Dental Bookshop - Berlin: The Twenties by Rainer Metzger, Christian Brandstetter

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Publisher:		Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Date:		May 1, 2007
Binding:		Hardcover
Pages:		400

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Product Description:


Berlin, a haunting vision of the twentieth century?s first modern city, is a cultural history filled with 400 shockingly fresh and romantic photographs, paintings, and other images. In the brief years between the twentieth century?s two cataclysmic world wars, the modern metropolis was invented in Berlin. Life in Berlin was a cabaret, and Marlene Dietrich, Thomas Mann, Alfred Einstein, or Joseph Goebbels might be seated at the next table. The avant-garde thrived there. The mass media magnified the impact of everything from fads to political ideas. Subcultures and club cultures nurtured gender-bending fashions and lifestyles. Architects and designers struggled to free themselves from the past. In the background beat the new rhythms of urban experience: the coming and going of the latest planes and trains and automobiles, the clacking of typewriters in vast offices, the jazz band that never sleeps. Berlin: The Twenties is a book for history buffs, travelers, and lovers of modern art and design.

Customers' Reviews:

OUTSTANDING book!, August 25, 2009

This is an excellent book! Graphics are well-chosen, contents and flow of information is well-organized, entertaining, and informative. It's a nice book to own and enjoy... Also, makes a great gift!
0 of 0 people found the above review helpful.



See youself the pinnacle of Modern culture, July 8, 2008

This book is not only aesthetically pleasing but also full of interesting information. It is not one of those coffee table books with numerous comely pictures but do not provide any contents. The book well summarizes and elucidites the cultural milieu of the turbulent but arguably most vibrant period in the modern German history. When fin de siècle Paris represented the beauty of Materialism and diametrically opposite sordid side of the modernity, and fin de siècle Vienna that so illuminatingly coveyed the disintegration and decay of repressive "old" psyche and looming "modern" psyche, what Berlin in 20s was able to provide is extreme creativity and energy that gave birth two modern culture( or post-modernity ) in the last half of the 20th century. Then , how could this aberration be possible from Wilhelimian Bürgertum? The book covers virtually every cultural aspects in Berlin in 20s. Expressionism,Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity ), Movies ( Lang and Murnau) theather (Brecht,Piscator, and Reinhard), and of course, literature. However, the book also doesn't overlook political and social aspects , so first chapters covers the immediate upheaval of breif revolutionary period and consequences.One of the most interesting pictures is the one depicted the march of war wounds. the verisimilitude of Remarque's "the Roadback" and the picture is simply striking.
0 of 0 people found the above review helpful.



Groundbreaking !!, December 24, 2007

The photographs in this book are so vivid and carefully reproduced that the reader feels as though they are actually present. Providing the reader with highly detailed and carefully crafted photographs of the opulance, sophistication, culture and seeming erudition of Weimar Berlin in the 1920's, this book not only adds to an existing battery of questions but provides an entirely new level of confusion to the already, repeated questions regarding the Germans and National Socialism.....what could have possesed them to secumb to such thought controlling, inflexible, gingoistic, restrictive and Machiavelllian fear and terror?? ......the highly prized, Jewish cultural life of a people, so easily compromised no, sacrificed by a seemingly intellectual and complex society? The seeming self-destruction of the litterary and artistic fabric of what the reader will see as a complex society, (from outward appearances not too unlike that which we enjoy today), practically jumps from the pages. The sense of freeedom and creativity displayed in these photographs is eerily familiar to any New Yorker, San Franciscan, Chicagoan, Londoner, Parisian or Bostonian. Music, Art, intensly frank discussion, schools, meuseums, architecture, philosophical questioning, technological advancement and an engaging active night-life will be seen as familiar to all........leading to one over-arching question.....what happened ? Of course, such a question is nothing new, but this book will shock the reader into re-asking it.
7 of 9 people found the above review helpful.



Berlin Between the Wars--More than just "Cabaret", June 26, 2007

This is quite an informative as well as beautifully-produced book (by Abrams; printed in the Czech Republic) primarily of photographs but with a very pereceptive textual analysis as well by Rainer Metzger. Among other things, the book contains an abundant selection (often in color) of the Expressionist artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Pechstein. These practitioners of the "New Objectivity" certainly win the award for stark realism. A number of topics are covered: the changing face of Berlin during the period, as the city grows, modernizes and energizes with cultural effervescence; the postwar revolution that was so bloodily suppressed; Expressionism and DaDa; the film industry (Caligari; Golem; Metropolis, e.g.); and Bauhaus architecture. Much attention is devoted to dance and music; night life; theater (Max Reinhard); Josephine Baker; and experimental photography. The power of the masses is illustrated by focusing upon the growth of the media, including radio and even television. The first glimmerings of Nazi Berlin also make an appearance toward the end of the book. The author poses a most interesting query (at 369): how could Berlin which reeked with freedom, nonchalance, laissez-faire, and individual freedom transform itself to become the dour, grey and frightening Berlin of the Nazi period? The same might be asked of all of Germany. A particularly interesting question given the current resurgence of Berlin as a "world city", which ripples with artistic energy and excitement much like the 1920's.
21 of 21 people found the above review helpful.



Amazing kaleidescope, June 24, 2007

Fascintating and moving pictorial biography of the city's most turbulent period seen through the eyes of the artists of Berlin at that time. Strong on analysis, short on chronology, so if you don't know the story of the city reasonably well, buy this book in conjunction with a more conventional narrative.
8 of 9 people found the above review helpful.