1.
Berlin
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Berlin is the capital and the largest city of Germany as well as one of its constituent 16 states. With a population of approximately 3.5 million, Berlin is the second most populous city proper, due to its location in the European Plain, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one-third of the area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers. Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world, following German reunification in 1990, Berlin once again became the capital of all-Germany. Berlin is a city of culture, politics, media. Its economy is based on high-tech firms and the sector, encompassing a diverse range of creative industries, research facilities, media corporations. Berlin serves as a hub for air and rail traffic and has a highly complex public transportation network. The metropolis is a popular tourist destination, significant industries also include IT, pharmaceuticals, biomedical engineering, clean tech, biotechnology, construction and electronics. Modern Berlin is home to world renowned universities, orchestras, museums and its urban setting has made it a sought-after location for international film productions. The city is known for its festivals, diverse architecture, nightlife, contemporary arts. Since 2000 Berlin has seen the emergence of a cosmopolitan entrepreneurial scene, the name Berlin has its roots in the language of West Slavic inhabitants of the area of todays Berlin, and may be related to the Old Polabian stem berl-/birl-. All German place names ending on -ow, -itz and -in, since the Ber- at the beginning sounds like the German word Bär, a bear appears in the coat of arms of the city. It is therefore a canting arm, the first written records of towns in the area of present-day Berlin date from the late 12th century. Spandau is first mentioned in 1197 and Köpenick in 1209, although these areas did not join Berlin until 1920, the central part of Berlin can be traced back to two towns. Cölln on the Fischerinsel is first mentioned in a 1237 document,1237 is considered the founding date of the city. The two towns over time formed close economic and social ties, and profited from the right on the two important trade routes Via Imperii and from Bruges to Novgorod. In 1307, they formed an alliance with a common external policy, in 1415 Frederick I became the elector of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, which he ruled until 1440. In 1443 Frederick II Irontooth started the construction of a new palace in the twin city Berlin-Cölln
2.
Der Sturm
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Der Sturm was a German art and literary magazine covering Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, among other artistic movements. It was published between 1910 and 1932, Der Sturm was established in Berlin in 1910 by Herwarth Walden. It ran weekly until monthly in 1914, and became a quarterly in 1924, the magazine modelled on the Italian literary magazine La Voce published in Florence from 1908 to 1916. Der Sturm ceased publication in 1932, Der Sturm consisted of pieces such as expressionistic dramas, artistic portfolios, essays from artists, and theoretical writings on art from Herwarth Walden. The most well-known publications resulting from the magazine were the Sturmbücher, the term Sturm was branded by Walden to represent the way in which modern art was penetrating Germany at the time. Regularly, poems and other texts of French and/or French-speaking expressionists were published and this relationship was renewed after the war despite the hostilities between the two countries caused by the fighting. The magazine also fostered the Galerie Der Sturm, started by Walden to celebrate its 100th edition, the gallery became the focus for Berlins modern art scene for a decade. Despite this, the gallery declined in importance after the war and closed in 1924, accordingly, Walden organized, until 1932, more than 200 exhibitions in its premises in Berlin plus multiple other touring exhibitions in Germany and also in most other major European cities. List of magazines in Germany Die Aktion Proto-Cubism Cubism Orphism
3.
Der Blaue Reiter
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Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. They considered that the principles of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, a group Kandinsky had founded in 1909, had become too strict, Der Blaue Reiter was an art movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded in 1905. Der Blaue Reiter lacked an artistic manifesto, but it was centered on Kandinsky, Kandinsky wrote 20 years later that the name is derived from Marcs enthusiasm for horses and Kandinskys love of riders, combined with a shared love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality, the darker the blue, within the group, artistic approaches and aims varied from artist to artist, however, the artists shared a common desire to express spiritual truths through their art. They believed in the promotion of art, the connection between visual art and music, the spiritual and symbolic associations of colour, and a spontaneous. Members were interested in European medieval art and primitivism, as well as the contemporary, as a result of their encounters with cubist, fauvist and Rayonist ideas, they moved towards abstraction. Der Blaue Reiter organized exhibitions in 1911 and 1912 that toured Germany and they also published an almanac featuring contemporary, primitive and folk art, along with childrens paintings. In 1913 they exhibited in the first German Herbstsalon, the group was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Franz Marc and August Macke were killed in combat, Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky were forced to move back to Russia because of their Russian citizenship. There were also differences in opinion within the group, as a result, Der Blaue Reiter was short-lived, lasting for only three years from 1911 to 1914. Supported by their dealer Galka Scheyer, Kandinsky, Feininger, Klee, together they exhibited and lectured together in the United States from 1924 on. An extensive collection of paintings by Der Blaue Reiter is exhibited in the Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich. Conceived in June 1911, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach was published in early 1912, by Piper, Munich, in an edition of 1100 copies, on 11 May, Franz Marc received a first print. The volume was edited by Kandinsky and Marc, its costs were underwritten by the industrialist and art collector Bernhard Koehler and it contained reproductions of more than 140 artworks, and 14 major articles. A second volume was planned, but the start of World War I prevented it, instead, a second edition of the original was printed in 1914, again by Piper. The art reproduced in the Almanac marked a turn away from a Eurocentric. The five works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin were outnumbered by seven from Henri Rousseau and thirteen from child artists. From January 1912 through July 1914, the exhibition toured Europe with venues in Cologne, Berlin, Bremen, Hagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Budapest, Oslo, Helsinki, Trondheim and Göteborg
4.
Futurism
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Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane, although it was largely an Italian phenomenon, there were parallel movements in Russia, England, Belgium and elsewhere. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past, Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurisms artistic style. Important Futurist works included Marinettis Manifesto of Futurism, Boccionis sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, to some extent Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism. Futurism is a movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. We want no part of it, the past, he wrote, publishing manifestos was a feature of Futurism, and the Futurists wrote them on many topics, including painting, architecture, religion, clothing and cooking. The founding manifesto did not contain an artistic programme, which the Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. This committed them to a universal dynamism, which was to be represented in painting. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, the Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others. Later, Severini, who lived in Paris, attributed their backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from Paris, the centre of avant-garde art. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism and following a visit to Paris in 1911 the Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists, Cubism offered them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. They often painted modern urban scenes, carràs Funeral of the Anarchist Galli is a large canvas representing events that the artist had himself been involved in, in 1904. The action of an attack and riot is rendered energetically with diagonals. His Leaving the Theatre uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated, Boccionis The City Rises represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control. The Futurists aimed through their art thus to enable the viewer to apprehend the inner being of what they depicted, Boccioni developed these ideas at length in his book, Pittura scultura Futuriste, Dinamismo plastico. Ballas Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash exemplifies the Futurists insistence that the world is in constant movement
5.
Oskar Kokoschka
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Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. He was born in Pöchlarn, second child to Gustav Josef Kokoschka, a Czech goldsmith and his older brother died in infancy in 1887, he had a sister, Berta and a brother, Bohuslav. Oskar had a belief in omens, spurred by a story of a fire breaking out in Pöchlarn shortly after his mother gave birth to him. Kokoschkas life was not easy due to a lack of financial help from his father. They constantly moved into flats, farther and farther from the thriving center of the town. Concluding that his father was inadequate, Kokoschka drew closer to his mother, he felt that he was the head of the household, Kokoschka entered secondary school at Realschule, where emphasis was placed on the study of modern subjects such as science and language. Kokoschka was not interested in subjects, as he found he only excelled in art. This education of classic literature is said to have influenced his artwork, one of Kokoschkas professors suggested he pursue a career in fine art. Against his fathers will, Kokoschka applied to Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Kunstgewerbeschule was an extremely progressive school that focused mainly on architecture, furniture, crafts and modern design. Unlike the more prestigious and traditional Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, Kokoschka studied there from 1904 to 1909, and was influenced by his professor Carl Otto Czeschka in developing an original style. Among Kokoschkas early works were drawings of children, which portrayed them as awkward. Kokoschka had no training in painting and so approached the medium without regard to the traditional or correct way to paint. The teachers at Kunstgewerbeschule helped Kokoschka gain opportunities through the Wiener Werkstätte or Viennese Workshops, Kokoschkas first commissions were postcards and drawings for children. Kokoschka said that it gave him the basis of artistic training and his early career was marked by portraits of Viennese celebrities, painted in a nervously animated style. Kokoschka had a passionate, often stormy affair with Alma Mahler and it began in 1912, shortly after the death of her four-year-old daughter Maria Mahler and her affair with Walter Gropius. After several years together, Alma rejected him, explaining that she was afraid of being too overcome with passion and he continued to love her his entire life, and one of his greatest works, The Bride of the Wind, is a tribute to her. The poet Georg Trakl visited the studio while Kokoschka was painting this masterpiece, Kokoschkas poem Allos Makar was inspired by this relationship. He volunteered for service as a cavalryman in the Austrian army in World War I, at the hospital, the doctors decided that he was mentally unstable
6.
Georg Schrimpf
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Georg Schrimpf was a German painter and graphic artist. Schrimpf was listed as a producer of Degenerate Art by the German National Socialist government in the 1930s, Schrimpf was born in Munich, his father having died before Schrimpfs birth. His stepfather later forced him to leave home, in 1902 he apprenticed as a baker in Passau. From 1905 to 1914 Schrimpf wandered through Belgium, France, Switzerland and Northern Italy, working as a waiter, baker, and coal shuffler. In 1913 he lived in an anarchist colony in Switzerland, where he formed a friendship with Oskar Maria Graf, also a baker, but later a famous novelist. With the outbreak of the First World War, the antimilitaristic Schrimpf successfully employed every trick to avoid military service, in so doing, however. From 1915–1918 Schrimpf lived in Berlin, where he worked as a freelance artist, in his free time he used every minute for drawing, painting, and wood carving. Mostly self-taught as an artist, he learned by copying the Old Masters, in 1916 the famous publicist and art expert Herwarth Walden exhibited some of Schrimpfs paintings and woodcarvings in his Berlin gallery Der Stumm where they received much public attention. At this time and in this gallery Schrimpf met the painter Maria Uhden, the two married in 1917 but she died the following year, due to complications from the birth of their son Mark. He participated with the November Group and was included in their exhibitions of 1919,1920,1924 and 1929, Schrimpf published works, in such the Munich expressionist magazines as Der Weg, Die Bücherkiste and Die Sichel. In 1919 he was involved in the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic which attempted to establish a socialist state in Bavaria and was arrested after the movement was crushed, in 1921 his works were shown in Munich by art dealer Hans Goltz. As early as the 1920s, Schrimpf was regarded as being a representative of the wing of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Other prominent representatives of the wing included Alexander Kanoldt and Franz Lenk, the movements so called verist wing included such artists as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Georg Scholz. In 1924 he moved to Italy where his wife, Hedwig Marshall. In 1925 Schrimpf participated in the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, two years later, he began teaching at the Meisterschule für Dekorationskunst in Munich. The right-wing of the movement were not immediately condemned by the Nazi regime at a stage and were able to take on professorships in painting after the regime seized power in 1933. Schrimpfs work was seen as a form of German Romanticism by the authorities. Schrimpf became professor at the Royal School of Art in Berlin in 1933 and he had been a short-time member of Rote Hilfe, a socialist organization
7.
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. Thoreaus books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes and he was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreaus aunt each wrote that Thoreau is pronounced like the word thorough, Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced Thó-row, with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable. Among modern-day American speakers, it is more commonly pronounced thə-ROH—/θəˈroʊ/—with stress on the second syllable. Thoreau was a man, with a nose that he called my most prominent feature. Of his appearance and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote, His face, once seen, Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the modest New England family of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was born in Jersey and his maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvards 1766 student Butter Rebellion, the first recorded student protest in the American colonies. David Henry was named after his recently deceased uncle, David Thoreau. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college and he had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr. and a younger sister, Sophia. Thoreaus birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord, the house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public. He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837 and he lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770, according to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. He commented, Let every sheep keep its own skin, a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas, after he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a school in Concord in 1838. They introduced several concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving, upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a periodical, The Dial. Thoreaus first essay published in The Dial was Aulus Persius Flaccus and it consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emersons suggestion
8.
National Diet Library
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The National Diet Library is the only national library in Japan. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the National Diet of Japan in researching matters of public policy, the library is similar in purpose and scope to the United States Library of Congress. The National Diet Library consists of two facilities in Tokyo and Kyoto, and several other branch libraries throughout Japan. The Diets power in prewar Japan was limited, and its need for information was correspondingly small, the original Diet libraries never developed either the collections or the services which might have made them vital adjuncts of genuinely responsible legislative activity. Until Japans defeat, moreover, the executive had controlled all political documents, depriving the people and the Diet of access to vital information. The U. S. occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur deemed reform of the Diet library system to be an important part of the democratization of Japan after its defeat in World War II. In 1946, each house of the Diet formed its own National Diet Library Standing Committee, hani Gorō, a Marxist historian who had been imprisoned during the war for thought crimes and had been elected to the House of Councillors after the war, spearheaded the reform efforts. Hani envisioned the new body as both a citadel of popular sovereignty, and the means of realizing a peaceful revolution, the National Diet Library opened in June 1948 in the present-day State Guest-House with an initial collection of 100,000 volumes. The first Librarian of the Diet Library was the politician Tokujirō Kanamori, the philosopher Masakazu Nakai served as the first Vice Librarian. In 1949, the NDL merged with the National Library and became the national library in Japan. At this time the collection gained a million volumes previously housed in the former National Library in Ueno. In 1961, the NDL opened at its present location in Nagatachō, in 1986, the NDLs Annex was completed to accommodate a combined total of 12 million books and periodicals. The Kansai-kan, which opened in October 2002 in the Kansai Science City, has a collection of 6 million items, in May 2002, the NDL opened a new branch, the International Library of Childrens Literature, in the former building of the Imperial Library in Ueno. This branch contains some 400,000 items of literature from around the world. Though the NDLs original mandate was to be a library for the National Diet. In the fiscal year ending March 2004, for example, the library reported more than 250,000 reference inquiries, in contrast, as Japans national library, the NDL collects copies of all publications published in Japan. The NDL has an extensive collection of some 30 million pages of documents relating to the Occupation of Japan after World War II. This collection include the documents prepared by General Headquarters and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the Far Eastern Commission, the NDL maintains a collection of some 530,000 books and booklets and 2 million microform titles relating to the sciences
9.
Saratov
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Saratov is a city and the administrative center of Saratov Oblast, Russia, and a major port on the Volga River located upstream of Volgograd. The name Saratov may be derived from the Turkic words Saryk Atov, another version of the name origin is Sary Tau, meaning yellow mountain in the Tatar language. Uvek, a city of the Golden Horde, stood near the site of the city of Saratov from the mid-13th century until its destruction by Tamerlane in 1395. While the exact date of the foundation of modern Saratov is unknown,1590, during the reign of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, who constructed several settlements along the Volga River in order to secure the southeastern boundary of his state. Town status was granted to it in 1708, by the 1800s, Saratov had grown to become an important shipping port on the Volga. The Ryazan-Ural Railroad reached Saratov in 1870, in 1896, the line crossed the Volga and continued its eastward expansion. During World War II, Saratov was a station on the North-South Volzhskaya Rokada, the city of Saratov played an important role in the history of the Volga Germans. Until 1941, the town of Pokrovsk, located just across the Volga from Saratov, the ethnic German population of the region numbered 800,000 in the early 20th century, with some people whose families had been there for generations. The Volga German community came to include industrialists, scientists, musicians and architects, others were expelled to western Europe after World War II ended in 1945. Beginning in the 1980s, a portion of the surviving members of the ethnic Germans emigrated from the Soviet Union to Germany. Reminders of the prominent place of Germans in the city remain. The building was converted into the childrens cinema Pioneer during the Soviet period, a new cathedral was built in 2000 elsewhere in the city, the Cathedral of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Saratov. As an administrative division, it is incorporated separately as the city of oblast significance of Saratov—an administrative unit with the equal to that of the districts. As a municipal division, the city of oblast significance of Saratov is incorporated as Saratov Urban Okrug, Saratov has moderately continental climate with warm and dry summers and an abundance of sunny days. The warmest month is July with daily temperature near +23 °C. Summers are hot and dry in Saratov, daytime temperatures of +30 °C or higher are commonplace, up to +40.9 °C during a heat wave in 2010. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season, days well above freezing and nights below −25 °C both occur in the winter. Saratov Oblast is highly industrialized, due in part to the richness in natural and industrial resources of the area, the oblast is also one of the more important and largest cultural and scientific centers in Russia
