The Ghosts of Berlin

Author: Brian Ladd
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226467600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
In this compelling work, Brian Ladd examines the ongoing conflicts radiating from the remarkable fusion of architecture, history, and national identity in Berlin. Ladd surveys the urban landscape, excavating its ruins, contemplating its buildings and memorials, and carefully deconstructing the public debates and political controversies emerging from its past. "Written in a clear and elegant style, The Ghosts of Berlin is not just another colorless architectural history of the German capital. . . . Mr. Ladd's book is a superb guide to this process of urban self-definition, both past and present."—Katharina Thote, Wall Street Journal "If a book can have the power to change a public debate, then The Ghosts of Berlin is such a book. Among the many new books about Berlin that I have read, Brian Ladd's is certainly the most impressive. . . . Ladd's approach also owes its success to the fact that he is a good storyteller. His history of Berlin's architectural successes and failures reads entertainingly like a detective novel."—Peter Schneider, New Republic "[Ladd's] well-written and well-illustrated book amounts to a brief history of the city as well as a guide to its landscape."—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

The Ghosts of Berlin

Author: Brian Ladd
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655886X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
“Written in a clear and elegant style, The Ghosts of Berlin is . . . a superb guide to this process of urban self-definition, both past and present.” —The Wall Street Journal In the twenty years since its original publication, The Ghosts of Berlin has become a classic, an unparalleled guide to understanding the presence of history in our built environment, especially in a space as historically contested—and emotionally fraught—as Berlin. Brian Ladd examines the ongoing conflicts radiating from the remarkable fusion of architecture, history, and national identity in Berlin. Returning to the city frequently, Ladd continues to survey the urban landscape, traversing its ruins, contemplating its buildings and memorials, and carefully deconstructing the public debates and political controversies emerging from its past. “With erudition, insight, and restraint, Brian Ladd carries off the dangerous task of analyzing architecture and urbanism in Berlin in terms of its horrific political past. He convincingly argues that architecture embodies ideological meaning more powerfully than other artifacts of a society.” —The New York Times Book Review “Ladd examines the conflicts radiating from [Berlin’s] remarkable fusion of architecture, history and national identity.” —History Today “His history of Berlin’s architectural successes and failures reads entertainingly like a detective novel.” —The New Republic “Ladd’s balanced, sensitive chronicle of the Berlin’s traumatized topography brings the past into focus.” —Harvard Design Magazine

Ghosts of Berlin

Author: Rudolph Herzog
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1612197515
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Berlin's hip present comes up against the city's dark past in these seven supernatural tales by the son of the great filmmaker who "shares his father's curious and mordant wit" (The Financial Times). In these hair-raising stories from the celebrated filmmaker and author Rudolph Herzog, millennial Berliners discover that the city is still the home of many unsettled—and deeply unsettling—ghosts. And those ghosts are not very happy about the newcomers. Thus the coddled daughter of a rich tech executive finds herself slowly tormented by the poltergeist of a Weimer-era laborer, and a German intelligence officer confronts a troll wrecking havoc upon the city's unbuilt airport. An undead Nazi sympathizer romances a Greek emigre, while Turkish migrants curse the gentrifiers that have evicted them. Herzog's keen observational eye and acid wit turn modern city stories into deliciously dark satires that ride the knife-edge of suspenseful and terrifying.

The Berlin Shadow

Author: Jonathan Lichtenstein
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316540994
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
A deeply moving memoir that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, upon arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behavior. As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin. Written with tenderness and grace, The Berlin Shadow is a highly compelling story about time, trauma, family, and a father and son's attempt to emerge from the shadows of history.

Ghost Dance in Berlin

Author: Peter Wortsman
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
ISBN: 1609520793
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down — Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space. Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Führer’s Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution.

Ghosts of East Berlin

Author: Eric Friedman
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781501004612
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
November 9, 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Santa Barbara, California residents, Celeste McConnell Barber and her son, Eric Friedman, recollect that time in their joint memoir: Ghosts of East Berlin. It was January, 1988 when they departed for six months to live in East Berlin, the city at the center of Cold War politics - among the first Americans to be invited to the Eastern Bloc under Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) policy. The late Frank McConnell, Professor of English at U.C. Santa Barbara, had been awarded a Fulbright grant by the International Exchange of Scholars to teach at Humboldt University. The Fulbright was part of a global effort to enhance cultural exchange and communications between the West and Eastern Bloc nations. "Just six months after President Reagan issued his challenge - 'Tear down this wall!' -- and suddenly we were traveling in a subway through No Man's Land. Most remarkable, our family of three became goodwill ambassadors for our country," said McConnell Barber. "I was only 10 years old," added Friedman. "My world instantly expanded from a local to a global perspective. It was a lot to grasp at the time, but the friendships I forged and the foreign view of my home country changed me on a fundamental level. Twenty-five years later and I am still discovering how those six months impacted me as a child and adult, in my understanding of the responsibility of being an American citizen, and the significance that I am a descendant of European Jews." The memoir highlights the challenge of everyday life under Socialism, as the family grappled with both the American Embassy and German Stasi and the joys of simply engaging with East Berliners on the most human level, walls be damned!

Berlin Calling

Author: Paul Hockenos
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620971968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
An exhilarating journey through the subcultures, occupied squats, and late-night scenes in the anarchic first few years of Berlin after the fall of the wall Berlin Calling is a gripping account of the 1989 "peaceful revolution" in East Germany that upended communism and the tumultuous years of artistic ferment, political improvisation, and pirate utopias that followed. It’s the story of a newly undivided Berlin when protest and punk rock, bohemia and direct democracy, techno and free theater were the order of the day. In a story stocked with fascinating characters from Berlin’s highly politicized undergrounds—including playwright Heiner Müller, cult figure Blixa Bargeld of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, the internationally known French Wall artist Thierry Noir, the American multimedia artist Danielle de Picciotto (founder of Love Parade), and David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust incarnation—Hockenos argues that the DIY energy and raw urban vibe of the early 1990s shaped the new Berlin and still pulses through the city today. Just as Mike Davis captured Los Angeles in his City of Quartz, Berlin Calling is a unique account of how Berlin became hip, and of why it continues to attract creative types from the world over.

Where Ghosts Walked

Author: David Clay Large
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393038361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
The capital of the Nazi movement was not Berlin but Munich, according to Hitler himself. In examining why, historian David Clay Large begins in Munich four decades before World War I and finds a proto-fascist cultural heritage that proved fertile soil later for Hitler's movement. An engrossing account of the time and place that launched Hitler on the road to power. Photos.

Berlin

Author: White-Spunner Barney
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643137239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description
The intoxicating history of an extraordinary city and her people—from the medieval kings surrounding Berlin's founding to the world wars, tumult, and reunification of the twentieth century. There has always been a particular fervor about Berlin, a combination of excitement, anticipation, nervousness, and a feeling of the unexpected. Throughout history, it has been a city of tensions: geographical, political, religious, and artistic. In the nineteenth-century, political tension became acute between a city that was increasingly democratic, home to Marx and Hegel, and one of the most autocratic regimes in Europe. Artistic tension, between free thinking and liberal movements started to find themselves in direct contention with the formal official culture. Underlying all of this was the ethnic tension—between multi-racial Berliners and the Prussians. Berlin may have been the capital of Prussia but it was never a Prussian city. Then there is war. Few European cities have suffered from war as Berlin has over the centuries. It was sacked by the Hapsburg armies in the Thirty Years War; by the Austrians and the Russians in the eighteenth century; by the French, with great violence, in the early nineteenth century; by the Russians again in 1945 and subsequently occupied, more benignly, by the Allied Powers from 1945 until 1994. Nor can many cities boast such a diverse and controversial number of international figures: Frederick the Great and Bismarck; Hegel and Marx; Mahler, Dietrich, and Bowie. Authors Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, and Thomas Mann gave Berlin a cultural history that is as varied as it was groundbreaking. The story vividly told in Berlin also attempts to answer to one of the greatest enigmas of the twentieth century: How could a people as civilized, ordered, and religious as the Germans support first a Kaiser and then the Nazis in inflicting such misery on Europe? Berlin was never as supportive of the Kaiser in 1914 as the rest of Germany; it was the revolution in Berlin in 1918 that lead to the Kaiser's abdication. Nor was Berlin initially supportive of Hitler, being home to much of the opposition to the Nazis; although paradoxically Berlin suffered more than any other German city from Hitler’s travesties. In revealing the often-untold history of Berlin, Barney White-Spunner addresses this quixotic question that lies at the heart of Germany’s uniquely fascinating capital city.

The Ghosts of Sleath

Author: James Herbert
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447294602
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
Can a ghost haunt a ghost? Can the dead reach out and touch the living? Can ancient evil be made manifest? These are the questions that confront paranormal investigator David Ash in James Herbert's The Ghosts of Sleath, when Ash is sent to the picturesque village of Sleath in the Chiltern Hills to look into mysterious reports of mass hauntings. What he discovers is a terrified community gripped by horrors and terrorized by ghosts from the ancient village's long history. As each dark secret is unveiled and terrible, malign forces are unleashed, he will fear for his very sanity. Sleath. Where the dead will walk the streets. Continue the chilling series from the Master of Horror, with Ash.