Among their many idiosyncrasies, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, remained serious cartoon aficionados throughout their lives. They adored animation and their influence on German animation after World War II continues to this day. This study explores Hitler and Goebbels' efforts to establish a German cartoon industry to rival Walt Disney's and their love-hate relationship with American producers, whose films they studied behind locked doors. Despite their ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This landmark biography of Hitler puts an emphasis on the man himself: his personality, his temperament, and his beliefs.“[A] fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesVolker Ullr...

"A superb portrait of twentieth century Germany seen through the prism of a house" from the #1 international bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf (Tom Holland, author of Dominion).Named a Best Book of the Year by The Times (London) • New Statesman (London) • Daily Express (London) • CommonwealIn the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small ...

In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century.The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins' internationally acclaimed Rites of Springand Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era--from the eve of the First...

'The story in this book is so gripping and fascinating that it is remarkable that it has never been told in this way before' Simon Heffer, Literary Review'Masterly ... His writing is brisk, confident and colourful ... a pleasure to read' Sunday TelegraphThe true story of a one-handed pianist and the fall of his aristocratic familyThe Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most...

A great American writer’s confrontation with a great European critic – a personal and intellectual awakening.A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained s...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography)Named of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Boston GlobeMagisterial in scope, this dual biography examines two complex lives that began alike but ended on opposite sides of the century’s greatest conflict.Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into...

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...

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...

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...

Art dealer Otto Wacker’s 1932 sensational trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs leads Eksteins to a unique narrative of a collapsing Weimar Germany, the rise of another misfit, Adolf Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt.

Douglas Sirk is one of the most neglected directors in American cinema. This book aims to rectify that and, through a survey of his career, to re-establish Sirk as one of the great stylists of Hollywood cinema.In 1937 Sirk left Germany, after a successful career in theatre and film, and came to Hollywood. From 1942 to 1958 he directed some 30 films, the most famous of which were a series of lush melodramas in the '50s, which were seen at the time as vehicles for stars such as Rock ...