'Strikingly original, utterly absorbing' Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the Third Reich A Financial Times 'Book to Read in 2023' 1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian café for his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin. Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other's homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught butterfly at the end of Verá's bed. Little do they all know, the book burning will soon begin. Love in a Time of Hate skilfully interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in an irresistible journey into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.

1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian cafe for his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin. Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other's homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught butterfly at the end of Vera's bed. Little do they all know, the book burning will soon begin. Love in a Time of Hate skilfully interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in an irresistible journey into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.

A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate vision of a world that is about to change forever. The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Kafka falls in love; Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet; a young seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique; Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract; and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence. Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent, and in London, Paris and Vienna, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow. In a Munich hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience; Proust sets out in search of lost time; and while Stravinsky celebrates the Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes.

Travel is a fundamental experience of human existence. For Max Beckmann it was of existential importance both in a symbolic, but also in a deeply personal sense. In the 1920s, he regularly traveled to the noble health resorts and palace hotels on the Dutch, Italian, and French coasts. His defamation as a "degenerate" artist by the Nazi regime, however, forced him to retreat, first from Frankfurt to Berlin and subsequently into exile in Amsterdam. His emigration to the United States marked the culmination of a life entwined with the longing to travel as well as uprooting, transit and exile. Max Beckmann. DEPARTURE assembles an outstanding selection of artworks and initiates a dialogue with hitherto unseen objects and materials from the Max Beckmann Archive. It shows Beckmann’s relationship to film and literature as a producer of images of aspirations and longing resonating with notions of identity and home.

A cultural history of nature may sound like a paradox, but a second glance proves it to be a clever theme. For though we are used to perceiving nature and culture as opposites, they are actually closely interwoven. This is precisely what Klaus Littman shows us in his startling project Tree Connections. In 2019, around three hundred trees were planted in the pitch at the Woerthersee football stadium in Klagenfurt. The result is the extraordinary experience of witnessing a confrontation between two otherwise strictly separate kinds of spaces. Blending the natural and the constructed worlds blurs their boundaries, making them practically indistinguishable. At the same time, the breathtaking views of this unique project offer fascinating insights into our current, unecological ideas and activities. An exhibition curated by Littmann will take place at the Basel H. Geiger Kulturstiftung starting in May 2021, featuring works by Alexandre Calame, Joseph Beuys, Christo, Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, Gunther Uecker, Tony Cragg, Michael Sailstorfer, Miriam Cahn, and Sol LeWitt, among others.

Carl Hummel (1821-1907) ist einer der vergessenen Kunstler des 19. Jahrhunderts. UEber 100 Jahre hinweg lag sein Nachlass im Schlossmuseum Weimar verborgen, nun treten die wildromantischen, poetischen Werke des Landschaftsmalers in die Welt. Der Katalog versammelt einen bislang der OEffentlichkeit vollkommen unbekannten Teil dieses Nachlasses: OElstudien aus Italien, Thuringen und von der Ostsee belegen, dass es sich bei Hummel um eine der grossen malerischen Begabungen des 19. Jahrhunderts handelt. Sie zeugen von dessen erstaunlichem Naturgefuhl sowie seiner aussergewoehnlichen Fahigkeit, Licht und Atmosphare auf dem Bildtrager einzufangen. Genaueste Beobachtung verbindet sich bei Hummel mit einem melodischen, warmherzigen Stil. Er kreiert Bilder voller Schoenheit und Anmut und lasst Naturgewalten geradezu spurbar werden. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes verleihen Einblick in das Leben sowie das kunstlerische Umfeld des geburtigen Weimarers.