Beschreibung
A complete run of the second year of this magnificent early fantasy magazine, each issue number 22 of 50 copies printed on art paper and signed by the editor von Czibulka. This example is presented by the publishers as a bound volume, with series title and contents pages. Der Orchideengarten started in 1919, with 18 issues in the first year, 24 issues in the second, and 12 in 1921, before the project folded. Complete runs are extremely rare. "Likely the first specialized fantasy magazine in the world" (Clute & Grant), the publication was edited by the Austrian writer of macabre fiction Karl Hans Strobl (1877-1946) and the Czech artist and writer Alfons von Czibulka (1888-1969). It printed fantasy and horror pieces, drawing on classics of the genre from global authors as well as contemporary writing in German, all alongside superb artwork. The magazine is particularly famed for its striking front cover designs, each printed in lurid colour and all beautifully preserved in this bound set. "The material, both graphic and literary, was strongly flavored. and can be seen as part of the postwar German Expressionist movement while continuing the long tradition of European grotesque and fantastic art. The artwork strikes one as independent of or collaborative with rather than subordinate to the fiction; it strikes one as art, not just as illustration. Even without a knowledge of German, one can safely describe the material as lurid and nightmarish. The magazine expresses the disillusionment and decadence of the Weimar Republic, which would rot and provide the soil for the rise of Hitler (who in turn despised the kind of modernist and decadent aesthetics found here). Der Orchideengarten is a pulp for grownups. The Balkanization of fiction set in motion by the [American] pulps has deprived fiction both inside the genre ghettoes and outside them of the vigor that results only from hybridization. If Der Orchideengarten had continued and flourished, if it has inspired like efforts in other countries, the course of modern literary history might have been very different. In this regard, it offers a glimpse of a parallel literary universe, a garden indeed: small and isolated but vibrant, exotic, and gorgeous" (Eldridge, courtesy of L. W. Currey). Eldridge also notes that none other that Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) attended the Technicum at Bingen with Karl Hans Strobel. Gernsback, after whom the Hugo Award is named, settled in America and in 1926 founded Amazing Stories, the first magazine ever dedicated to science fiction. In all the writers and artists involved in the project, it is notable to observe figures working side by side in these culturally intense years immediately following Germany's defeat in the First World War, who would go on to be polarized by the upheavals of National Socialism, some ending up as Nazis, and others as refugees. The artists involved in this second year series include Ernst Heigenmooser (1893-1963), Rolf von Hoerschelmann (1885-1947), Richard Klein (1890-1967, who became one of Hitler's favoured painters), Heinrich Kley (1863-1945, German illustrator), Otto Linnenkogel (1897-1981, film director), Friedrich Otto Muck (1882-1960), Elfriede Plaichinger-Coltelli (1883-1971), Carl Rabus (1898-1983, Expressionist who was persecuted by the Nazis), and Karl Ritter (1888-1977, later a major Nazi filmmaker). The editors also drew on fantastical or macabre images by earlier artists including Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, and Tony Johannot, as well as occasional medieval woodcuts involving skeletons and visions of apocalypse. Many of the fantastical stories and poems were drawn from earlier authors, such as Lucrezia Borgia, Lord Byron, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Lamb, Jules Lemaître, Martial, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Merimée, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pushkin, Voltaire, H. G. Wells, Walt Whitman, and Johann Winckelmann. The range of contemporary writers involved includes: Sergej Au. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 169210
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