A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism. While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

History

Jay, Martin

Dimendberg, Edward

Kæs, Anton

Europe

University of California Press

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Volume 3)

The notion of utopia exists in every culture, capturing shared dreams and common goals. This book—prepared to accompany the exhibition Expressionist Utopias mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1993—explores how the optimistic themes of utopia and fantasy sustained faith among artists and architects in the power of art to shape a better world during the tumultuous World War I era in Germany. The exhibition's curator, Timothy O. Benson along with David Frisby, Reinhold Heller, Anton Kaes, Wolf Prix, and Iain Boyd White present the diverse manifestations of the utopia metaphor in its progression throughout Expressionism from Arcadian to manmade utopias. This work includes a new essay and an interview by Edward Dimenberg with Wolf Prix on the spectacular installation created for the exhibition by the Viennese architectural firm Coop Himmelblau.

Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Politics & Social Sciences

Frisby, David

Benson, Timothy O.

Heller, Reinhold

Social Sciences

How does migration change a nation? Germany in Transit is the first sourcebook to illuminate the country's transition into a multiethnic society―from the arrival of the first guest workers in the mid-1950s to the most recent reforms in immigration and citizenship law. The book charts the highly contentious debates about migrant labor, human rights, multiculturalism, and globalization that have unfolded in Germany over the past fifty years―debates that resonate far beyond national borders. This cultural history in documents offers a rich archive for the comparative study of modern Germany against the backdrop of European integration, transnational migration, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Divided into eleven thematic chapters, Germany in Transit includes 200 original texts in English translation, as well as a historical introduction, chronology, glossary, bibliography, and filmography.

Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) (Volume 40)

Gramling, David

Göktürk, Deniz

Kaes (German literature, UC Berkeley) examines ways in which recent German filmmakers have interpreted and rewritten Germany's past. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Harvard University Press

West German filmmakers have tried to repeatedly over the past half-century to come to terms with Germany’s stigmatized history. How can Hitler and the Holocaust, how can the complicity and shame of the average German be narrated and visualized? How can Auschwitz be reconstructed? Anton Kaes argues that a major shift in German attitudes occurred in the mid-1970s―a shift best illustrated in films of the New German Cinema, which have focused less on guilt and atonement than on personal memory and yearning for national identity.
To support his claim, Kaes devotes a chapter to each of five complex and celebrated films of the modern German era: Hans Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany, a provocative restaging of German history in postmodern tableaux; The Marriage of Maria Braun, the personal and political reflection on postwar Germany with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder first caught the attention of American and European audiences; Helma Sanders-Brahms's feminist and autobiographical film Germany, Pale Mother, relating the unexplored role of German women during and after the war; Alexander Kluge's The Patriot, a self-reflexive collage of verbal and visual quotations from the entire course of the German past; and, finally, Edgar Reitz's Heimat, a 16-hour epic rendering of German history from 1918 to the present from the perspective of everyday life in the provinces.
Despite radical differences in style and form, these films are all concerned with memory, representation, and the dialogue between past and present Kaes draws from a variety of disciplines, interweaving textual interpretation, cultural history, and current theory to create a dynamic approach to highly complex and multi-voiced films. His book will engage readers interested in postwar German history, politics, and culture; in film and media studies; and in the interplay of history, memory, and film.

From Hitler to Heimat : The Return of History as Film

Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War

Shell Shock Cinema explores how the classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I and the the devastating effects of the nation's defeat. In this exciting new book, Anton Kaes argues that masterworks such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Nibelungen, and Metropolis, even though they do not depict battle scenes or soldiers in combat, engaged the war and registered its tragic aftermath. These films reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock, reeling from a devastating defeat that it never officially acknowledged, let alone accepted.
 Kaes uses the term "shell shock"--coined during World War I to describe soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns--as a metaphor for the psychological wounds that found expression in Weimar cinema. Directors like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang portrayed paranoia, panic, and fear of invasion in films peopled with serial killers, mad scientists, and troubled young men. Combining original close textual analysis with extensive archival research, Kaes shows how this post-traumatic cinema of shell shock transformed extreme psychological states into visual expression; how it pushed the limits of cinematic representation with its fragmented story lines, distorted perspectives, and stark lighting; and how it helped create a modernist film language that anticipated film noir and remains incredibly influential today.
 A compelling contribution to the cultural history of trauma, Shell Shock Cinema exposes how German film gave expression to the loss and acute grief that lay behind Weimar's sleek façade.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Princeton University Press

Fritz Lang's 'M' (1931) is an undisputed classic of world cinema. Lang considered it his most lasting work. Peter Lorre's extraordinary performance as the childlike misfit Hans Beckert was one of the most striking of film debuts, and it made him an international star. Lang's vision of a city gripped with fear, haunted by surveillance and total mobillization, is still remarkably powerful today. And 'M' resonates too in the serial-killer genre which is so prominent in contemporary cinema. 'M' speaks to us as a timeless classic, but also as a Weimar film that has too often been isolated from its political and cultural context. In this groundbreaking book, Anton Kaes reconnects 'M''s much-studied formal brilliance to its significance as an event in 1931 Germany, recapturing the film's extraordinary social and symbolic energy. Interweaving close reading with cultural history, Kaes reconstitutes 'M' as a crucial modernist artwork. In addition he analyzes Joseph Losey's 1951 film noir remake and, in an appendix, publishes for the first time 'M''s missing scene.

M (BFI Film Classics)

British Film Institute

About the Author\nAnton Kaes is Chancellor's Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is the author of From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (1989) and co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994).\nFritz Lang's 'M' (1931) is an undisputed classic of world cinema. Lang considered it his most lasting work. Peter Lorre's extraordinary performance as the childlike misfit Hans Beckert was one of the most striking of film debuts, and it made him an international star. Lang's vision of a city gripped with fear, haunted by surveillance and total mobillization, is still remarkably powerful today. And 'M' resonates too in the serial-killer genre which is so prominent in contemporary cinema. 'M' speaks to us as a timeless classic, but also as a Weimar film that has too often been isolated from its political and cultural context. In this groundbreaking book, Anton Kaes reconnects 'M''s much-studied formal brilliance to its significance as an event in 1931 Germany, recapturing the film's extraordinary social and symbolic energy. Interweaving close reading with cultural history, Kaes reconstitutes 'M' as a crucial modernist artwork. In addition he analyzes Joseph Losey's 1951 film noir remake and, in an appendix, publishes for the first time 'M''s missing scene.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kæs, Anton. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kæs, Anton

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kæs, Anton. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Volume 3)

Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) (Volume 40)

From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film

From Hitler to Heimat : The Return of History as Film

Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War

Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War

M (BFI Film Classics)

M (BFI Film Classics)