Speer was Hitler's chief architect before becoming his Minister for Armaments during the war. He reformed Germany's war production to the extent that it continued to increase for over a year despite increasingly intensive Allied bombing. After the war, he was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for his role in the Third Reich. As "the Nazi who said sorry", he was the only senior Nazi figure to admit guilt and express remorse. Following his release in 1966, he became an author, writing two bestselling autobiographical works, and a third about the Third Reich. His two autobiographical works, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: the Secret Diaries detailed his often close personal relationship with German dictatorAdolf Hitler, and have provided readers and historians with an unequalled personal view inside the workings of the Third Reich. Speer died of natural causes in 1981, in London, England.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Albert Speer
Josef Von Sternberg
John Heartfield
John Heartfield (June 19, 1891–April 26, 1968) is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld. He chose to call himself Heartfield in 1916, to criticize the rabid nationalism and anti-British sentiment prevalent in Germany duringWorld War I.
Leni Riefenstahl
Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (August 22, 1902 – September 8, 2003) was a German film director, dancer and actress widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a propaganda film made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl's prominence in the Third Reich along with her personal friendships with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels thwarted her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but never convicted of war crimes.
The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most commentators but many film histories cite theaesthetics as outstanding. After her death the Associated Press described Riefenstahl as an "acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques." Der Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin noted, "Leni Riefenstahl conquered new ground in the cinema." The BBC said her documentaries "were hailed as groundbreaking film-making, pioneering techniques involving cranes, tracking rails, and many cameras working at the same time." Reviewer Gary Morris called Riefenstahl "an artist of unparalleled gifts, a woman in an industry dominated by men, one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles." Riefenstahl later published her still photography of the Nuba tribes in Africa and made films of marine life.
Thomas Mann
Richard Huelsenbeck
Richard Huelsenbeck (April 23, 1892 - April 30, 1974) was a poet, writer and drummer born in Frankenau, Hesse-Nassau.
Huelsenbeck was a medical student on the eve of World War I. He was invalided out of the army and emigrated to Zürich, Switzerland in February 1916, where he fell in with the Cabaret Voltaire. In January 1917, he moved to Berlin, taking with him the ideas and techniques which helped him found the Berlin Dada group. 'To make literature with a gun in my hand had for a time been my dream,'(1) he wrote in 1920. His ideas fitted in with left-wing politics current at time in Berlin. However, idealistic Huelsenbeck and his companions were their challenge 'Dada is German Bolshevism' had unfortunate repercussions later, when the National Socialistsdenounced all aspects of modern art as Kunstboschewismust. Later in life, he moved to New York City, where he practiced Jungian psychoanalysis under the name Charles R. Hulbeck. In 1970 he returned to the Ticino region of Switzerland.
Huelsenbeck was the editor of the Dada Almanach, and wrote Dada Sieght, En Avant Dada and other Dadaist works.
Of his music, Hugo Ball wrote, "Huelsenbeck has arrived. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm (Negro rhythm). He would best love to drum literature & toperdition."
Until the end of his life, Huelsenbeck insisted, "Dada is still existing," although the movement's other founders might not have agreed.
Hannah Hoch
Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball (February 22, 1886 – September 14, 1927) was a German author, poet and was one of the leading Dada artists.
Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany and was raised in a Catholic family. He studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg(1906–1907). In 1910, he moved to Berlin in order to become an actor and collaborated with Max Reinhardt. At the beginning of the First World War he joined the army as a volunteer, But, after the invasion of Belgium, was disillusioned saying: "The war is founded on a glaring mistake, men have been confused withmachines". Considered a traitor in his country, he crossed the frontier with his wife and settled in Zürich. Here, Ball continued his interest in anarchism, and inBakunin in particular; he also worked on book of Bakunin translations, which never got published. Although interested in anarchist philosophy, he nonetheless rejected it for its militant aspects, and viewed it as only a means to his personal goal of enlightenment.[1]
In 1916, Hugo Ball created the Dada Manifesto, making a political statement about his views on the terrible state of society and acknowledging his dislike for philosophies in the past claiming to possess the ultimate Truth. The same year as the Manifesto, in 1916, Ball wrote his poem "Karawane," which is a German poem consisting of nonsensical words. The meaning however resides in its meaninglessness, reflecting the chief principle behind Dadaism. Some of his other best known works include the poem collection 7 schizophrene Sonette, the drama Die Nase des Michelangelo, a memoir of the Zürich period Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, and a biography of Hermann Hesse, entitled Hermann Hesse. Sein Leben und sein Werk (1927).
As co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, he led the Dada movement in Zürich, and is one of the people credited with naming the movement "Dada", by allegedly choosing the word at random from a dictionary. He was married to Emmy Hennings, another member of Dada.
His involvement with the Dada movement lasted approximately two years. He then worked for a short period as a journalist, for Freie Zeitung in Bern. Eventually he retired to the canton of Ticino where he lived a religious and relatively poor life. He died in Sant'Abbondio, Switzerland.
His poem "Gadji beri bimba" was later adapted to the song entitled "I Zimbra" on the 1979 Talking Heads album Fear of Music; he received a writing credit for the song on the track listing.
Tristan Tzara
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (March 18, 1893 – November 4, 1918) was a poet and soldier, regarded by many as the leading poet of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Some of his best-known works—most of which were published posthumously—include Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, and Strange Meeting. His preface intended a book of poems to be published in 1919 contains numerous well-known phrases, especially 'War, and the pity of War', and 'the Poetry is in the pity'.
He is perhaps just as well-known for having been killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre just a week before the war ended, causing news of his death to reach home as the town's church bells declared peace.
