The mask dancers
Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt: fanatical creativity, wild performances and violent death in Weimar Germany
Strange Flowers
Highly unusual lives.
Latest posts
Secret Satan, 2023
Panto dames, UFO guides, between-the-wars bohos, honorary Inuit, utopian assassins, extraordinary aesthetes and the sandwich man of the beyond – it's our annual book round-up!
Places: Villa Stuck
To Munich for the fin-de-siècle temple of artist Franz (von) Stuck, complete with an altar to sin
Doubles: Marie Corelli
A prolific author (and champion figure skater) takes on "perhaps the most accomplished liar in literature".
Valeska unveiled
A revolutionary production of Wilde’s Salomé staged by Valeska Gert in Berlin 100 years ago today
The bitter tears of Empress Elisabeth
Our Lady of Sorrows riding side-saddle through a vale of tears, or a morbid, capricious, drug-addicted, tattooed narcissist? Or both?
Secret Satan, 2022
You know what to expect by now, surely? Well, expect even more of it: this is our biggest year-end book selection yet.
The Battle of Vienna
Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste bring their infernal cabaret to a temple of high culture; trouble ensues
The courting of Caresse Crosby
War-shattered nihilist poet Harry Crosby marries Polly Peabody (later Caresse Crosby), inventor of the bra, 100 years ago today.
Three Prose Works
A selection of vital and biographically charged pre-World War One fiction from the great Else Lasker-Schüler