Voluptuous Panic

Voluptuous Panic PDF Author: Mel Gordon
Publisher: Feral House
ISBN: 193259597X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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).

Voluptuous Panic

Voluptuous Panic PDF Author: Mel Gordon
Publisher: Feral House
ISBN: 193259597X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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).

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber PDF Author: Mel Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin

The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin PDF Author: Barbara Ulrich
Publisher: Feral House
ISBN: 1932595929
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Before the Nazis, there were the Hot Girls.

Before the Deluge

Before the Deluge PDF Author: Otto Friedrich
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060926791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
A fascinating portrait of the turbulent political, social, and cultural life of the city of Berlin in the 1920s.

Lustmord

Lustmord PDF Author: Maria Tatar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
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.

Berlin Cabaret

Berlin Cabaret PDF Author: Peter JELAVICH
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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.

Dada Performance

Dada Performance PDF Author: Mel Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
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.

Horizontal Collaboration

Horizontal Collaboration PDF Author: Mel Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781627310178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Mel Gordon's companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.

Theatre of Fear & Horror: Expanded Edition

Theatre of Fear & Horror: Expanded Edition PDF Author: Mel Gordon
Publisher: Feral House
ISBN: 1627310436
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"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.

Sex and the Weimar Republic

Sex and the Weimar Republic PDF Author: Laurie Marhoefer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442619570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
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.