Germany‘s Uncommercial Traveler
New York and London
New York and London
Author: Alfred Kerr
Translator: Professor Alan Bance
Cover Picture: Berenice Abbott
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Softcover; 170 pp.
Dimensions: 5.5’’ x 8.5’’
ISBN USA: 978-1-935902-64-5
ISBN Germany: 978-3-96026-076-9
Suggested retail $14.95
Release: 2025
About the Book
After the First World War, the Berlin theater critic Alfred Kerr travels to America and Great Britain. Kerr, who calls New York the "greatest city in the world", visits the Broadway theaters and Wall Street, marvels at the subway, at Times Square and Pennsylvania Station. He writes about Eugene O'Neill and talks to the satirist Henry Louis Mencken, the railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman and Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. In London, he meets the poet George Bernard Shaw. But the book, written concisely and wittily, is much more than just a travelogue. After the war, during which the mood in America and England was extremely hostile towards Germany, when German professors were fired and the German language shunned, Kerr is on a mission to ask for sympathy and help for the fragile Weimar democracy.
Alfred Kerr
Alfred Kerr
Alfred Kerr, born in 1867 in Breslau, was a German-Jewish writer and journalist. He wrote for Der Tag, the Breslauer Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt, and Frankfurter Zeitung. He also was the editor of the art magazine PAN which he founded with the arts critic Julius Meier-Graefe. Kerr, known for his ironic, terse, cinematic style, but also for his long-running dispute with the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, was one of the most influential theater critics of his time—until the Nazis seized power and declared him one of their most foremost enemies. In 1933, immediately after the book burning, he fled to Prague and then went to London with his family, including his daughter Judith Kerr, who would become an author herself. Three years after the war, at the beginning of a lecture tour in Hamburg in 1948, he passed away from a stroke. This book was written following a journey shortly after WWI.
An Austrian in New York
Springtime in America
Springtime in America
Author: Alexander Roda Roda
Translator: Peter Winslow
Cover Picture: Berenice Abbott
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Softcover; ca 140 pp.
Dimensions: 5.5’’ x 8.5’’
ISBN USA: 978-1-935902-01-0
ISBN Germany: 978-3-96026-056-1
Suggested retail $ 14.95
Release: 2026
About the Book
Reporting with taste and tact and, above all, with knowledge—only very few can do it. Roda Roda can do it. The whole book is written in such a light, harmless and pleasant tone that you read it to the end one after the other with interest. ... These impressions are truthful and pose-free—and that is worth a lot. Your learn what any of us would ask: the standard of living, the daily life of the middle class, wages and amusements, literature and theater, school and commerce—in short, what you would like to know if you had been so fenced in for years and, in an intellectual sense, still are. Reading this little book is very useful; it can possibly heal our people's miserable monomania and egocentric view of the world, perhaps, perhaps, a little, from the heart, with pain, a bit. Or not at all. Because sometimes, it seems incurable.
- Peter Panter, Die Weltbühne, March 13,1924
Alexander Roda Roda
Alexander Roda Roda
Alexander Friedrich Ladislaus Roda Roda was born in 1872 in the Austrian province of Moravia and grew up in Croatia; the humorist saw himself as the "quintessential poet of Austria-Hungary". He started to write at Simplizissimus. During World War I, he was a correspondent for Neue Freie Presse in Vienna. His military comedy Der Feldherrnhügel was initially banned by the military censors, but eventually became a movie. That was followed by the novels Die Panduren, Der Mann mit der roten Weste and Roda Rodas Roman. He performed in cabarets in Munich and Berlin. Shortly before the annexation of Austria, he fled the Nazis to Switzerland, where he got expelled in 1940. He emigrated to New York. Being unable to repeat his successes, he died impoverished in 1945. Friends brought his is urn back to Vienna.
The Racing Reporter
Paradise America
Paradise America
Author: Egon Erwin Kisch
Pictures:
Lewis W. Hine and Berenice Abbott
Preface:
Los Angeles Evening Post-Record
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Softcover; 320 pp. / 41 pics
Dimensions: 6’’ x 9’’
Suggested retail $ 24.95
ISBN: 978-1-935902-00-3
ISBN in Germany:
978-3-96026-046-2
Release: 2026
About the Book
Paradise America describes a road trip Egon Erwin Kisch took in 1928/29, from New York City to California from the perspective of the downtrodden, the immigrants, the Afro-Americans, the workers at the harbor and in the coalmines, the construction workers, the sinners, and the settlers. Kisch, the famed Weimar-era “racing reporter”, talks to the men who are building the skyscrapers and work at the docks and in the field. He visits the docks, the jails, the courthouses, and cemeteries for the poor in New York, but also the banks on Wall Street. He documents the slaughterhouses in Chicago, the Ford factories in Detroit, and stops by the Capitol in Washington as well as the theatre where Lincoln was shot. He plays God on Hollywood Boulevard, feels with the extras and the stars, meets the author Upton Sinclair, and visits Charlie Chaplin doing a movie on location. His adventures include the election campaign of Herbert Hoover and Al Smith, a boat tour through the Panama Canal, and Sutter's Farm in Sacramento, where the gold rush began. Kisch shows us a detailed, and often humorous picture of America just months before the Great Depression. In some respect, not that much has changed in America today. An entertaining work for everybody interested in American history translated here for the first time.
Egon Erwin Kisch
Egon Erwin Kisch
Egon Erwin Kisch, born 1885 in Prague to a Jewish family, was a journalist and travel writer known as the "racing reporter". He started his career in 1906 in Prague for Bohemia, a German-language newspaper. After having served in WWI, he moved to Vienna and then Berlin where he wrote for the Communist paper Die Rote Fahne, The Red Flag. He traveled to Greece, Italy, the Soviet Union, China; in 1929, he came to the U.S. under a false name to write a series of literary reportages. In 1933, the ardent fighter against the Nazis had to flee; he landed in fled in Australia, later reached Paris, went back to New York, and finally ended up in Mexico City. After World War II, he returned to Prague, where he died in 1948. He published more than thirty books and numerous newspaper stories.
Coming Soon in an Updated Edition
Berlin for Free
Berlin for Free
Author: Monika Märtens
Translator: Cindy Opitz
Genre: Guidebook
Softcover, 104 pages
Dimensions 5’’ x 8’'
Suggested Retail: $10.95
ISBN: 978-1-935902-40-9
Release: Winter 2010
About the Book
Berlin for Free is an invaluable guide for the frugal traveler, to everything free in Berlin: Underground pop, classical music, and concerts in the park, art shows and exhibitions, museums and movies, readings and theater, sport events, city tours, gay life, and street fairs. All of these no-cost opportunities for kids and grown-ups alike are neatly arranged and easy to find. The book also includes more than two hundred addresses, phone numbers, and websites—and all the information is fact-checked and recently updated.
Monika Märtens
Monika Märtens
Monika Maertens, the author, is a student at the Berlin University of the Arts. Martin Blath, the original publisher and co-author, came to Berlin in 2002 from the Rhine as a freelance journalist, he also worked in PR. Two years later, he founded Verlag an der Spree—because he loves Berlin, the most exciting city in Europe.
