Berlin: The Twenties
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Book Cover
Hardcover
Book Details
Written by Rainer Metzger and Christian Brandstetter.
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($40.00)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
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.
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Worth Reading.
This is a very large book of photos and an extended essay on the culture, popular, low, and high, of Berlin between WWI in 1918 and the establishment of Hitler as Reichs Chancellor in 1932. The book does not put much emphasis on the political situation. Though there are a number of photos of Nazi demonstrations, there is little discussion of either the Nazi party or of any of the other political movements of the time. Nor is there any discussion at all of German rearmament. The economic depression is alluded to, but its impact on society and on individuals is not discussed.
Perhaps this book is aimed at art historians or at cultural historians. As a guide to understanding the subsequent events in Berlin, it fails miserably.