Berlin and Its Culture: A Historical Portrait [Hardcover]

What is the culture of a city? Is it the corporate personality, the politics of the founders, the undertaking of its artists and visionaries? Berlin and Its Culture surveys all these arenas, paying particular attention to the writers, philosophers, actors, and later, interior designers and filmmakers. In relating the lives and accomplishments of its inhabitants, Ronald Taylor maps the social patterns of the city in fascinating detail.

Taylor takes care to include accounts of life in both East and West Berlin, and while he does provide some coverage of Nazi culture, he does not perform an in-depth analysis. Rather, with his focus on the periods of artistic proliferation, he writes at length on the Romanticism of Berlin's early years and the flourishing of literature during the Weimar period.

The book itself is a weighty, glossy endeavor. The reader can not turn a page or two without encountering an illustration, painting reproduction (often in color), or elaborate map of the changing face of the city. Berlin and Its Culture is a visual, visceral treat and an appealing survey of one of the world's most complex locales.

An ambitious--and successful--attempt to grapple with a problematic city. Few cities in Europe can compete with Berlin in laying a claim to history. Taylor (emeritus professor of German at the University of Sussex, England) has written biographies of Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Kurt Weill, as well as histories of medieval and modern Germany. Here, a lifetime of study is distilled. The book--like the city itself--makes demands, but the reader will be rewarded for perseverance. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the author takes us to 1990 and the formal dissolution of the East German state. As Taylor readily admits, he begins with a conventional conception of what constitutes ``culture'' (literature, philosophy, painting and sculpture, theater, music, and the decorative arts). Some may criticize the lack of attention paid to popular culture, although most scholars would now recognize that the division we draw today between ``high'' and ``low'' (or more properly ``popular'') culture was blurred for most of European history. To his credit, Taylor recognizes that contemporary cultural history overlaps with traditional intellectual history and the more modern forms of social history. Of particular interest are the last three chapters on Weimar, Nazi, and postwar Berlin: Otto Dix and George Grosz shockingly revealed the decay behind a glittering, bourgeois Berlin in the 1920s; the bombast and false heroism of the Nazi regime is contrasted with the quiet dignity and poignant literature of the ``inner emigration''; and postwar Berlin is divided between a commitment to socialist realism and the attraction of artistic freedom found in the West. Taylor's postscript touches on the problem of a unified Berlin in a unified country: He is cautiously optimistic. Beautifully produced and profusely illustrated (the color reproductions are particularly good), a look at a city whose long history has much to teach us. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

...Taylor offers a useful overview of the culture of one of the world's fascinating cities, a metropolis where the brisk pace of change has become its most familiar marker. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Edward Dimendberg

This beautiful book--a full cultural portrait of Berlin--reveals the spirit of this vital and important city by focusing on the culture it produced from its medieval beginnings to the reunification of 1990. Lavishly illustrated the book surveys the literature, philosophy, music, theater, and visual and decorative arts that emerged from, and were expressive of, the evolving social patterns of the city. 50 color and 160 b&w illustrations .