LENS Newsletter

Berlin Without Walls …
If you listen to WNYC you know that between November 2^nd and 14^th the station focused on Berlin’s cultural reemergence with a multi-media festival complementing Carneige Hall’s “Berlin in Lights” and the seventeen day New York residency of the Berlin Philharmonic. The cabaret singer, Ute Lemper, hosted the show, Evening Music, on WNYC from November 5^th to November 9^th  and played and talked about both contemporary cabaret music and that from the Weimar period.  The Weimar period began in November, 1918 when the German Empire collapsed and ended on January 30,1933 when the President Paul von Hindenberg named Adolf Hitler as chancellor. It was period of continuous political and economic upheaval and at the same time, as Peter Gay says, “a breathless era of cultural flowering.” Berlin was at the center of much of this artistic explosion and experimentation. The young and talented such as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht came to Berlin and fed off the quick wit and irreverence of theater and cabaret audiences. Berlin horrified others. Stefan Zweig wrote, “Berlin transformed itself into the Babal of the world….the Germans brought to perversion all their vehemence and love of system”. Weimar lasted only fourteen years. After 1933, many artists fled or were killed and the period has taken on an almost mythic quality.           

If Berlin and the Weimar period interest you, the Chappaqua Library has many resources. We have books on Bauhaus and on the culture and history of the short-lived republic such as:  

Peter Gay    Weimar Culture: the outsider as insideroriginally written in 1968 and reissued in 2001 

or the 1974 classic by:Walter Laqueur   Weimar: a cultural history, 1918-1933 

or more recently, in 2007, from the Univ. of Minnesota historian:Eric Weitz     Weimar Germany: promise and tragedy 

And a graphic novel centered on 8 months in 1928/29 by:Jason Lutes     Berlin: city of stones 

We also have the poems and plays of Brecht and the music of Weill and others. On cd, the library owns Ute Lemper singing Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in The Threepenny Opera. Ask at the reference desk for help finding these and other materials on Weimar.

This is my last LENS.

I will begin working at the library in North Salem in December. This electronic newsletter has reflected my interests and those of our webmaster, Terry Martini, for the last four years. Martha Alcott will take over in 2008 and it will now showcase what she thinks is the best or at least what is fun and exciting in this library.    Carolyn Reznick