Download or read book Voluptuous Panic written by Mel Gordon and published by Feral House. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seductive sourcebook of rare visual delights from pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring hip club goers, filmmakers, gay historians, graphic designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. This expanded edition includes “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their often-bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” Mel Gordon is professor of theater at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also the author of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Feral House).
Download or read book The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber written by Mel Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including dozens of photographs and drawings that recreate Anita's "Repertoire of the Damned." Book jacket.
Download or read book Dada Performance written by Mel Gordon and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most controversial and ironic of twentieth-century modernisms, Dada swept through the arts after the shock of World War I, when poets, painters, filmmakers, and performers joined forces to challenge conventions of society and art. The only collection of its kind, this volume includes writings by leading Dadaists: Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Huelsenbeck, Roger Vitrac, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Francis Picabia, and others.
Download or read book The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin written by Barbara Ulrich and published by Feral House. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Nazis, there were the Hot Girls.
Download or read book Before the Deluge written by Otto Friedrich and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1995-10-13 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating portrait of the turbulent political, social, and cultural life of the city of Berlin in the 1920s.
Download or read book Lustmord written by Maria Tatar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely question what is at stake in its representation. Tatar, however, challenges us to consider what is taking place--both artistically and socially--in the construction and circulation of scenes depicting sexual murder. In examining images of sexual murder (Lustmord), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar Germany to the present. Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound. Here a revealing episode in the gender politics of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent artistic expression. Not only does Tatar show that male artists openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in which victims were disavowed and erased. Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the representation of murdered women in visual and literary works functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties, and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural production and biological reproduction. In exploring the complex relationship between victim and agent in cases of sexual murder, Tatar explains how the roles came to be destabilized and reversed, turning the perpetrator of criminal deeds into a defenseless victim of seductive evil. Throughout the West today, the creation of similar ideological constructions still occurs in societies that have only recently begun to validate the voices of its victims. Maria Tatar's book opens up an important discussion for readers seeking to understand the forces behind sexual violence and its portrayal in the cultural media throughout this century.
Download or read book Berlin Cabaret written by Peter JELAVICH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Step into Ernst Wolzogen's Motley Theater, Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke, Rudolf Nelson's Chat noir, and Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel. Enjoy Claire Waldoff's rendering of a lower-class Berliner, Kurt Tucholsky's satirical songs, and Walter Mehring's Dadaist experiments, as Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. Fads and fashions, sexual mores and political ideologies--all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstable yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism. By situating cabaret within Berlin's rich landscape of popular culture and distinguishing it from vaudeville and variety theaters, spectacular revues, prurient nude dancing, and Communist agitprop, Jelavich revises the prevailing image of this form of entertainment. Neither highly politicized, like postwar German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitude toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances--as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt. This book gives us a sense of what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin and at the same time lets us see, from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual, and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.
Download or read book Horizontal Collaboration written by Mel Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mel Gordon's companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.
Download or read book Theatre of Fear Horror Expanded Edition written by Mel Gordon and published by Feral House. This book was released on 2016-07-18 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bloodcurdling shrieks, fiendish schemes, deeds of darkness, mayhem and mutilation—we all have a rough idea of what Grand Guignol stands for. But until now it has been hard to find out much more about it than that. According to the American theater historian Mel Gordon, no major history of the theater so much as mentions it, although it is a form of entertainment that held its own on the Paris stage for more than half a century. But Mr. Gordon has made a thorough job of filling the gap."—John Gross, The New York Times Here is the expanded edition of classic outré book, The Grand Guignol, first published in 1988 and now long out of print. Like the original anthology, it includes an illustrated introduction to the theater of Paris and abroad, a breakdown of its stage tricks, a summary of one hundred plots, extensive photo documentation, André de Lord's essay, "Fear in Literature," and two originally produced Grand Guignol scripts. The expanded edition also contains additional graphic and textual material including a color insert of Grand Guignol posters; the 1938 autobiographical account of Maxa, the company's leading female performer entitled "I Am the Maddest Woman in the World"; and the controversial playscript Orgy in the Lighthouse.
Download or read book Hitler s Jewish Clairvoyant written by Mel Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of a major Werner Herzog film starring Tim Roth, Erik Jan Hanussen was Europe's most audacious soothsayer. Billing himself as 'The Man Who Knows All,' he performed in music halls reading minds and hypnotising women to orgasm. In March 1932, when Adolph Hitler's political future seemed destined to failure, Hanussen predicted a resurgence of the Nazi party and soon after became Hitler's confidant. Extraordinarily, what Hitler did not know was that Hanussen was not the Dane he claimed to be but a Jew from Moravia whose name was Herschel Steinschneider. Lavishly illustrated.
Download or read book Sex and the Weimar Republic written by Laurie Marhoefer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberated, licentious, or merely liberal, the sexual freedoms of Germany’s Weimar Republic have become legendary. The home of the world’s first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized – however misleadingly – in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar’s freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation. Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen’s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable. Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded “immoral” sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Röhm. Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer’s observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today.
Download or read book Miniature Metropolis written by Andreas Huyssen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andreas Huyssen explores the history and theory of metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about urban life written for European newspapers. His fine-grained readings open vistas into German critical theory and the visual arts, revealing the miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism.
Download or read book The Stanislavsky Technique written by Mel Gordon and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1988 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stop reading about Stanislavsky and wondering what it's all supposed to mean. Meet the master and his disciples as they evolve new techniques and exercises in a workshop atmosphere over a quarter of a century.
Download or read book Apocalypse Culture written by Adam Parfrey and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Apocalypse Culture" is compulsory reading for all those concerned with the crisis of our times. An extraordinary collection unlike anything I have ever encountered. These are the terminal documents of the twentieth century."-J.G. Ballard
Download or read book The Grand Guignol written by Mel Gordon and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1997-08-21 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Theatre of the Grand Guignol, which began in turn-of-the-century Paris, celebrated horror and fear. Innocent victims, mangled beauty, insanity, mutilation, depravity and guilt were its primary themes. This text examines its history, themes and methods and summarizes its plots.
Download or read book The Europeans written by Luigi Giorgio Barzini and published by Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin. This book was released on 1983 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of European culture and history and of the nations that must b the base of a unified Europe backs up the eminent scholar-journalist's call a Europe with one will, one voice, and a unified foreign policy.
Download or read book Haunted Bauhaus written by Elizabeth Otto and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
