Modernism
In which I pull another long-unread book off the To-Be-Read shelf:
There was a time when I felt guilty about the number of unread books sitting on my shelves. They come in faster than I can read them.* I don’t feel guilty anymore. More than once over the course of writing this book, I’ve found exactly the book I need sitting on my shelves waiting its…
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Jeanne Mammen, “Neue Frau”
And speaking of the “New Woman,” as I believe we were, allow me to introduce you to German artist and illustrator Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) whose life and work in the 1920s and 1930s embodied the “Neue Frau” in Berlin. Mammen was born in Berlin in 1890, but her family moved to Paris when she was…
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Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic
When I started looking at the possibility of writing about Sigrid Schultz last April, what I knew about the Weimar Republic could be summed up in Peter Gay’s assertion in his classic Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider* that the Weimar spirit is embodied in “Gropius’ buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs.”…
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