Hamlyn, 1979, hardcover, illustrated, index, 208 pages. large format, condition: very good.
Photographs and accompanying text portray the artistic, cultural, social, and political life in Berlin during the 1920s.
Between 1943 and 1945 allied bombers destroyed a third of the city's 1.5 milion buildings, laying waste to 10 sq. miles of central Berlin...
In 1945 after the bombing had stopped, the Russians turned 22,000 guns on what was left and raised it to the ground.
Happily Susanne Keegan nee Everett (she is married to the great military historian John Keegan) has given us a huge slice of wonderful nostalgia in its best form - photographs!!!
And a text which is sparse but never wasted.
These deal with the city itself as well as its film, art, music, cabaret, Bauhaus architecture and design, politics and history of the empire, republic and dictatorship. "Only in Berlin was there so much hunger for the new, so fierce a rejection of the old, and so much intellectual and artistic freedom to translate these new ideas into reality.
By contrast "the Third Reich was to commit not only physical but artistic murder.
Propaganda took the place of experimentation,
bigotry replaced freedom of expression,
and sentimentality triumphed over satire.