This one has a book translated by the legendary translator Anthea Bell.
Haakenson, T. O. (2021). Grotesque visions: The Science of Berlin Dada. Bloomsbury Academic.
“Grotesque Visions focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity.
The volume concludes by examining the exhibition Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit/Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Arts, 1870-1940. In contrast to the ahistorical and amorphous concept informing the exhibition, Thomas O. Haakenson reveals a unique deployment of the artistic grotesque that targeted specific established and emerging scientific discourses at the turn of the last fin-de-siècle.” – from Bloomsbury
McKay, S. (2022). Berlin: life and death in the city at the center of the world. St. Martin’s Press.
“Sinclair McKay’s portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city’s broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond.
Sinclair McKay’s Berlin begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity—in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He traces the city’s history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945. It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins.
Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work—a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the ordinary citizens from 1919 forward should be given more prominence. That the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying—and for some, initially exhilarating—transformation should be heard. Today, the exciting, youthful Berlin we see is patterned with echoes that lean back into that terrible vortex. In this new history of Berlin, Sinclair McKay erases the lines between the generations of Berliners, making their voices heard again to create a compelling, living portrait of life in this city that lay at the center of the world.” – from macmillan
Simon, M. (2015). Underground in Berlin: a young woman’s extraordinary tale of survival in the heart of Nazi Germany (A. Bell, Trans.). Little, Brown and Company.
“A thrilling piece of undiscovered history, this is the true account of a young Jewish woman who survived World War II in Berlin.
In 1942, Marie Jalowicz, a twenty-year-old Jewish Berliner, made the extraordinary decision to do everything in her power to avoid the concentration camps. She removed her yellow star, took on an assumed identity, and disappeared into the city.
In the years that followed, Marie took shelter wherever it was offered, living with the strangest of bedfellows, from circus performers and committed communists to convinced Nazis. As Marie quickly learned, however, compassion and cruelty are very often two sides of the same coin.
Fifty years later, Marie agreed to tell her story for the first time. Told in her own voice with unflinching honesty, Underground in Berlin is a book like no other, of the surreal, sometimes absurd day-to-day life in wartime Berlin. This might be just one woman’s story, but it gives an unparalleled glimpse into what it truly means to be human.” – from Little, Brown
Millar, P. (2014). 1989: The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall. Arcadia Books Limited.
“It was an event that changed history and Peter Millar was in the middle of it. For over a decade Millar had been living in East Berlin, as well as Warsaw and Moscow, and in this engaging memoir we follow him to the heart of Cold War Europe. We relive the night that it all disintegrated, and its curious domino-like effect on Eastern Europe. We see Peter as he opens his Stasi file and discovers which of his friends had – or hadn’t – been spying on him. A compelling, amazingly insightful, and entertaining read, this book brings Peter Millar’s characteristic wit and insight to one of the most significant moments in history. Peter Millar has worked for Reuters, the Telegraph Group and the Sunday Times as a foreign correspondent. For the latter he covered the Fall of the Berlin Wall and was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year.” – from Amazon
Parker, J. (2016). Tales of Berlin in American literature up to the 21st century. Brill Rodopi.
“Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city’s image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but ofshifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today” – from Brill