| Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray Contributor(s): Wortsman, Peter (Author) |
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ISBN: 1609520785 ISBN-13: 9781609520786 Publisher: Travelers' Tales OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 2013 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Historical - Travel | Europe - Germany - Travel | Essays & Travelogues |
| Dewey: 943.155 |
| LCCN: 2012050191 |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 5.1" W x 7.2" (0.50 lbs) 175 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Germany |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down -- Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space. Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the F hrer's Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution. |