Bowling for Communism

Bowling for Communism PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751670
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

Bowling for Communism

Bowling for Communism PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751670
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

Pevsner

Pevsner PDF Author: Stephen Games
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441137262
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The first biography of Nikolaus Pevsner, the best known and most important architectural historian of the 20th-century.

Bach

Bach PDF Author: David Schulenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190936312
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Bach has remained a figure of continuous fascination and interest to scholars and readers since the original Master Musicians Bach volume's publication in 1983 - even since its revision in 2000, understanding of Bach and his music's historical and cultural context has shifted substantially. Reflecting new biographical information that has only emerged in recent decades, author David Schulenberg contributes to an ongoing scholarly conversation about Bach with clarity and concision. Bach traces the man's emergence as a startlingly original organist and composer, describing his creative evolution, professional career, and family life from contemporary societal and cultural perspectives in early modern Europe. His experiences as student, music director, and teacher are examined alongside the music he produced in each of these roles, including early compositions for keyboard instruments, the great organ and harpsichord works of later years, vocal music, and other famous instrumental works, including the Brandenburg Concertos. Schulenberg also illuminates how Bach incorporated his contemporary environment into his work: he responded to music by other composers, to his audiences and employment conditions, and to developments in poetry, theology, and even the sciences. The author focuses on Bach's evolution as a composer by ultimately recognizing "Bach's world" in the specific cities, courts, and environments within and for which he composed. Dispensing with biographical minutiae and more closely examining the interplay between his life and his music, Bach presents a unique, grounded, and refreshing new framing of a brilliant composer.

The Mayor of Leipzig

The Mayor of Leipzig PDF Author: Rachel Kushner
Publisher: Karma, New York
ISBN: 9781949172478
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars Room In Rachel Kushner's latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig, an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne--where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig--where she encounters live "adult entertainment" in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author. "Taking a time out from what happened to me in Cologne and in Leipzig," Kushner writes, "I want to let you in on a secret: I personally know the author of this story you're reading. Because she fancies herself an art world type, a hanger-on. Who would do that voluntarily? I mean, it's not like someone held a gun to my head and said, Be an artist. I chose it, but I still can't imagine having anything to do with the art world if you don't have to. Also, people who don't make stuff, who instead try to catalogue, periodize, and understand art, they never understand the first thing. Art is about taste, a sense of humor, and most writers lack both." Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is the author of The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018). Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche PDF Author: Julian Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521871174
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 667

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Book Description
Julian Young provides the most comprehensive biography available of the life and philosophy of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

USIA World

USIA World PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cultural relations
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description


The Eitingons

The Eitingons PDF Author: Mary-Kay Wilmers
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844679004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A family history that explores the KGB, the fur trade, Freud and the assassination of Trotsky Leonid Eitingon was a KGB assassin who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico, helping to organize the assassination of Trotsky. “As long as I live,” Stalin said, “not a hair of his head shall be touched.” It did not work out like that. Max Eitingon was a psychoanalyst, a colleague, friend and protégé of Freud’s. He was rich, secretive and—through his friendship with a famous Russian singer— implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937. Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, questioned by the FBI. Was Motty everybody’s friend or everybody’s enemy? Mary-Kay Wilmers, best known as the editor of the London Review of Books, began looking into aspects of her remarkable family twenty years ago. The result is a book of astonishing scope and thrilling originality that throws light into some of the darkest corners of the last century. At the center of the story stands the author herself—ironic, precise, searching, and stylish—wondering not only about where she is from, but about what she’s entitled to know.

Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts

Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts PDF Author: United States. Central Intelligence Agency
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World politics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description


Variations of Suburbanism

Variations of Suburbanism PDF Author: Barbara Schönig
Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
ISBN: 3838267095
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Considered to be sub-ordinated and sub-prime to the city, sub-urban areas receive little attention by researchers and designers. However, it ́s the rapidly growing areas outside the central cities that pose the biggest questions of the urban millennium: How can the scattered patchwork of urban areas and social spaces linked by networks of highways and public transportation function as a sustainable and livable urban environment? Answering this question requires understanding suburban spaces as heterogeneous urban areas with distinct local characteristics, qualities, and problems. Following this path, Variations of Suburbanism explores formation, characteristics, and trends of suburban areas all over the world. It provides insights on common features and differences of suburban governance, design, and infrastructure and discusses strategies to understand and design suburban areas in an increasingly sub-urbanizing world.

Nicolae Iorga

Nicolae Iorga PDF Author: Nicholas M Talavera
Publisher: Histria Books
ISBN: 1592111262
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
The Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga played a critical role in the history of his country for more than fifty years until his tragic death in 1940. The author of more than 1,200 books and 20,000 articles, Iorga was one of the most prolific scholars of all time. In recognition of his academic achievements, he received honorary doctorates from universities around the world. Nicolae Iorga is the first comprehensive biography of one of the most important European cultural and political personalities of the first half of the twentieth century. It considers Iorga not only as a historian, politician, journalist, literary critic, playwright, writer, poet, and linguist, but also as an orator, teacher, and a human being.Written by Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, a leading American scholar, and based on archival sources and family documents, this is the first biography to present a complete portrait of the world-renowned historian Nicolae Iorga.