Katja Mann, wife of German novelist Thomas Mann, recalls their fifty years of marriage and their history both as a couple and independent intellectuals. Born in Germany, the Manns were exiled to the United States during WWII, and returned to Europe after the war, settling in Kilchberg near Zurich. Katja (née Pringsheim) was a witness to all her husband’s writing and guarded him from interruptions throughout the years. Thomas Mann’s well known...

Featuring unprecedented access to an influential and multi-faceted institution, The Great Museum reveals the inner-workings of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the most important art institutions in the world. Widely known as the art palace that houses paintings by Rembrandt, Diego Velasquez, Pieter Brueghel, Peter Paul Rubens and Caravaggio, among many other canonical works, the museum also features a remarkable and magnetic group of dedicated...

In 1987, after over ten years of work, Werner Tübke (1929-2004), one of East Germany’s most important painters, completed the monumental, oil-on-canvas painting The Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. Painted in the Renaissance styles of Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer, the painting—measuring 14 meters high and 123 meters wide—is in the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia, the site of the last battle of the German Peasants’...

This portrait of East German sculptor and graphic artist Fritz Cremer (1906-1993) shows the artist at work in his studio and some of his art works, including sculptures for his Buchenwald Memorial. It accompanies the images with a text by Bertolt Brecht, read by actor Wolfgang Heinz of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

At 47, German sculptor and graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) lost her beloved son Peter in WWI. She began to process her grief in drawings and sculptures, including the famous memorial The Grieving Parents, and became increasingly active in protesting social injustice. She often used the Goethe quotation "Seed corn should not be ground!" as an argument against senseless war and the killing of millions of young men. When her memorial was finally...

In 1986, after suffering many obstacles and interference in his work, Lutz Dammbeck moved to Hamburg, West Germany. Two years later, in an attempt to start anew, he explores his decision and tries to sort out his past as an artist. In the process, he interviews artists Cornelia Schleime, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling and Hans Scheib, who had been core members of the alternative art scene in East Germany. They had all worked together in the 8mm-scene and...

While working on his Hercules Concept, director Lutz Dammbeck began to study the life and work of the German sculptor Arno Breker (1900-91). How could a highly talented sculptor who had met French avant-garde artists in Paris in the 1920s, and whose works were first labeled as “degenerate art” become one of Adolf Hitler’s and Albert Speer’s preferred sculptors and protégé? In trying to find an answer, Dammbeck met with contemporaries and...

Es gibt bereits zahlreiche Literatur (Biographien, Fotobände, Nachschlagewerke) über Udo Lindenberg. Dieses Bilder/Reim/Werk ist das philosophische Gegenstück dazu. Es beschreibt in Versform die Entstehungsgeschichte des Panikorchesters sowie das Leben des Panikrockers aus Gronau bei Münster. Weiter werden in Texten und Bildern einige der Wichtigsten Stationen Udo Lindenbergs beschrieben und beleuchtet. Hierzu diente als Vorlage die Biographie...

At the Vienna Art Academy in 1994, an unidentified person painted over 27 works by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer in black. Rainer had become world-famous for his abstract art and, in particular, for his over-layering of photographs and overpainting of his own and other artists’ works. But who painted over the “overpainter”? Speculation rages: Did he attack his works himself? A year later, an unsigned letter surfaces claiming responsibility...

As of the late 1970s, young East German artists, especially in the larger cities, created spaces for cultural experimentation that were separate from official art channels. Through their art, they rebelled against both the existing art market, and the country’s political climate. Leipzig, for example, became an important center of this subculture created by painters, photographers, musicians and poets. From 1985 to 1989, the EIGEN+ART gallery in...