Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed production history, its critical reception over time, and the place it occupies within the larger history of the...

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed production history, its critical reception over time, and the place it occupies within the larger history of the...

Between Redemption and Doom is a revelatory exploration of the evolution of German-Jewish modernism. Through an examination of selected works in literature, theory, and film, Noah Isenberg investigates the ways in which Jewish identity was represented in German culture from the eve of the First World War through the rise of National Socialism. He argues that various responses to modernity-particularly to its social, cultural, and aesthetic currents-converge around the discourse on community: its renaissance, its crisis, and its dissolution. Isenberg opens with a general discussion of German...

A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modernworld in Vicki Baum s celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all itsverve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a WorldWar I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emergesto read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he s beenawaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fightinga losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, and Gaigern, asleek...