"Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the son of a German banker and an Irish beauty, was a diplomat and publisher who moved easily between the worlds of art, politics, and society. He lived in Berlin, but traveled throughout Europe, always with a keen eye to the political climate of the times. Kessler's work as a publisher of rare limited-edition art books brought him in contact with the great artists of his era. His work as a diplomat and his canny timing ensured his presence at the world-changing political events of the day. He recorded in his diaries the world that he witnessed." "Kessler's diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people: Einstein engaging him in long discussions on his theories, Josephine Baker dancing naked in a friend's drawing room, Lloyd George at the farcical Genoa conference in 1922, and "the endless SA goose-stepping parade" in Berlin at Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933. There were dinners with Max Reinhardt, Georg Grosz, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide, lunches with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Erik Satie, and others encapsulated in this time frame. Fascinated by the cynical spirit of doomed Berlin, his diaries record at first hand the agonizing collapse and death of Weimar Germany and the arrival of the Nazis." --Book Jacket.

Includes list of members, 1882-1902 and proceedings of the annual meetings and various supplements.

"The first carefully researched historical analysis of the co-evolution of Berlin and its infrastructure services"--

Adolf Hitler's obsession with art not only fueled his vision of a purified Nazi state--it was the core of his fascist ideology. Its aftermath lives on to this day. Nazism ascended by brute force and by cultural tyranny. Weimar Germany was a society in turmoil, and Hitler's rise was achieved not only by harnessing the military but also by restricting artistic expression. Hitler, an artist himself, promised the dejected citizens of postwar Germany a purified Reich, purged of "degenerate" influences. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he removed so-called "degenerate" art from German society and promoted artists whom he considered the embodiment of the "Aryan ideal." Artists who had produced challenging and provocative work fled the country. Curators and art dealers organized their stock. Thousands of great artworks disappeared--and only a fraction of them were rediscovered after World War II. In 2013, the German government confiscated roughly 1,300 works by Henri Matisse, George Grosz, Claude Monet, and other masters from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Hitler's primary art dealers. For two years, the government kept the discovery a secret. In Hitler's Last Hostages, Mary M. Lane reveals the fate of those works and tells the definitive story of art in the Third Reich and Germany's ongoing struggle to right the wrongs of the past.

Through images, many of which have not been published before, this book tells the story of Berlin in the 20th century. It documents the changes in the city from the viewpoint of the activities of its citizens: at work, leisure, protest and politics.

An American labor leader's eyewitness perspective on the rise of Nazi power in Weimar-era Berlin