In art, architecture, design, science and technology, the 20th century was one of change, revolution and breaking with the past. It was a century of artistic movements, new doctrines, daring projects, radical experiences and cultural adventures. Coming in the wake of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and founded by Walter Gropius a hundred years ago, Staatliches Bauhaus was fundamental to some of these changes. The people who worked with this school of architecture and design included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It had to move twice to different cities and lived under constant threat. It was closed by the Nazis in 1933, but everything it did in those few years lived on into the future. There is a before Bauhaus and an after Bauhaus. In this ‘Record’, the architect Ulf Meyer, author of Bauhaus: 1919-1933, tells the story of the school’s history and its presence in our world today.

A new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin was premièred this year at the Bayreuth Festival. This was transformed into a mega-event with its live transmission to around a hundred cinemas in Germany, in a fusion of opera and audiovisual media.
 

Bazooka is a playful word. When I was eight years old, and bought treats with the spare change my mother gave me to take to school, Bazooka was a piece of chewing gum for blowing bubbles which burst explosively. Derived from ‘bazoo’, slang for bluster, the word was created to name a wind instrument invented in America in 1910 by Bob Burns, a jazz musician and radio comedian. It spread into popular use during the Second World War as the name of an anti-tank gun used by the American army, whose tubular shape with a small bulging end was reminiscent of the instrument of the same name.

Berlin is the city as palimpsest, the great metropolis and laboratory of modernism, where German history shows its most tragic side. It has been built and rebuilt in literature, film and the theatre by great authors, film-makers and playwrights. Durs Grünbein, Germany’s most respected poet and essayist of the post-Wall generation, offers a worthy addition to the great literary depictions of Berlin, describing a city that “rises once more from the rubble”.
 

The work of Italian sociologist Vania Baldi, author of Otimizados e Desencontrados. Ética e Crítica na Era da Inconsciência Artificial [Optimised and Disconnected. Ethics and Criticism in the Era of Artificial Unconsciousness] draws on the philosophy and anthropology of technology. In this article, he challenges the unrestricted belief, blind optimism, and ethical negligence regarding the new systems of Artificial Intelligence.

One of the most awaited returns in recent years seems to be that of ethics to politics, accompanied by the realisation that it has been missing for quite a long time. This awaiting and realisation can be found in forces and agents that are normally considered opposites. If we look at one of the largest oppositions today, we find that both the defenders of democratic liberalism and what are generally called populist movements set great store by ethics.

Journalist and writer Cristina Battocletti is the author of a biography of Robert Bazlen (1902–1965) that paints a portrait of this cosmopolitan native of Trieste, who made a major contribution to ensuring the publication of Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience. Bazlen was a cult figure who founded the publishing house Adelphi, and was also a translator and a writer, although little of his work was published during his lifetime.

Bologna, the city of porticos, towers, and the oldest university in Europe, the city where Pasolini was born, is read, in its metamorphoses, as a palimpsest by a philosopher who lives there. Under the surge of tourism, the city resists and survives, emerging as all that is contained in the word ‘tradition’.

His immense work, which traverses a number of disciplines, gives good reason for this interview with Boris Groys. Moving in such areas as philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, art history and media theory, he has applied his vast erudition and his originality of thought to contemporary art, its system and its institutions. Born in 1947 in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, Boris Groys grew up in the Soviet Union, where he studied Mathematics, Logic and Linguistics. When he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1981, he brought with him a deep knowledge of the Russian vanguards and Soviet art. The relations between art and politics, and between the artist and society, are favoured by this former professor of the famous Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (1994–2009) who is now Global Distinguished Professor at the New York University.

In this issue of Electra, two ‘Books of Hours' chronicle the days leading up to Brazil’s presidential runoff election that caught the attention of the entire world. The authors are Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, writer, translator, and research director at Radio Novelo, born in the United States and based in Rio de Janeiro; and Rodrigo Nunes, a university professor in Brazil who holds a PhD from the University of London, with a vast, widely cited work on philosophy and political science. In this period of political uncertainty, apprehension and uneasiness, people lived every moment with a stressful and overwhelming intensity. These journals give us two different but complementing insights into everyday life and politics at the time of the clash between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And then there are the people, animals, books, films, and day-to-day acts that have become long-lasting symbols with each passing day.