Berlin: The Twenties

An illustrated cultural history of Weimar Berlin by the Austrian art historian Rainer Metzger, assembling some 400 photographs, paintings, posters and pieces of printed ephemera from the years between the November Revolution of 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

The book moves through the period year by year, setting the work of Grosz, Dix, Höch, Schwitters, Brecht, Piscator and the Bauhaus circle against the street photography, cabaret programmes, film stills, magazine covers and advertising that made the city the emblem of the modern metropolis. Expressionism, Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit and the building programmes of the late 1920s appear alongside inflation, unemployment and the political violence of the closing years. The picture editing is by the Viennese publisher Christian Brandstätter, whose firm issued the original German edition, Berlin: Die Zwanzigerjahre; Abrams published this English edition in New York in 2007.

Metzger (b. 1961) is professor of art history at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts and has written extensively on Van Gogh, Klimt and Viennese modernism.