Voluptuous Panic

This seductive sourcebook of rare visual delights from pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring hip club goers, filmmakers, gay historians, graphic designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. This expanded edition includes “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their often-bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” Mel Gordon is professor of theater at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also the author of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Feral House).

This lively collage of excerpts from German periodicals shows a culture at its decadent peak before the Nazi suppression.

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including dozens of photographs and drawings that recreate Anita's "Repertoire of the Damned." Book jacket.

Each chapter examines the correspondence of a particular psycho-analyst with a particular author.

Mel Gordon's companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.

A fascinating portrait of the turbulent political, social, and cultural life of the city of Berlin in the 1920s.

One of the most controversial and ironic of twentieth-century modernisms, Dada swept through the arts after the shock of World War I, when poets, painters, filmmakers, and performers joined forces to challenge conventions of society and art. The only collection of its kind, this volume includes writings by leading Dadaists: Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Huelsenbeck, Roger Vitrac, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Francis Picabia, and others.

Richard Sorge was a spy, a Russian spy and an extraordinarily successful one. Two quotes illustrate this. The first is by Larry Collins, 'Richard Sorge's brilliant espionage work saved Stalin and the Soviet Union from defeat in the fall of 1941, probably prevented a Nazi victory in World War Two and thereby assured the dimensions of the world we live in today.' The second is by Frederick Forsyth, 'The spies in history who can say from their graves, the information I supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Richard Sorge was in that group.' Masquerading as a Nazi journalist, Richard Sorge worked undetected as head of a Red Army spy ring until he was arrested and executed in Japan during the Second World War. Such an astonishing story as Sorge's is bound to attract attention but not only was this the first book to offer an authoritative account, it has, in many ways, not least in the quality of its writing, never been superseded. The authors rejected legend and found facts that were even stranger. They provide an account as reliable as it is enthralling of possibly the most successful spy who ever operated; a man who for eight years transmitted from Japan a continuous stream of the most valuable information, often derived from the highest quarters, culminating in precise advance information of Hitler's invasion of Russia, of Japan's decision not to attack Russia in 1941, and of the near certainty of war against America that October or November instead. Jointly written books sometimes jar, but not this one. The authors had complementary skills, F. W. Deakin being an authority on twentieth-century European history and G. R Storry no less of an authority on twentieth-century Japan. Together they do justice to 'the man whom I regard as the most formidable spy in history,' (Ian Fleming).