Whybrow, N. (2005). Street scenes: Brecht, Benjamin, and Berlin. Intellect Books.
“Always the focal point in modern times for momentous political, social and cultural upheaval, Berlin has continued, since the fall of the Wall in 1989, to be a city in transition. As the new capital of a reunified Germany it has embarked on a journey of rapid reconfiguration, involving issues of memory, nationhood and ownership. Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, stands as one of the principal thinkers about art and politics in the 20th century. The ‘Street Scene’ model, which was the foundation for his theory of an epic theatre, relied precisely on establishing a connection between art’s functioning and everyday life. His preoccupation with the ceaselessness of change, an impulse implying rupture and movement as the key characteristics informing the development of a democratic cultural identity, correlates resonantly with the notion of an ever-evolving city. Premised on an understanding of performance as the articulation of movement in space, Street Scenes interrogates what kind of ‘life’ is permitted to ‘flow’ in the ‘new Berlin’. Central to this method is the flaneur figure, a walker of streets who provides detached observations on the revealing ‘detritus of modern urban existence’. Walter Benjamin, himself a native of Berlin as well as friend and seminal critic of Brecht, exercised the practice in exemplary form in his portrait of the city One-Way Street.” – from Intellect Books
Caplan, M. (2021). Yiddish writers in Weimar Berlin: a fugitive modernism. Indiana University Press.
“In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.
Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.
Caplan’s masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.” – from Indiana University Press
Nelson, A. (2009). Red Orchestra: the story of the Berlin underground and the circle of friends who resisted Hitler (1st ed). Random House.
“Anne Nelson has written a major work on a tragic dilemma of our time — how a cultured people, defeated and impoverished though they were, could turn on and brutalize their own citizenry. And how the civilized world could stand by, reasoning that it would all “soon blow over.”
In an innovative approach this book describes Hitler’s rise to power from the point of view of the underground, which opposed him. The Red Orchestra was prominent in that opposition.
Using exhaustively researched real-life accounts of people of the time, Nelson, an experienced journalist, shows how men and women scrambled in and out of Germany, some finally deciding to stay and fight the glittering, ruthless new power.
The volunteer spies acted as loyal members of the regime, often partying with the Nazi elite and the Prussian nobility, while passing military information to the Russians and Allies.
Nelson’s un-theatrical style sometimes lacks pace. But her work stands as a tribute to the underground that opposed Hitler, the many murdered, and the embittered survivors. It is also a fine source for scholars, libraries, and curious readers. Bibliographical notes, documentaries, epilogue, index, preface, prologue, select bibliography.” – from Jewish Book Council
Thacker, A. (2020). Modernism, space and the city: outsiders and affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and London. Edinburgh University Press.
“Explores the crucial role played by the city in the construction of modernism.
This innovative book examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Focusing on how literary outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect and literary geography. Particular attention is given to the transnational qualities of modernist writing by examining writers whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles or strangers, including Mulk Raj Anand, Blaise Cendrars, Bryher, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirrlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Stephen Spender.
Key Features
* The first book in modernist studies to bring detailed discussion of these four cities together
* Breaks new ground in being the first book to bring affect theory and literary geography together in order to analyse modernism
* An extensive range of authors is analysed, from the canonical to the previously marginal
* Situates the literary and filmic texts within the context of urban spaces and cultural institutions” – from Edinburgh University Press
Funder, A. (2018). Stasiland. Penguin Random House Australia.
“In this now classic work, Funder tells extraordinary stories from the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, condemned as an enemy of the state at sixteen, and Frau Paul, for whom the Berlin Wall ‘went through my heart’. She drinks with the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the East, once declared by the authorities to ‘no longer exist’. And she meets ex-Stasi – men who spied on their families and friends – still loyal to the deposed regime as they await the next revolution.
Stasiland is a brilliant, timeless portrait of a Kafkaesque world as gripping as any thriller. In a world of total surveillance, its celebration of human conscience and courage is as potent as ever.” – from Penguin