EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Shameful Peace

    Book Details:
  • Author : Frederic Spotts
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2008-12-09
  • ISBN : 0300142374
  • Pages : 426 pages

Download or read book The Shameful Peace written by Frederic Spotts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German occupation of France from 1940 to 1945 presented wrenching challenges for the nation's artists and intellectuals. Some were able to flee the country; those who remained—including Gide and Céline, Picasso and Matisse, Cortot and Messiaen, and Cocteau and Gabin—responded in various ways. This fascinating book is the first to provide a full account of how France's artistic leaders coped under the crushing German presence. Some became heroes, others villains; most were simply survivors. Filled with anecdotes about the artists, composers, writers, filmmakers, and actors who lived through the years of occupation, the book illuminates the disconcerting experience of life and work within a cultural prison. Frederic Spotts uncovers Hitler's plan to pacify the French through an active cultural life, and examines the unexpected vibrancy of opera, ballet, painting, theater, and film in both the Occupied and Vichy Zones. In view of the longer-term goal to supplant French with German culture, Spotts offers moving insight into the predicament of French artists as they fought to preserve their country's cultural and national identity.

Book Artists in Nazi occupied France

Download or read book Artists in Nazi occupied France written by Werner Lange and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From 1940 to 1944, Werner Lange served as a Lieutenant of the Propagandastaffel, the German propaganda service in Paris, overseeing visual artists still living in France. His was a privileged position and he enjoyed the cultural life of Paris, even during the occupation years. From the Champs Elysées Head Quarters, the Nazi administration oversaw the artistic and intellectual life of occupied France. This fascinating memoir includes Lange's encounters with renowned artists like Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Aristide Maillol, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau. After sitting untouched for decades, this volume was discovered by Victor Loupan and released in France in 2015. Now this fascinating firsthand account of wartime Paris is published in English for the first time. No other memoir of this period provides such intimate and detailed accounts of the day to day lives of artists during the Occupation."--

Book Artists in Nazi occupied France

Download or read book Artists in Nazi occupied France written by Werner Lange and published by . This book was released on 2018-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From 1940 to 1944, Werner Lange served as a Lieutenant of the Propagandastaffel, the German propaganda service in Paris, overseeing visual artists still living in France. His was a privileged position and he enjoyed the cultural life of Paris, even during the occupation years. From the Champs Elysâees Head Quarters, the Nazi administration oversaw the artistic and intellectual life of occupied France. This fascinating memoir includes Lange's encounters with renowned artists like Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Aristide Maillol, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau. After sitting untouched for decades, this volume was discovered by Victor Loupan and released in France in 2015. Now this fascinating firsthand account of wartime Paris is published in English for the first time. No other memoir of this period provides such intimate and detailed accounts of the day to day lives of artists during the Occupation."--

Book The Postmistress of Paris

Download or read book The Postmistress of Paris written by Meg Waite Clayton and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER* A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK* A GMA BUZZ PICK * AN INDIE NEXT PICK* AN AMAZON BEST OF THE MONTH PICK, LITERATURE AND FICTION*A PEOPLE MAGAZINE PICK The New York Times bestselling author of The Last Train to London revisits the dark early days of the German occupation in France in this haunting novel—a love story and a tale of high-stakes danger and incomparable courage—about a young American heiress who helps artists hunted by the Nazis escape from war-torn Europe. Wealthy, beautiful Naneé was born with a spirit of adventure. For her, learning to fly is freedom. When German tanks roll across the border and into Paris, this woman with an adorable dog and a generous heart joins the resistance. Known as the Postmistress because she delivers information to those in hiding, Naneé uses her charms and skill to house the hunted and deliver them to safety. Photographer Edouard Moss has escaped Germany with his young daughter only to be interned in a French labor camp. His life collides with Nanée’s in this sweeping tale of romance and danger set in a world aflame with personal and political passion. Inspired by the real life Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who worked with American journalist Varian Fry to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of France, The Postmistress of Paris is the haunting story of an indomitable woman whose strength, bravery, and love is a beacon of hope in a time of terror.

Book A German Officer in Occupied Paris

Download or read book A German Officer in Occupied Paris written by Ernst Jünger and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 936 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernst Jünger was one of twentieth-century Germany’s most important—and most controversial—writers. Decorated for bravery in World War I and the author of the acclaimed western front memoir Storm of Steel, he frankly depicted war’s horrors even as he extolled its glories. As a Wehrmacht captain during World War II, Jünger faithfully kept a journal in occupied Paris and continued to write on the eastern front and in Germany until its defeat—writings that are of major historical and literary significance. Jünger’s Paris journals document his Francophile excitement, romantic affairs, and fascination with botany and entomology, alongside mystical and religious ruminations and trenchant observations on the occupation and the politics of collaboration. While working as a mail censor, he led the privileged life of an officer, encountering artists such as Céline, Cocteau, Braque, and Picasso. His notes from the Caucasus depict the chaos after Stalingrad and atrocities on the eastern front. Upon returning to Paris, Jünger observed the French resistance and was close to the German military conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After fleeing France, he reunited with his family as Germany’s capitulation approached. Both participant and commentator, close to the horrors of history but often distancing himself from them, Jünger turned his life and experiences into a work of art. These wartime journals appear here in English for the first time, giving fresh insights into the quandaries of the twentieth century from the keen pen of a paradoxical observer.

Book Bronzes to Bullets

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher : Stanford University Press
  • Release : 2008-11-12
  • ISBN : 0804779716
  • Pages : 265 pages

Download or read book Bronzes to Bullets written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War.

Book And the Show Went On

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alan Riding
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2010-10-19
  • ISBN : 0307594548
  • Pages : 416 pages

Download or read book And the Show Went On written by Alan Riding and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 14, 1940, German tanks rolled into a silent and deserted Paris. Eight days later, a humbled France accepted defeat along with foreign occupation. The only consolation was that, while the swastika now flew over Paris, the City of Light was undamaged. Soon, a peculiar kind of normality returned as theaters, opera houses, movie theaters and nightclubs reopened for business. This suited both conquerors and vanquished: the Germans wanted Parisians to be distracted, while the French could show that, culturally at least, they had not been defeated. Over the next four years, the artistic life of Paris flourished with as much verve as in peacetime. Only a handful of writers and intellectuals asked if this was an appropriate response to the horrors of a world war. Alan Riding introduces us to a panoply of writers, painters, composers, actors and dancers who kept working throughout the occupation. Maurice Chevalier and Édith Piaf sang before French and German audiences. Pablo Picasso, whose art was officially banned, continued to paint in his Left Bank apartment. More than two hundred new French films were made, including Marcel Carné’s classic, Les Enfants du paradis. Thousands of books were published by authors as different as the virulent anti-Semite Céline and the anti-Nazis Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Meanwhile, as Jewish performers and creators were being forced to flee or, as was Irène Némirovsky, deported to death camps, a small number of artists and intellectuals joined the resistance. Throughout this penetrating and unsettling account, Riding keeps alive the quandaries facing many of these artists. Were they “saving” French culture by working? Were they betraying France if they performed before German soldiers or made movies with Nazi approval? Was it the intellectual’s duty to take up arms against the occupier? Then, after Paris was liberated, what was deserving punishment for artists who had committed “intelligence with the enemy”? By throwing light on this critical moment of twentieth-century European cultural history, And the Show Went On focuses anew on whether artists and writers have a special duty to show moral leadership in moments of national trauma.

Book Art of the Defeat

    Book Details:
  • Author : Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
  • Publisher : Getty Publications
  • Release : 2008
  • ISBN : 9780892368914
  • Pages : 452 pages

Download or read book Art of the Defeat written by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Art of the Defeat offers an unflinching look at the pivotal role art played in France during the German occupation. It begins with Adolf Hitler's staging of the armistice at Rethondes and moves across the dark years - analyzing the official junket by French artists to Germany, the exhibition of Arno Breker's colossi in Paris, the looting of the state museums and Jewish collections, the glorification of Philippe P?tain and a pure national identity, the demonization of modernists and foreigners, and the range of responses by artists and artisans. The sum is a pioneering expos? of the deployment of art and ideology to hold the heart of darkness at bay"--Page 4 of cover.

Book Paper Bullets

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jeffrey H. Jackson
  • Publisher : Algonquin Books
  • Release : 2021-11-02
  • ISBN : 1643752057
  • Pages : 353 pages

Download or read book Paper Bullets written by Jeffrey H. Jackson and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The true story of an audacious resistance campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women -- Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe -- who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute wicked insults against Hitler and calls to desert, a PSYOPs tactic known as "paper bullets," designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home of Jersey in the British Channel Islands"--

Book Resistance

Download or read book Resistance written by Agnes Humbert and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-11-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Agnès Humbert bears devastating witness to her time ... An insider's account of the germination of the French Resistance' William Boyd 'Sober and testifying, sardonic and humorous ... A beautiful and powerful work of literature' The Times In the summer of 1940, as the German Occupation tightened its grip on Paris, Agnès Humbert helped to establish one of the first resistance cells. She had no experience in warfare: she was an art historian, as were most of her early comrades, colleagues from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. All they had was an unquenchable desire to free their country from the horrors of Nazi occupation. Within a year the group was publishing a news bulletin, helping allied airmen escape and passing military information back to London. Then came the catastrophe of betrayal, followed by arrest and interrogation, imprisonment and trial and, for Agnès, deportation to slave labour camp in Germany. Résistance is the secret journal of a woman who never gave up hope, even in the face of impossible odds.

Book Art as Politics in the Third Reich

Download or read book Art as Politics in the Third Reich written by Jonathan Petropoulos and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. In Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy

Book Exiles and Emigres

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stephanie Barron
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1997-02
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 440 pages

Download or read book Exiles and Emigres written by Stephanie Barron and published by . This book was released on 1997-02 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the lives & work of 23 well known artists exiled from Germany, including Heartfield, Schwitters, Kokoschka & Beckmann.

Book Les Parisiennes

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anne Sebba
  • Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
  • Release : 2016-10-18
  • ISBN : 1466849568
  • Pages : 599 pages

Download or read book Les Parisiennes written by Anne Sebba and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Anne Sebba has the nearly miraculous gift of combining the vivid intimacy of the lives of women during The Occupation with the history of the time. This is a remarkable book.” —Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba explores a devastating period in Paris's history and tells the stories of how women survived—or didn’t—during the Nazi occupation. Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life. When the Nazis and the puppet Vichy regime began rounding up Jews to ship east to concentration camps, the full horror of the war was brought home and the choice between collaboration and resistance became unavoidable. Sebba focuses on the role of women, many of whom faced life and death decisions every day. After the war ended, there would be a fierce settling of accounts between those who made peace with or, worse, helped the occupiers and those who fought the Nazis in any way they could.

Book The Perfume Thief

    Book Details:
  • Author : Timothy Schaffert
  • Publisher : Anchor
  • Release : 2022-07-05
  • ISBN : 1984899236
  • Pages : 369 pages

Download or read book The Perfume Thief written by Timothy Schaffert and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stylish, sexy page-turner set in Paris on the eve of World War II, where Clementine, a queer American ex-pat and notorious thief, is drawn out of retirement and into one last scam when the Nazis invade. "A hint of Moulin Rouge, a whiff of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, a little spritz of Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief...The Perfume Thief is a pulse-pounding thriller and a sensuous experience you’ll want to savor."—Oprah Daily Clementine is a seventy-two-year-old reformed con artist with a penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down in 1930 and opens a shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets. Now it's 1941 and Clem's favorite haunt, Madame Boulette's, is crawling with Nazis, while Clem's people—the outsiders, the artists, and the hustlers who used to call it home—are disappearing. Clem's first instinct is to go to ground—it's a frigid Paris winter and she's too old to put up a fight. But when the cabaret's prize songbird, Zoe St. Angel, recruits Clem to steal the recipe book of a now-missing famous Parisian perfumer, she can't say no. Her mark is Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who wants the book and Clem's expertise to himself. Hoping to buy the time and trust she needs to pull off her scheme, Clem settles on a novel strategy: Telling Voss the truth about the life and loves she came to Paris to escape. Complete with romance, espionage, champagne towers, and haute couture, this full-tilt sensory experience is a dazzling portrait of the underground resistance of twentieth-century Paris and a passionate love letter to the power of beauty and community in the face of insidious hate.

Book Defending National Treasures

    Book Details:
  • Author : Elizabeth Karlsgodt
  • Publisher : Stanford University Press
  • Release : 2011-04-07
  • ISBN : 0804777829
  • Pages : 404 pages

Download or read book Defending National Treasures written by Elizabeth Karlsgodt and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defending National Treasures explores the fate of art and cultural heritage during the Nazi occupation of France. The French cultural patrimony was a crucial locus of power struggles between German and French leaders and among influential figures in each country. Karlsgodt examines the preservation policy that the Vichy regime enacted in an assertion of sovereignty over French art museums, historic monuments, and archeological sites. The limits to this sovereignty are apparent from German appropriations of public statues, Jewish-owned art collections, and key "Germanic" works of art from French museums. A final chapter traces the lasting impact of the French wartime reforms on preservation policy. In Defending National Treasures, Karlsgodt introduces the concept of patrimania to reveal examples of opportunism in art preservation. During the war, French officials sought to acquire coveted artwork from Jewish collections for the Louvre and other museums; in the early postwar years, they established a complicated guardianship over unclaimed art recovered from Germany. A cautionary tale for our own times, Defending National Treasures examines the ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in the ongoing noble quest to preserve great works of art.

Book The House of Fragile Things

Download or read book The House of Fragile Things written by James McAuley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

Book The Art of Resistance

    Book Details:
  • Author : Justus Rosenberg
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2020-01-28
  • ISBN : 0062742213
  • Pages : 309 pages

Download or read book The Art of Resistance written by Justus Rosenberg and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jew’s flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in the French underground.” —USA Today An American Library in Paris Book Award "Coups de Coeur" Selection The Art of Resistance is unlike any World War II memoir before it. Its author, Justus Rosenberg, has spent the past seventy years teaching the classics of literature to American college students. Hidden within him, however, was a remarkable true story of wartime courage and romance worthy of a great novel. Here is Professor Rosenberg’s elegant and gripping chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil. In 1937, after witnessing a violent Nazi mob in his hometown of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent by his Jewish parents to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, the Nazis came again, as France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, Justus fled Paris, heading south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille who led a clandestine network helping thousands of men and women—including many legendary artists and intellectuals, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst—escape the Nazis. With his intimate understanding of French and German culture, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s operation as a spy and scout. After the Vichy government expelled Fry from France, Justus worked in Grenoble, recruiting young men and women for the Underground Army. For the next four years, he would be an essential component of the Resistance, relying on his wits and skills to survive several close calls with death. Once, he found himself in a Nazi internment camp, with his next stop Auschwitz—and yet Justus found an ingenious way to escape. He two years during the war gathering intelligence, surveying German installations and troop movements on the Mediterranean. Then, after the allied invasion at Normandy in 1944, Justus became a guerrilla fighter, participating in and leading commando raids to disrupt the German retreat across France. At the end of the Second World War, Justus emigrated to America, and built a new life. For the past fifty years, he has taught literature at Bard College, shaping the inner lives of generations of students. Now he adds his own story to the library of great coming-of-age memoirs: The Art of Resistance is a powerful saga of bravery and defiance, a true-life spy thriller touched throughout by a professor’s wisdom.