Documents 

In the brief years between the twentieth century's two cataclysmic world wars, the modern metropolis was invented in Berlin. Artists penetrated the surface of things with X-ray vision. An avant-garde of theater and film found an audience and took root there. Subcultures and club cultures invented gender-bending lifestyles and fashions to match. Architects and designers struggled to free themselves from the past and planned for the needs of the future. The soundtrack of daily life throbbed with new rhythms: the coming and going of the latest planes and trains and automobiles; the clacking of typewriters in vast offices; the jazz band that never sleeps. But when the Nazis began to grasp the levers of power, the culture of self-expression and license was doomed. Berlin: The Twenties filled with 400 shockingly fresh photographs, paintings, posters, film stills, and other images - tells the haunting story of the rise and fall of the twentieth century's first modern city.[eidotr summary]