Helmut Gruber: Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (1991)

“From 1919 to 1934, the Socialist government in Vienna sought to create a comprehensive working-class culture, striving to provide a foretaste of the socialist utopia in the present. In Red Vienna, Gruber critically examines the impact of this experiment in all areas of life, from massive public housing projects and health and education programs to socialist parades, festivals, and sporting events designed to create a ‘new’ working class.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1991
ISBN 0195069145, 9780195069143
x+270 pages

Reviews: Mark Emanuel Blum (Central European History, 1992), George V. Strong (History of European Ideas, 1993), William D. Bowman (Journal of Social History, 1993), Alfred Diamant (American Historical Review, 1993), J. Robert Wegs (Austrian History Yearbook, 1993), Karen J. Vogel (American Political Science Review, 1993), Albert Lindemann (International Labor and Working-Class History, 1993).

Wikipedia
WorldCat

PDF (12 MB, updated on 2021-4-22, via Libcom.org)
PDF (6 MB, added on 2021-4-22, via ZLibrary)

See also Eve Blau’s The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934, MIT Press, 2000 (PDF, 18 MB)

Roman Jakobson: My Futurist Years (1992/1997)

“Born in Moscow in 1896, Roman Jakobson was a founder of and a key figure in two influential schools of 20th century literary thought: Russian formalism, and later, during his years in Prague, structuralism. Forced to flee the invading Nazis, Jakobson spent time in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, before coming to the United States in 1941. During his long and illustrious academic career in the U.S., Jakobson was a professor of literature and linguistics at Columbia, Harvard and MIT. Up to his death in 1982, he published 500 monographs and articles on linguistics, Slavic studies, poetics, and semiotics.

Vital as the extraordinary innovative and turbulent period that spawned these writings, My Futurist Years is one of the most important reflections on the Russian Futurist movement and a cornerstone in the career of one of the century’s greatest linguistic and literary thinkers.

Jakobson’s rare sensibility in his explorations in language and art are no more evident than in this volume, detailing the formative moment in his public and personal life. Along with the quite moving recollections of his friendships with such Modernist figures as Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Malevich, the book includes Jakobson’s letters to other Futurists active in the scene and to his close friend Elsa Brik, later to gain notoriety as the French writer Elsa Triolet and wife of the poet Louis Aragon.” (from the back cover)

First published in Russian as Jakobson-budetljanin: sbornik materialov, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1992.

Compiled and Edited by Bengt Jangfeldt
Translated and with an Introduction by Stephen Rudy
Publisher Marsilio, New York, 1997
ISBN 0941419797
371 pages
in the Unlimited Edition

Review: Avril Pyman (Slavonic & East European Review, 1993).

WorldCat

PDF (21 MB, updated on 2019-9-27)

Mel Gordon: Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (2000–)

This sourcebook of rare visual documents and study of pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture.

Publisher Feral House, Los Angeles, 2000
Expanded edition, 2006
ISBN 1932595112
303 pages

Review: Lemons (Salon, 2000).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (64 MB, updated on 2018-5-8)

See also Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935, 1997.