Mary Albon

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Considered the greatest photographer of the 20th century, if not of all time, he was present for a number of pivotal moments, including the Liberation of Paris, the division of Berlin and Beijing’s fall to the Communists, among others.

“My way into the world is through touch,” Edmund de Waal, author of the award-winning family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), told a rapt audience at Vienna’s Jewish Museum on 20 Oct.. “That’s my way of understanding who I am.” 

Berlin 1933. Adolf Hitler has just become chancellor. Anti-Semitic violence is on the rise. Like the rest of the country, Germany’s freewheeling capital is rapidly learning to dance to the rhythm of rattling sabers and jackboots on the march.

This is the diabolical backdrop for Erik Larson’s latest work of narrative non-fiction, In the Garden of Beasts, which recounts the experiences of the U.S. ambassador to Germany and his daughter in the early days of the Nazi reign of terror.

“There is no easy story in legacy,” notes Edmund de Waal in the prologue to his absorbing and graceful European family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. An acclaimed British ceramicist, de Waal is fascinated by objects and intrigued by the possibility that things can hold memories.

De Waal is a descendent of the Ephrussi, once one of the wealthiest Jewish dynasties in Europe. When he inherited a collection of 264 netsuke that have been in his family for over a century, he set out to discover where they had been, who had handled them and what they had witnessed.

A sellout crowd of Austrian hipsters welcomed controversial American writer Bret Easton Ellis to Vienna’s Rabenhof Theater on October 5. Ellis was in town to promote his new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, a dark tale of betrayal and violence in youth-obsessed Hollywood.

In a city full of astonishing buildings, the Karl-Marx-Hof in Heiligenstadt is in a class by itself. Probably the best-known of Vienna’s public housing estates, it is a striking mix of medieval and modern architecture, a kilometer-long “superblock” built during the remarkable period known as Red Vienna.

“Wien im Film” (Vienna in the Movies: Images of the city from 100 years), the current exhibition at the Wien Museum, is not a film festival. Instead, it is a unique and innovative exhibition comprised solely of film clips that cumulatively create a portrait of the city.

It was raining when I arrived at Shakespeare & Company’s street fair on May 7, so the festivities celebrating Sylvia Beach were over. But no matter—because I was there for the books.

Secreted away on a picturesque lane in the heart of the Ruprechtsviertel, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, Shakespeare & Company at Sterngaße 2 has the cozy, been-there-forever feeling that devoted readers adore in bookshops.