerous frontier worlds of Aramis Subsector. Just honest merchants trying to make a Credit — without being killed in the process! Traveller is the role-playing game of the far future, first published in 1977, now brought to you by Mong...

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."Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsme...

Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical, and scientific upheavals of the twentieth century. In these stirring recollections, Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of "the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," known as logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration camps during the War...

An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.Known already in the 1850s for the friendly company of its “warm brothers” (German slang for men who love other men), Berlin, before the turn of the twentieth century, became a place where scholars, activists, and medical professionals could explore and ...

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed producti...

This "witty and droll" collection of philosophical tweets from the popular @NeinQuarterly offers a "perfect antidote to relentless positivity" ( Publishers Weekly)."Rome didn't burn in a day." — Nein. A ManifestoEric Jarosinski is the self-described "failed intellectual" behind @NeinQuarterly, a "Compendium of Utopian Negation" that uses the aphoristic potential of Twitter to plumb the existential abyss of modern life. In Nein. A Manif...

From James Agee to W. G. Sebald, there has been an explosion of modern documentary narratives and fiction combining text and photography in complex and fascinating ways. However, these contemporary experiments are part of a tradition that stretches back to the early years of photography. Writers have been integrating photographs into their work for as long as photographs have existed, producing rich, multilayered creations; and photographers have always made images that incorporate, respon...

Playwright, poet and activist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was known for his theory of the Epic Theatre and his attempts to break down the division between high art and popular culture. The Threepenny Opera, his collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, was a milestone in musical theatre, and plays like Mother Courage and Galileo changed the course of modern drama and aesthetic theory.Framed by two world wars, the Weimar Republic and a global depression, Nazis...

The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives – their behavior, values, and relationship to society.As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a p...

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernit...

German National Cinema is the first comprehensive history of German film from its origins to the present. In this new edition, Sabine Hake discusses film-making in economic, political, social, and cultural terms, and considers the contribution of Germany's most popular films to changing definitions of genre, authorship, and film form.The book traces the central role of cinema in the nation’s turbulent history from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Berlin Republic, with special ...