Ghost Dance In Berlin

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 Führer'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.

This volume engages with memory of the Holocaust as expressed in literature, film, and other media. It focuses on the cultural memory of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors, while also taking into view those who were children during the Nazi period. Language loss, language acquisition, and the multiple needs of translation are recurrent themes for all of the authors discussed. By bringing together authors and scholars (often both) from different generations, countries, and languages, and focusing on transgenerational and translational issues, this book presents multiple perspectives on the subject of Holocaust memory, its impact, and its ongoing worldwide communication.

"Although author Carole Maso follows the contours of fiction, style is everything in Ghost Dance, a strangely lovely and perplexing book . . . she has a fine ear and her literary gift is impressive." —San Francisco Chronicle Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Carole Maso. Vanessa Turin's family has been broken up by an event so devastating she cannot bear to face it straight on. Her mother, the brilliant and beautiful poet Christine Wing, seems simply to have disappeared, and her gentle, silent father also vanishes. In Ghost Dance, the reader experiences firsthand the dimensions of Vanessa's longing, the capabilities of her imagination, the persistence of her memory, and the ferocity of her love as she struggles to retrieve her family, to reclaim her country, and to come to terms with overwhelming sorrow.

The Ghost Dance religion that swept through the Plains Indian tribes in the early 1890s was embraced wholeheartedly by the Pawnees. It was a message of hope to a people devastated by the attacks of enemy tribes, the encroachment of white settlers, and the outbreak of epidemics. For the Pawnees, who were looking to the U.S. government and trying unsuccessfully to farm their land, the Ghost Dance movement promised salvation: a restoration of the Indian dead, the buffalo, and the old times. Alexander Lesser shows how the Ghost Dance brought about a partial revival of traditional Pawnee culture and its dances and songs. The ancient guessing hand game, remembered best by a tribe starved for the joy of play, became an important part of the Ghost Dance ritual. What had been a gambling game, a representation of warfare played by men, was transformed into a sacred game played by both sexes as an expression of faith or ?good fortune.? Lesser surveys the history of the Pawnee Indians and their relations with the federal government and describes in detail the Ghost Dance hand games that ?were the chief intellectual product of Pawnee culture? from the onset of the messianic movement to the original publication of this book in 1933. Citing such authorities as James Mooney and Stewart Culin, Lesser produced an enduring classic, now introduced by Alice Beck Kehoe, a professor of anthropology at Marquette University and the author of The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization.

This book traces the ways Berlin has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors. It presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society.

In tiny, remote Lawton, Vermont, a series of grisly murders draws filmmaker Patrick Gallagher and policewoman Andie Nightingale toward each other--and deeper into the horrors of a past century.