A One Hundred Years-Old Storm

One hundred years ago the first issue of Der Sturm, the great avant-garde magazine edited by Herwarth Walden in Berlin appeared (well, to be exact it was on 3 March 1910). For those who have German, there is in interesting article on the magazine in the current issue of Die Welt, here. Or, to quote l’incontournable Wikipedia:

Der Sturm (German: The Storm) was a magazine of expressionism founded in Berlin in 1910 by. Originally running weekly, and then monthly in 1914, it became a quarterly in 1924 until it ceased publication in 1932. Among the literary contributors were Peter Altenberg, Max Brod, Richard Dehmel, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Arno Holz, Karl Kraus, Selma Lagerlöf, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Paul Scheerbart, René Schickele. Der Sturm consisted of pieces such as expressionistic dramas (i.e. from Hermann Essig and August Stramm), artistic portfolios (Oskar Kokoschka), essays from artists (the Kandinsky Album), and theoretical writings on art from Herwarth Walden. The most well-known publications resulting from the magazine were the Sturmbücher (storm-books), (e.g. Sturmbücher 1 and 2 were works of August Stramm – Sancta Susanna und Rudimentär). Postcards were also created featuring the expressionistic, cubist, and abstract art of Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Georg Schrimpf, Maria Uhden, Rudolf Bauer and others. The term Sturm was branded by Walden to represent the way in which modern art was penetrating Germany at the time.

Particularly in the time before outbreak of the World War I, Der Sturm played a crucial role in the French-German exchange of expressionist artists, which led to a special relationship between Berlin and Paris. Regularly, poems and other texts of French and/or French-speaking expressionists were published (Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, etc). This relationship was renewed after the war despite the hostilities between the two countries caused by the fighting.

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