Die vielen Leben der Ruth Landshoff-Yorck

The first biography of Ruth Landshoff-Yorck

She played croquet with Thomas Mann, was portrayed by Oskar Kokoschka, helped Marlene Dietrich land her role in The Blue Angel, socialized with Andy Warhol, Patricia Highsmith, and Salvador Dalí. Ruth Landshoff-Yorck was a glitter girl and androgynous style icon, but above all, she was a versatile literati who provided the press of the Weimar Republic with lively feuilletons and published several novels. Her short stories and poems were published worldwide.

The life of Ruth Landshoff bridges the bohemia of the Weimar Republic to the American New Bohemia of the 1960s, from expressionist silent films to the emergence of experimental Off-Off-Broadway, and not least from the gay subculture of the "golden" twenties to the alternative scene in New York. In years of work, Thomas Blubacher has uncovered unknown documents and interviewed eyewitnesses. For the first time, a biography of the underappreciated avant-garde writer and committed anti-fascist is now available, whose many lives in Berlin, Paris, Venice, London, and New York reflect the currents of half a century.