Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the 1965 Jerusalem Prize, the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize, and the 1986 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
The Merry Widow is an operetta by the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár. The librettists, Viktor Léon and Leo Stein, based the story – concerning a rich widow, and her countrymen's attempt to keep her money in the principality by finding her the right husband – on an 1861 comedy play, L'attaché d'ambassade by Henri Meilhac.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the so-called Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
Piers Paul Read FRSL is a British novelist, historian and biographer. He was first noted in 1974 for a book of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, later adapted as a feature film and a documentary. Read was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history.
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. His austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions, particularly his homoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography.
Voyager is a 1991 English-language drama film directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy, and Barbara Sukowa. Adapted by screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer from the 1957 novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, the film is about a successful engineer traveling throughout Europe and the Americas whose world view based on logic, probability, and technology is challenged when he falls victim to fate, or a series of incredible coincidences.
Elsie Dinsmore is a children's book series written by Martha Finley (1828–1909) between 1867 and 1905. Of Finley's two girls' fiction series, the "Mildred Keith" books were more realistic and autobiographical in nature, while the "Elsie Dinsmore" books, which were better sellers, were more idealistic in plot. A revised and adapted version of the Elsie books was published in 1999.
The Package is a 1989 American political action thriller film directed by Andrew Davis and starring Gene Hackman, Joanna Cassidy, Tommy Lee Jones, John Heard, and Dennis Franz.
Lili Marleen is a 1981 West German drama film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that stars Hanna Schygulla, Giancarlo Giannini, and Mel Ferrer. Set in the time of the Third Reich, the film recounts the love affair between a German singer who becomes the darling of the nation, based on Lale Andersen, and a Swiss conductor, based on Rolf Liebermann, who is active in saving his fellow Jews. Though the screenplay uses the autobiographical novel Der Himmel hat viele Farben by Lale Andersen, her last husband, Arthur Beul, said the film bears little relation to her real life.
John Frederick Norman Hampson Simpson was an English novelist writing as John Hampson. Best known for his 1931 novel Saturday Night at the Greyhound – an unexpected success for Hogarth Press – he was a member of a Birmingham Group of working-class authors that included Walter Allen, Leslie Halward, Walter Brierley and Peter Chamberlain.
Montauk is a story by Swiss writer Max Frisch. It first appeared in 1975 and takes an exceptional position in Frisch's work. While fictional stories previously served Frisch for exploring the possible behavior of his protagonists, in Montauk, he tells an authentic experience: a weekend which he spent with a young woman in Montauk on the American East Coast. The short-run love affair is used by Frisch as a retrospective on his own biography. In line with Philip Roth he tells his "life as a man", relates to the women with whom he was associated, and the failure of their relationship. Further reflections apply to the author's age and his near-death and the mutual influence of life and work. Also, the story is about the emergence of Montauk: in contrast to his previous work Frisch describes his decision to document this weekend's direct experience without adding anything. Montauk met with strongly polarized reception. When faced by the open descriptions of their past, former partners of Frisch felt duped. Some readers were embarrassed by Frisch's self-exposure. Other critics hailed the story as his most important work and praised the achievement to make a literary masterpiece of his own life. Marcel Reich-Ranicki adopted Montauk in his Canon of German literature. The 2017 film Return to Montauk by Volker Schlöndorff and Colm Tóibín was inspired by the novel.
Ventseslav Konstantinov was a Bulgarian writer, aphorist and translator of German and English literature.
Hanna Ralph was a German stage and film actress whose career began on the stage and in silent film in the 1910s and continued through the early 1950s.
Howard Melville Hanna was an American Civil War veteran, businessman in shipping and iron ore, philanthropist and owner of Pebble Hill Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia.
Oleksiy Logvynenko was a Ukrainian translator who specialized in translating from German and English.
Ivy Teresa Low Litvinov was an English-Russian writer and translator, and wife of Soviet diplomat and foreign minister Maxim Litvinov. She was also known as Ivy Low, Ivy Litvinova or Ivy Litvinoff.
Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt is the first novel of the Swiss writer Max Frisch (1911-1991). It was started during the winter of 1933 and published in Germany by Deutschen Verlags-Anstalt in 1934. Frisch would later distance himself from this juvenile autobiographical work which was not reprinted as an individual novel, although much later it was included in a compilation of Frisch's collected works. His second novel, J’adore ce qui me brûle, referred back to this first novel, being again centred on the same eponymous protagonist.
Richard Strauss composed his Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 6, TrV 115, in 1883 when he was 19 years old. It was dedicated to the Czech cellist Hanuš Wihan, who gave the premiere in 1883. It rapidly became a standard part of the cello repertoire.
Edwin Sheldon Whitehouse was an American diplomat who served as the U.S. Minister to Guatemala and U.S. Minister to Colombia.
