Where did cabaret come from? What has it got to do with pre-war Berlin, decadent society and Nazis? How does it turn into media cabaret and the sisterhood of sleaze? Is cabaret a primary vehicle for exploring the range of sexual practices and alternative sexual identities?In this new book William Grange brings into one place for the first time the range of practices now associated with the form of cabaret. Beginning with its origins in speciality German theatres and the development...

The Business of American Theatre is a research guide to the history of producing theatre in the United States. Covering a wide range of subjects, the book explores how traditions of investment, marketing, labor union contracts, advertising, leasing arrangements, ticket scalping, zoning ordinances, royalties, and numerous other financial transactions have influenced the art of theatre for the past three centuries. Yet the book is not a dry reiteration of hits and flops, bankruptcie...

The German-language theater is one of the most vibrant and generously endowed of any in the world. It boasts long and honored traditions that include world-renowned plays, playwrights, actors, directors, and designers, and several German theater artists have had an enormous impact on theater practice around the globe. Students continue to study German plays in dozens of languages, and every year scores of German plays are produced in a wide variety of non-German venues.This second ...

A Primer in Theatre History covers productions, personalities, theories, innovations, and plays from ancient Greece to the Spanish Golden Age. Grange discusses theatre from 534 BC in Athens to 1681 AD in Madrid. The book contains highly informative chapters on theatre culture in the ancient classical world, the medieval period, the Italian Renaissance, classical Asia, German-speaking Europe, France to 1658, and England to 1642.Following a wide-ranging introduction, chapters allow th...

Some authors strongly criticized attempts to rebuild a German literary culture in the aftermath of World War II, while others actively committed themselves to "dealing with the German past." There are writers in Austria and Switzerland that find other contradictions of contemporary life troubling, while some find them funny or even worth celebrating. German postwar literature has, in the minds of some observers, developed a kind of split personality. In view of the traumatic monstrosities ...

Historical Dictionary of German Literature to 1945 covers a wide swath of literary analysis and achievement, from Old High German lays and ecclesiastical encomia to Middle High German epics, sagas, and love lyrics. While extensive in its chronological dimension, the Historical Dictionary of German Literature to 1945 is equally comprehensive in the geographical and genre areas it covers.The history of this period in German literature is told through a detailed chro...

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...

A "compelling" history of German cultural and intellectual development from 1750 to the twentieth century ( Financial Times).From the end of the Baroque era and the death of Bach to the rise of Hitler, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than the British and Americans combined. Yet this remarkable genius was cut down in its prime by Ado...

Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger has always called forth superlatives from those who have fallen under its spell. Toscanini wanted to lay his baton down for the last time only after he had conducted a performance of it. Paderewski called it 'the greatest work of genius ever achieved by any artist in any field of human endeavour.' H.L. Mencken declared, 'It took more skill to plan and write it than it took to plan and write the whole canon of Shakespeare.'And yet Wagner's...

Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Mann (1875–1955) is not only one of the leading German novelists of the twentieth century, but also one of the few to transcend national and language boundaries to achieve major stature in the English-speaking world. Famous from the time that he published his first novel in 1901, Mann became an iconic figure, seen as the living embodiment of German national culture. Leading scholar Todd Kontje provides a succinct introduction to Mann's life and work, discussing ke...

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...

Deemed by Heinrich Heine a city of merchants where poets go to die, Hamburg was an improbable setting for a major intellectual movement. Yet it was there, at the end of World War I, at a new university in this commercial center, that a trio of twentieth-century pioneers in the humanities emerged. Working side by side, Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky developed new avenues in art history, cultural history, and philosophy, changing the course of cultural and intellectual histo...