"Superb, sensitive, honest and compelling . . . a simple but terrifying tale of the destruction of a single Jewish family."--The New York Times Winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award His best friend thought Friedrich was lucky. His family had a good home and enough money, and in Germany in the early 1930s, many were unemployed. But when Hitler came to power, things began to change. Friedrich was expelled from school, and then his mother died and his father was deported. For Friedrich was Jewish.
A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape. In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.
In the final phase of the World War II, the Allies launched a bombing campaign that inflicted unprecedented destruction on Germany. This work attempts to document life under the Allied bombing, and renders the annihilation of cities such as Dresden.
After an adoptive mother tells her daughter all the reasons that she is her "real mother," the young girl realizes that her mother is right, even though they do not look alike.
One of his generation's most popular artists, German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich is known for his allegorical landscapes that convey a deep sense of contemplation and melancholy. 2024 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of this outstanding artist, whose paintings continue to gain in topicality–hardly a discussion on climate change without one of his iconic paintings, such as The Sea of Ice, being invoked as a silent witness. Barbara Hess examines the painter's work and his life, from its lasting poignancy to the great themes of Romanticism and drawing. In the playful format of an A–Z book, the author takes us on a timely journey, showing how new views and perspectives can be gained from what has long been thought familiar. CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH (1774-1840) is the most important artist of the German Romantic period. Born in Greifswald, then part of the Kingdom of Sweden, he studied drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, before settling in Dresden in 1798. His compositions are visualizations of emotional landscapes that create an instant of sublimity. His works elude lucidity and have therefore continuously been open to new interpretations. Art historian BARBARA HESS (*1964) has published works on avant-garde galleries, Abstract Expressionism, the documenta, Lucio Fontana and Jasper Johns, among others. Most recently, she has co-edited the diary of the German post-war avant-garde artist HP Zimmer, published this spring by Hatje Cantz.
This story begins in the late 1890's and documents the life of an ambitious young man who grew up eagerly looking forward to a comfortable and sheltered life in an isolated community in Russia near the Polish border. In his youth this farm boy dreamed of becoming the best blacksmith in this community of ethnic German colonies in southern Russia. However, his plans for the future were interrupted when he was conscripted into the Russian Navy. Here he served as a stoker and rose in rank to become an astute marine engineer, and was decorated for bravery by Tsar Nicholas II in the disastrous Russo-Japanese naval Battle of the Yellow Sea, while he served on the flagship of Russia's First Pacific Squadron. Although he had diligently served his community, his country, and his Tsar, it is difficult to concieved how this dedicated citizen of a land which he loved and cherished, that he would end his life as a blind and destitute inmante in one of Stalin's slave labour camps.
Though little known today, Johann Friedrich Herbart was one of the leading philosophers of his age, the competitor of Schelling and Hegel. Although he was trained by Fichte, Herbart soon became a critic of the idealist tradition and developed a philosophy antithetical to it. His own philosophy was opposed to the idealist tradition in important respects: he defended a dualism between the factual and normative; he was an ontological pluralist rather than monist; and he accepted crucial Kantian dualisms that had been rejected by the idealists. Herbart was also an important forerunner of analytic philosophy, first in breaking with the idealist tradition, and second in insisting that the proper method of philosophy is the analysis of concepts rather than speculation about the universe as a whole. In the first intellectual biography of Herbart in English, Frederick C. Beiser studies the development of one of 19th-century Germany's most important philosophers, from his education in Oldenburg and Jena to his final years in Göttingen.
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a major figure in the German Romantic movement, painted sublime works representing nature at its most melancholic and desolate. One of his most famous motifs was that of two intimate figures, seen from behind, gazing at the moon. Friedrich painted three versions of this theme, one of which -- Two Men Contemplating the Moon -- has recently been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book discusses the Metropolitan's painting in conjunction with the other two versions and a number of related paintings and drawings by Friedrich and his Dresden friends. It also presents fascinating details about the moon itself -- including what was known about it in Friedrich's lifetime and its presence and symbolism in contemporary Romantic poetry.
