title: John Kassir

text: Kassir has specialized in voice-over work for animation, video games, and other productions, most notably as the voice of Crypt Keeper in "Tales from the Crypt". He would later voice Ray "Raymundo" Rocket in "Rocket Power". He also provided the voice for the mercenary Deadpool in the video games "", "", and "Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2", as well as for Sauron and Pyro, two other well-known characters. He was also featured in the very first commercial for the Nintendo cornerstone video game series "The Legend of Zelda" in the United States in 1987.


title: John Kassir

text: Kassir provided the vocal effects of the mischievous raccoon Meeko in Disney's 1995 animated feature "Pocahontas" and "". Also, he provided the voice of Buster Bunny in four "Tiny Toon Adventures" episodes (following Charlie Adler's departure from the role). He played the villainous Scuttlebutt in "". He also made one voice appearance in an episode of "Ben 10", ("Last Laugh") as Zombozo. He voiced the character Adam MacIntyre and provided Additional voice over work in the video game "Dead Rising". His voice is featured in the games "Shadows of the Damned" and "" as Hell demons and Desperado Enforcement captain Monsoon, respectively.


title: John Kassir

text: In 2011, he voiced Crazy Smurf in the live-action/animated film "The Smurfs", and in 2012, he voiced Jealousy as well as Gumball, Penny, Leslie, Carrie & Darwin when he possesses them in "The Amazing World of Gumball" episode "The Flower". Kassir appeared in Bryan Singer's "Jack the Giant Slayer" (2013), along with Bill Nighy, as Fallon, the two-headed leader of the giants; Nighy played the big head while Kassir played the small head.


title: John Kassir

text: Additionally, he voiced Buster Bunny (taking over from Charlie Adler late in the final season of "Tiny Toon Adventures"), Ray "Raymundo" Rocket on "Rocket Power", the mischievous raccoon Meeko in "Pocahontas" and its direct-to-video sequel, Jibolba in the "Tak and the Power of Juju" video game series, Pete Puma in "The Looney Tunes Show", and Deadpool in "" and the "" series. Kassir even voiced Elliot the Dragon in Disney's 2016 live-action remake of the 1977 live-action/animated movie "Pete's Dragon".


title: John Kassir

text: Kassir also voiced Rizzo in the "Spyro" video game "", as well as Ghost Roaster in "", Short Cut in "", and Pit Boss in "". He is also known for his various roles in the first season of "The Amanda Show". He voiced the Ice King in the original "Adventure Time" pilot, but was replaced by Tom Kenny for the series. He also provided additional voice over work for "Eek! The Cat", "The Brothers Flub", "Sonic the Hedgehog", "Dead Rising", "Casper's Scare School", "Spider-Man 3", "", "The Princess and the Frog", "Diablo III", "", "Monsters University", "The Prophet", "Minions", "", "The Secret Life of Pets", "Despicable Me 3", "The Grinch" and "The Secret Life of Pets 2".


title: John Kassir

text: A few of his many theater credits include: originating the role of Kenny in "Three Guys Naked From The Waist Down" (also starring Scott Bakula), for which he was nominated for both a Drama Desk and an Outer Critics Circle award. John also originated the role of Ralph in the musical "Reefer Madness", on stage and in the film version.


title: John Kassir

text: He married actress Julie Benz on May 30, 1998, the marriage lasted for nine years until Benz filed for divorce in December 2007.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: John Nommensen Duchac (born February 25, 1953), known professionally as John Doe, is an American singer, songwriter, actor, poet, guitarist and bass player. Doe co-founded LA punk band X, of which he is still an active member. His musical performances and compositions span rock, punk, country and folk music genres. As an actor, he has dozens of television appearances and several movies to his credit, including the role of Jeff Parker in the television series "Roswell".


title: John Doe (musician)

text: In addition to X, Doe performs with the country-folk-punk band the Knitters and has released records as a solo artist. In the early 1980s, he performed on two albums by the Flesh Eaters.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: Doe moved to Los Angeles, California, and in 1976 met guitar player Billy Zoom through an ad in the local free weekly paper, "The Recycler."


title: John Doe (musician)

text: As a musician with X, Doe has two feature-length concert films, several music videos, and an extended performance-and-interview sequence in "The Decline of Western Civilization", Penelope Spheeris's seminal documentary about the early-1980s L.A. punk scene.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: Along with co-writer Exene Cervenka, Doe composed most of the songs recorded by X. "Wild Gift", an album from that band's heyday, was named "Record of the Year" by Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. With Dave Alvin, he co-wrote two of the songs on the Blasters' 1984 album "Hard Line", "Just Another Sunday" and "Little Honey". He also wrote "Cyrano de Berger's Back" for the Flesh Eaters LP "A Minute to Pray, a Second To Die".


title: John Doe (musician)

text: Since 1990, Doe has recorded nearly a dozen albums as a soloist or in collaboration with other artists, and has contributed tracks to motion pictures. In the 1992 movie "The Bodyguard" (starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston), it is Doe's version of "I Will Always Love You" that plays on the jukebox when Costner's and Houston's characters are dancing. It was released on audio cassette by Warner Bros. in September 1992, but no version is believed to exist on CD. He co-wrote and played on the song "Lobotomy" with Tyler Willman for the eponymous 1998 debut studio album of the band Calm Down Juanita.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: Doe took part in Todd Haynes's 2007 movie "I'm Not There", recording two Bob Dylan covers, "Pressing On" and "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine." Both recordings were included on the film's soundtrack, and the former was prominently featured in the film, with Christian Bale (as Pastor John Rollins) lip-synching Doe's vocals. Doe recorded the song "Unforgiven" in 2007 with Aimee Mann on "A Year in the Wilderness", an album which also featured Kathleen Edwards, Jill Sobule, Dan Auerbach. He then joined with Eddie Vedder on a mix of the song "Golden State" in 2008. "The Meanest Man in the World" by Doe was featured in Season 4 of the television series "Friday Night Lights" and included on the second soundtrack album. "Country Club" (2009), featuring Canadian indie rock band The Sadies, covered country classics along with original songs.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: His latest solo record, "The Westerner", was released in 2016. Doe said that it was made in the desert, in Arizona, and that the genre is psychedelic soul.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: In the 1989 biographical film "Great Balls of Fire!", Doe played Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin-turned-father-in-law J. W. Brown. He starred in the 1992 films "Roadside Prophets" and "Pure Country", and in the 1998 short "Lone Greasers". Other movie acting credits include "Road House", "Vanishing Point", "Salvador", "Boogie Nights", "The Specials", "The Good Girl", "Gypsy 83", "Wyatt Earp", "Border Radio", "Pure Country", "The Outsiders", and "Brokedown Palace". Doe has appeared on the television series "Law & Order", "Carnivale", "One Tree Hill", "Childrens Hospital" (alongside his fellow bandmates in X) and "The Wizards of Waverly Place".


title: John Doe (musician)

text: With co-author Tom DeSavia, Doe wrote and compiled stories for a book about the LA punk rock scene from 1977 to 1983. The book, "Under the Big Black Sun", incorporated the punk ethos of contributions from other musicians that were part of the scene, people like Exene Cervenka, Jack Grisham, Henry Rollins, Mike Watt, Jane Wiedlin and others who wrote chapters. Doe wanted it to be a collective recollection, not just one person's perspective of the time.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: A sequel of sorts was released in 2019 entitled "More Fun in the New World: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk". Doe and DeSavia again invited contributors to narrate the space of time from 1982 to 1987.


title: John Doe (musician)

text: Doe was born in Decatur, Illinois. He was married to fellow X member Exene Cervenka between 1980 and 1985. He remarried in 1987. He revealed to Adam Carolla in a podcast in September 2011 that he resided (at the time) in Fairfax, California. He has three daughters. In early 2017, he announced that he would be moving to Austin, Texas.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Skulduggery Pleasant is a series of dark fantasy novels written by Irish author Derek Landy. The books revolve around the adventures of fledgling detective Valkyrie Cain, her mentor Skulduggery Pleasant, along with other friends and allies. The central story concerns Valkyrie's struggle to stop evil forces threatening the world and her internal struggle to resist the darkness within.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Since the release of the first novel in 2007, "Skulduggery Pleasant", the series has been praised by both readers and critics. The following novels were released each year afterward, with the exception of the fourth and fifth novels, "Dark Days" and "Mortal Coil", which were both released in 2010. Landy was initially contracted to write three books, with any further books depending on how well the first trilogy sold. The success of the first novels ensured that the deal was extended first to six books and in 2011, HarperCollins signed the deal for the third and final trilogy.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: In July 2016, Derek Landy announced via a video blog that although the "Skulduggery Pleasant" series was complete, the series as a whole was still set to continue with a sequel series, the first book of which was released in June 2017, titled "Resurrection". While nine books were planned, the series was cut down to six books by HarperCollins after the publication of "Seasons of War", with final book, "Until the End", releasing in April 2022. In October 2022, Landy announced via YouTube livestream that a "one-off prequel" and "Book 0·1", "Hell Breaks Loose", would release in April 2023.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Stephanie Edgley's uncle died leaving her a fortune including his mansion. While staying there, she was attacked by a strange man and was rescued by Skulduggery Pleasant, a mysterious skeleton mage. Together with Ghastly Bespoke, China Sorrows and Tanith Low, Stephanie and Skulduggery tried to stop a plot for world domination of Serpine, an evil wizard. Serpine wanted to rule the world with the Scepter of the Ancients, a weapon used to defeat the tyrannical gods called the Faceless Ones. Serpine was the murderer of Skulduggery and his family in a war four hundred years ago. But Skulduggery returned from the death mysteriously as a living skeleton.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: After obtaining the Scepter, Serpine created an immortal fighter called the White Cleaver. During a fight with the White Cleaver, Ghastly used magic to petrify himself to avoid being killed. Serpine then invaded the Sanctuary and killed two Elders with the help of the other traitorous Elder. He tried to use the Book of Names to control the World but all three Elders' consent was needed to read from it.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: During the fight with Serpine in the Sanctuary, Stephanie glimpsed her True name in the Book of Names but could not remember it before the Book of Names was destroyed. Skulduggery destroyed Serpine with the Scepter, breaking the Scepter's power in the process. Afterward, Skulduggery offered to take Stephanie on as his assistant and apprentice because she is a descendant of the Ancients. Stephanie decided to takes the name of Valkyrie Cain.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: With Serpine dead, the world is safe once more. At least, that's what Valkyrie and Skulduggery think, until the notorious Baron Vengeous makes a bloody escape from prison, and dead bodies and vampires start showing up all over Ireland. With Baron Vengeous after the deadly armour of Lord Vile, and pretty much everyone out to kill Valkyrie, the daring detective duo face their biggest challenge yet. But what if the greatest threat to Valkyrie is just a little closer to home...?


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: As a number of teleporters are mysteriously murdered, Valkyrie and Skulduggery learn that it is quickly linked to a fanatical cult named the Diablerie, who seek to open a portal with the goal of returning the Faceless Ones to the world. With the assistance of cocky young teleporter Fletcher Renn, Valkyrie and Skulduggery have very little time to track down a mysterious man named Batu, stop the Diablerie, and prevent the return of the Faceless Ones. This one will have deadly consequences. Do panic. They are coming.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Skulduggery Pleasant is gone, sucked into a parallel dimension overrun by the Faceless Ones. If his bones haven't already been turned to dust, chances are he's insane, driven out of his mind by the horror of the ancient gods. There is no official, Sanctuary-approved rescue mission. There is no official plan to save him. But Valkyrie's never had much time for plans. The problem is, even if she can get Skulduggery back, there might not be much left for him to return to. There's a gang of villains bent on destroying the Sanctuary, there are some very powerful people who want Valkyrie dead, and as if all that wasn't enough it looks very likely that a sorcerer named Darquesse is going to kill the world and everyone on it. Skulduggery is gone. All our hopes rest with Valkyrie. The world's weight is on her shoulders, and its fate is in her hands. These are dark days indeed.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain are back — just in time to see their whole world get turned upside down! While they struggle to protect a known killer from an unstoppable assassin, Valkyrie is on a secret mission of her own. This quest, to prevent her dark and murderous destiny, threatens to take her to the brink of death and beyond. And then the body-snatching Remnants get loose, thousands of twisted souls who possess the living like puppets, and they begin their search for a being powerful enough to lead them. Facing such insurmountable odds, Skulduggery, Valkyrie, Ghastly and Tanith can trust no one. Not even each other!


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: The Necromancers no longer need Valkyrie to be their Death Bringer, and that's a good thing. There's just one catch. The reason the Necromancers don't need her anymore. Because they've found their Death Bringer already, the person who will dissolve the doors between life and death. And that's a very, very bad thing... Skulduggery and Valkyrie have seven days to uncover the Necromancers' secret before it's too late. The clock is ticking. Lord Vile is loose. And after this one, nothing will ever be the same again.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Magic is a disease. Across the land, normal people are suddenly developing wild and unstable powers. Infected by a rare strain of magic, they are unwittingly endangering their own lives and the lives of the people around them. Terrified and confused, their only hope lies with the Sanctuary. Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain are needed now more than ever. And then there's the small matter of Kitana. A normal teenage girl who, along with her normal teenage friends, becomes infected. Becomes powerful. Becomes corrupted. Wielding the magic of gods, they're set to tear the city apart unless someone stands up against them. Looks like it's going to be another one of those days...


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: War has finally come. But it's not a war between good and evil, or light and dark – it's a war between Sanctuaries. For too long, the Irish Sanctuary has teetered on the brink of world-ending disaster, and the other Sanctuaries around the world have had enough. Allies turn to enemies, friends turn to foes, and Skulduggery and Valkyrie must team up with the rest of the Dead Men if they're going to have any chance at all of maintaining the balance of power and getting to the root of a vast conspiracy that has been years in the making. But while this war is only beginning, another war rages within Valkyrie herself. Her own dark side, the insanely powerful being known as Darquesse, is on the verge of rising to the surface. And if Valkyrie slips, even for a moment, then Darquesse will rise and the world will burn.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: The final book of the first series. The War of the Sanctuaries has been won, but not without its casualties. Following the loss of Valkyrie Cain, Skulduggery Pleasant must use any and all means to track down and stop Darquesse before she turns the world into a charred, lifeless cinder, drawing together a team of soldiers, monster hunters, killers, criminals... and Valkyrie's own murderous reflection. The war may be over, but the final battle is about to begin. And not everyone will get out of here alive...


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: In October 2019, following a joint interview alongside Eoin Colfer, Landy confirmed the original and preferred title of "Resurrection" and the sequel series as a whole to be "Valkyrie Cain", after both series' main protagonist, a title previously considered for both "Playing with Fire" and the first series as a whole, attributing its continued official disuse to an unnamed HarperCollins executive.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: A lot has changed. Roarhaven is now a magical city, where sorcerers can live openly. Valkyrie Cain has been out of action for years, recovering from the war against her alter-ego Darquesse, which nearly destroyed her and everyone else. Some things never change though: bad people still want to do bad things, and Skulduggery Pleasant is still there to stop them. When Skulduggery learns of a plot to resurrect a terrifying evil, he persuades Valkyrie to join him for just 24 hours. But they need someone else on their team, someone inconspicuous, someone who can go undercover. Enter Omen Darkly. Student at the new Corrival Academy. Overlooked. Unremarkable in every way. 24 hours to save the world. One sharply-dressed skeleton. One grief-stricken young woman. One teenage boy who can't remember which class he's supposed to be in. This cannot end well...


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: For years, Valkyrie Cain has struggled to keep her loved ones safe from harm, plunging into battle — time and time again — by Skulduggery Pleasant's side, and always emerging triumphant. But now the very thing that Valkyrie fights for is in danger, as a ruthless killer snatches her little sister in order to lure Valkyrie into a final confrontation. With Skulduggery racing to catch up and young sorcerer Omen scrambling along behind, Valkyrie only has twelve hours to find Alice before it's too late. The clock is ticking...


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: On a desperate journey to recover her sister's lost soul, Valkyrie Cain goes up against the High Sanctuary itself, and there's nothing Skulduggery Pleasant can do to stop her. With Abyssinia's grand plan about to kick off in a night of magic, terror, and bloodshed, it falls to Omen Darkly to save the lives of thousands of innocent people. And as the madness unfolds around him, as hidden enemies step into the light, and as Valkyrie is sucked into a desperate, lawless quest of her own, he has no choice but to become the hero he never really wanted to be — or die in the attempt.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: War is coming. To avert catastrophe, Skulduggery and Valkyrie are sent on a secret mission that takes them away from everything they know, to a forsaken land of magic and grim, unrelenting terror, with the last Dead Men, Tanith Low, and Dimensional Shunter "Luke Skywalker". It is here that Valkyrie will have to fight the hardest – not only against the enemies who want her dead but also against her own self-destructive impulses. And it is only by crawling through the darkness that she will be able to once again stand within the light...


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: In a matter of days, the world will change. Billions of lives will be wiped away in a final, desperate search for Alice, the Child of the Faceless Ones – she who is destined to bring about the return of humankind's ancient overlords. To prevent this, Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain have one last – terrible – option: the assassination of Damocles Creed. With protests stirring in the magical city of Roarhaven, with riots and revolutions on the horizon, Valkyrie must decide who she wants to be: the hero who risks everything for a noble ideal, or the killer who sacrifices her own soul for the fate of humanity. The decision must be made, and time is running out.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: The second cycle of the internationally bestselling Skulduggery Pleasant series comes to a thrilling end. The Faceless Ones have returned to our universe. The bad guys have won. With the end of everything just days away – and no longer able to rely on Valkyrie Cain – Skulduggery must make allies of enemies if he's going to stand any chance of saving what's left of the world. And just when things are looking their bleakest, they manage to get even worse, with Omen Darkly suddenly having to step up when his brother, the Chosen One, falls.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: In October 2022, Landy announced via YouTube livestream that a "one-off prequel" and "Book 0·1", officially titled "Skulduggery Pleasant: Hell Breaks Loose" (titled on-page as "Hell Breaks Loose: From the World of Skulduggery Pleasant", the same titling scheme as the 2013 novella "Tanith Low in... The Maleficent Seven"), was already written and edited, and would release in April 2023.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Three-hundred years before the story begins... the story begins. Set in Tuscany, Italy, 1703, during the War, "Hell Breaks Loose" focuses on an enraged Skulduggery, 13 years after being killed with his wife and child by Serpine and resurrected as a living skeleton (but before being transformed into Lord Vile) and the Dead Men as they hunt down Serpine and Vengeous, the Generals of Mevolent.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: Travel back to 1703 with Skulduggery Pleasant in this standalone novel featuring all your favourite characters. So many enemies, so little time . . . Italy, 1703. As the war with Mevolent rages on, the Dead Men are dispatched to a walled town in the Tuscan hills – not to assassinate the Lord of the Dark Sorcerers, but to save him. A rift has opened to a hellish dimension where a being of devastating power awaits, and only Mevolent is strong enough to seal it and save the world. A simple mission, then, which turns ever-so-slightly trickier when Skulduggery is presented with the opportunity to finally get revenge on Nefarian Serpine, the man who murdered him and killed his family thirteen years earlier. Return to the world of "Skulduggery Pleasant" in a short novel set hundreds of years before Valkyrie Cain is even born, and follow Skulduggery, Ghastly, Shudder, Ravel, Saracen, Dexter and Hopeless as they argue, bicker and battle their way through an army of their most hated enemies in order to save their oldest enemy so they can stop another, brand new, enemy… And that's when things get complicated.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: (6–7) In June 2011 Landy posted on his blog that he would be writing a short story about Skulduggery called "The End of the World". It was released in late February 2012 to coincide with World Book Day 2012. The Australian release of this novella came with an additional short story titled "Just Another Friday Night". Deleted scenes from "Skulduggery Pleasant" were included. It is set a few months after "Death Bringer". It was included in the 2014's short story collection.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: (7–8) A spin-off novel featuring Tanith Low taking place between the seventh and eighth books was released on 28 March 2013 in the U.K & Ireland and 1 April in other countries. The cover and title ("Tanith Low in... The Maleficent Seven: From the World of Skulduggery Pleasant") were released on 7 December 2012 after several delays, with Landy stating it to be his favourite book cover ever.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: This time, the bad guys take the stage. Tanith Low, now possessed by a remnant, recruits a gang of villains – many of whom will be familiar from previous Skulduggery adventures – in order to track down and steal the four God-Killer level weapons that could hurt Darquesse when she eventually emerges. Also on the trail of the weapons is a secret group of Sanctuary sorcerers, and doing his best to keep up and keep Tanith alive is one Mister Ghastly Bespoke. When the villains around her are lying and scheming and plotting, Tanith needs to stay two steps ahead of her teammates and her enemies. After all, she's got her own double-crosses to plan – and she's a villain herself... It's a good day to be a bad guy.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: "Armageddon Outta Here" is a collection of all the previous short stories and novellas published in the series along with 3 new short stories, 1 new novella and a sample chapter from the final book. It was released on 3 July 2014. The order below represents chronological order, as they as listed in the collection, as opposed to their original publication date.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: (4–5) An additional short story was later published to the "Skulduggery Pleasant" website in 2018: "Going Once, Going Twice": Set between "Dark Days" and "Mortal Coil".


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: On 20 March 2020 Landy started posting a choose-your-adventure-type story to Twitter. It ended on 1 April 2020. It had readers vote in a poll at the end of each day he posted the tweets to decide something in the story.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: The story follows Valkyrie and Skulduggery going to America to investigate a witch. It introduces the concept of "Horts", essentially people outside of the fictional universe who consume entertainment (that is actually real in the fictional world) and have choices as to what happens.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: (5–6) Set between "Mortal Coil" and "Death Bringer", the novella "Apocalypse Kings" was published in February 2021.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: "Skulduggery Pleasant" won the Red House Children's Book Award, the Bolton Children's Book Award and the Staffordshire Young Teen Fiction Award. The book was also recommended for confident readers (9+) by the Richard & Judy Children's Book Club in 2007. It also won the Portsmouth Book Awards in 2008, having been selected by school children in Portsmouth, as well as winning Irish book of the decade in 2010. Also, in 2009, it won the Kernow Youth and Grampian Book Awards by a majority vote. It had also been nominated for Young Reader's Choice Awards 2010 in North America and it won Irish Book Awards in 2009 and 2010.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: As the first four novels released, immense popularity and positive reviews have been given to the novels. Many critics praised Derek Landy's way of writing due to his large gallery of characters.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: The series did not prove popular in the US, and the publisher stopped releasing there after the third book.


title: Skulduggery Pleasant

text: A film adaption was in development under Warner Brothers but according to Derek Landy, the script was "the worst thing [he had] ever read", with Skulduggery Pleasant a "skeleton body who somehow retained his head and face", and a musical number where he danced to Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror". In December 2010, Landy announced on his blog that the movie rights were back with him. In October 2019, Landy confirmed he had written a new screenplay draft, adapting the first novel and elements of a short story. In interviews with the "Irish Examiner" and "The Nerd Daily" in March and April 2021, Landy confirmed he was continuing the development of a screenplay.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1947, Noguchi began a collaboration with the Herman Miller company, when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is often considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture ever produced, including the iconic Noguchi table which remains in production today. His work lives on around the world and at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York City.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, the son of Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who was acclaimed in the United States, and Léonie Gilmour, an American writer who edited much of Noguchi's work.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Yone had ended his relationship with Gilmour earlier that year and planned to marry "The Washington Post" reporter Ethel Armes. After proposing to Armes, Yone left for Japan in late August, settling in Tokyo and awaiting her arrival; their engagement fell through months later when Armes learned of Léonie and her newborn son.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1906, Yone invited Léonie to come to Tokyo with their son. She at first refused, but growing anti-Japanese sentiment following the Russo-Japanese War eventually convinced her to take up Yone's offer. The two departed from San Francisco in March 1907, arriving in Yokohama to meet Yone. Upon arrival, their son was finally given the name Isamu (, "courage"). However, Yone had married a Japanese woman by the time they arrived, and was mostly absent from his son's childhood. After again separating from Yone, Léonie and Isamu moved several times throughout Japan.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1912, while the two were living in Chigasaki, Isamu's half-sister, pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement Ailes Gilmour, was born to Léonie and an unknown Japanese father. Here, Léonie had a house built for the three of them, a project that she had the 8-year-old Isamu "oversee". Nurturing her son's artistic ability, she put him in charge of their garden and apprenticed him to a local carpenter. However, they moved once again in December 1917 to an English-speaking community in Yokohama.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1918, Noguchi was sent back to the US for schooling in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. After graduation, he left with Dr. Edward Rumely to LaPorte, where he found boarding with a Swedenborgian pastor, Samuel Mack. Noguchi began attending La Porte High School, graduating in 1922. During this period of his life, he was known by the name "Sam Gilmour".


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: After high school, Noguchi explained his desire to become an artist to Rumely; though he preferred that Noguchi become a doctor, he acknowledged Noguchi's request and sent him to Connecticut to work as an apprentice to his friend Gutzon Borglum. Best known as the creator of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Borglum was at the time working on the group called "Wars of America" for the city of Newark, New Jersey, a piece that includes forty-two figures and two equestrian sculptures. As one of Borglum's apprentices, Noguchi received little training as a sculptor; his tasks included arranging the horses and modeling for the monument as General Sherman. He did, however, pick up some skills in casting from Borglum's Italian assistants, later fashioning a bust of Abraham Lincoln. At summer's end, Borglum told Noguchi that he would never become a sculptor, prompting him to reconsider Rumely's prior suggestion.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: He then traveled to New York City, reuniting with the Rumely family at their new residence, and with Dr. Rumely's financial aid enrolled in February 1922 as a premedical student at Columbia University. Soon after, he met the bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, who urged him to reconsider art, as well as the Japanese dancer Michio Itō, whose celebrity status later helped Noguchi find acquaintances in the art world. Another influence was his mother, who in 1923 moved from Japan to California, then later to New York.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1924, while still enrolled at Columbia, Noguchi followed his mother's advice to take night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. The school's head, Onorio Ruotolo, was immediately impressed by Noguchi's work. Only three months later, Noguchi held his first exhibit, a selection of plaster and terracotta works. He soon dropped out of Columbia University to pursue sculpture full-time, changing his name from Gilmour (the surname he had used for years) to Noguchi.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: After moving into his own studio, Noguchi found work through commissions for portrait busts, he won the Logan Medal of the Arts. During this time, he frequented "avant garde" shows at the galleries of such modernists as Alfred Stieglitz and J. B. Neuman, and took a particular interest in a show of the works of Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In late 1926, Noguchi applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. In his letter of application, he proposed to study stone and wood cutting and to gain "a better understanding of the human figure" in Paris for a year, then spend another year traveling through Asia, exhibit his work, and return to New York. He was awarded the grant despite being three years short of the age requirement.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi arrived in Paris in April 1927 and soon afterward met the American author Robert McAlmon, who brought him to Constantin Brâncuși's studio for an introduction. Despite a language barrier between the two artists (Noguchi barely spoke French, and Brâncuși did not speak English), Noguchi was taken in as Brâncuși's assistant for the next seven months. During this time, Noguchi gained his footing in stone sculpture, a medium with which he was unacquainted, though he would later admit that one of Brâncuși's greatest teachings was to appreciate "the value of the moment". Meanwhile, Noguchi found himself in good company in France, with letters of introduction from Michio Itō helping him to meet such artists as Jules Pascin and Alexander Calder, who lived in the studio of Arno Breker. They became friends and Breker did a bronze bust of Noguchi.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi only produced one sculpture – his marble "Sphere Section" – in his first year, but during his second year he stayed in Paris and continued his training in stoneworking with the Italian sculptor Mateo Hernandes, producing over twenty more abstractions of wood, stone and sheet metal. Noguchi's next major destination was to be India, from which he would travel east; he arrived in London to read up on Oriental Sculpture, but was denied the extension to the Guggenheim Fellowship he needed.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In February 1929, he left for New York City. Brâncuși had recommended that Noguchi visit Romany Marie's café in Greenwich Village. Noguchi did so and there met Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated on several projects, including the modeling of Fuller's Dymaxion car.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Upon his return, Noguchi's abstract sculptures made in Paris were exhibited in his first one-man show at the Eugene Schoen Gallery. After none of his works sold, Noguchi altogether abandoned abstract art for portrait busts in order to support himself. He soon found himself accepting commissions from wealthy and celebrity clients. A 1930 exhibit of several busts, including those of Martha Graham and Buckminster Fuller, garnered positive reviews, and after less than a year of portrait sculpture, Noguchi had earned enough money to continue his trip to Asia.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi left for Paris in April 1930, and two months later received his visa to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway. He opted to visit Japan first rather than India, but after learning that his father Yone did not want his son to visit using his surname, a shaken Noguchi instead departed for Beijing. In China, he studied brush painting with Qi Baishi, staying for six months before finally sailing for Japan. Even before his arrival in Kobe, Japanese newspapers had picked up on Noguchi's supposed reunion with his father; though he denied that this was the reason for his visit, the two did meet in Tokyo. He later arrived in Kyoto to study pottery with Uno Jinmatsu. Here he took note of local Zen gardens and haniwa, clay funerary figures of the Kofun period which inspired his terracotta "The Queen".


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi returned to New York amidst the Great Depression, finding few clients for his portrait busts. Instead, he hoped to sell his newly produced sculptures and brush paintings from Asia. Though very few sold, Noguchi regarded this one-man exhibition (which began in February 1932 and toured Chicago, the west coast, and Honolulu) as his "most successful". Additionally, his next attempt to break into abstract art, a large streamlined figure of dancer Ruth Page entitled "Miss Expanding Universe", was poorly received. In January 1933 he worked in Chicago with Santiago Martínez Delgado on a mural for Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition, then again found a business for his portrait busts; he moved to London in June hoping to find more work, but returned in December just before his mother Leonie's death.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Beginning in February 1934, Noguchi began submitting his first designs for public spaces and monuments to the Public Works of Art Program. One such design, a monument to Benjamin Franklin, remained unrealized for decades. Another design, a gigantic pyramidal earthwork entitled "Monument to the American Plow", was similarly rejected, and his "sculptural landscape" of a playground, "Play Mountain", was personally rejected by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. He was eventually dropped from the program, and again supported himself by sculpting portrait busts. In early 1935, after another solo exhibition, the "New York Sun's" Henry McBride labeled Noguchi's "Death", depicting a lynched African-American, as "a little Japanese mistake". That same year he produced the set for "Frontier", the first of many set designs for Martha Graham.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: After the Federal Art Project started up, Noguchi again put forth designs, one of which was another earthwork chosen for the New York City airport entitled "Relief Seen from the Sky"; following further rejection, Noguchi left for Hollywood, where he again worked as a portrait sculptor to earn money for a sojourn in Mexico. Here, Noguchi was chosen to design his first public work, a relief mural for the Abelardo Rodriguez market in Mexico City. The 20-meter-long "History as Seen from Mexico in 1936" was hugely political and socially conscious, featuring such modern symbols as the Nazi swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the equation "E" = "mc"². Noguchi also met Frida Kahlo during this time and had a brief but passionate affair with her; they remained friends until her death.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi returned to New York in 1937. He designed the Zenith Radio Nurse, the iconic original baby monitor now held in many museum collections. The Radio Nurse was Noguchi's first major design commission and he called it "my only strictly industrial design".


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: He again began to turn out portrait busts, and after various proposals was selected for two sculptures. The first of these, a fountain built of automobile parts for the Ford Motor Company's exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair, was thought of poorly by critics and Noguchi alike but nevertheless introduced him to fountain-construction and magnesite. Conversely, his second sculpture, a nine-ton stainless steel bas-relief entitled "News", was unveiled over the entrance to the Associated Press building at the Rockefeller Center in April 1940 to much praise. Following further rejections of his playground designs, Noguchi left on a cross-country road trip with Arshile Gorky and Gorky's fiancée in July 1941, eventually separating from them to go to Hollywood.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment was energized in the United States, and in response Noguchi formed "Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy". Noguchi and other group leaders wrote to influential officials, including the congressional committee headed by Representative John H. Tolan, hoping to halt the internment of Japanese Americans; Noguchi later attended the hearings but had little effect on their outcome. He later helped organize a documentary of the internment, but left California before its release; as a legal resident of New York, he was allowed to return home. He hoped to prove Japanese-American loyalty by somehow helping the war effort, but when other governmental departments turned him down, Noguchi met with John Collier, head of the Office of Indian Affairs, who persuaded him to travel to the internment camp located on an Indian reservation in Poston, Arizona, to promote arts and crafts and community.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi arrived at the Poston camp in May 1942, becoming its only voluntary internee. Noguchi first worked in a carpentry shop, but his hope was to design parks and recreational areas within the camp. Although he created several plans at Poston, among them designs for baseball fields, swimming pools, and a cemetery, he found that the War Relocation Authority had no intention of implementing them. To the WRA camp administrators he was a troublesome interloper from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and to the internees he was an agent of the camp administration. Many did not trust him and saw him as a spy. He had found nothing in common with the Nisei, who regarded him as a strange outsider.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In June, Noguchi applied for release, but intelligence officers labeled him as a "suspicious person" due to his involvement in "Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy". He was finally granted a month-long furlough on November 12, but never returned; though he was granted a permanent leave afterward, he soon afterward received a deportation order. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, accusing him of espionage, launched into a full investigation of Noguchi which ended only through the American Civil Liberties Union's intervention. Noguchi would later retell his wartime experiences in the British World War II television documentary series "The World at War".


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Upon his return to New York, Noguchi took a new studio in Greenwich Village. Throughout the 1940s, Noguchi's sculpture drew from the ongoing surrealist movement; these works include not only various mixed-media constructions and landscape reliefs, but "lunars" – self-illuminating reliefs – and a series of biomorphic sculptures made of interlocking slabs. The most famous of these assembled-slab works, "Kouros", was first shown in a September 1946 exhibition, helping to cement his place in the New York art scene.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1947 he began a relationship with Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan. This relationship was to prove very fruitful, resulting in several designs that have become symbols of the modernist style, including the iconic Noguchi table, which remains in production today. Noguchi also developed a relationship with Knoll, designing furniture and lamps. During this period he continued his involvement with theater, designing sets for Martha Graham's "Appalachian Spring" and John Cage and Merce Cunningham's production of "The Seasons". Near the end of his time in New York, he also found more work designing public spaces, including a commission for the ceilings of the Time-Life headquarters.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In March 1949, Noguchi had his first one-person show in New York since 1935 at the Charles Egan Gallery. In September 2003, The Pace Gallery held an exhibition of Noguchi's work at their 57th Street gallery. The exhibition, entitled "33 MacDougal Alley: The Interlocking Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi", featured eleven of the artist’s interlocking sculptures. This was the first exhibition to illustrate the historical significance of the relationship between MacDougal Alley and Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural work.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Following the suicide of his artist friend Arshile Gorky in 1948, and a failed romantic relationship with Nayantara Pandit (the niece of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru), Noguchi applied for a Bollingen Fellowship to travel the world, proposing to study public space as research for a book about the "environment of leisure".


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In his later years Noguchi gained in prominence and acclaim, installing his large-scale works in many of the world's major cities.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: He was married to the ethnic-Japanese icon of Chinese song and cinema Yoshiko Yamaguchi, between 1952 and 1957.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1955, he designed the sets and costumes for a controversial theatre production of "King Lear" starring John Gielgud.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: In 1986, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, showing a number of his Akari light sculptures.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Isamu Noguchi died on December 30, 1988 at the age of 84. In its obituary for Noguchi, "The New York Times" called him "a versatile and prolific sculptor whose earthy stones and meditative gardens bridging East and West have become landmarks of 20th-century art".


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: His final project was the design for Moerenuma Park, a park in Sapporo, Japan. Designed in 1988 shortly before his death, it was completed and opened to the public in 2004.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: Noguchi received the Edward MacDowell Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to the Arts in 1982; the National Medal of Arts in 1987; and the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government in 1988.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum is devoted to the preservation, documentation, presentation, and interpretation of the work of Isamu Noguchi. It is supported by a variety of public and private funding bodies. The US copyright representative for the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum is the Artists Rights Society. In 2012, it was announced that, in order to reduce liability, Noguchi's catalogue raisonné would be published as an online-only, ever-modifiable work-in-progress.


title: Isamu Noguchi

text: M+ [1] in partnership with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum organized an exhibition of Isamu Noguchi and Danh Vō. Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint(Nov 16, 2018 - April 22, 2019) The exhibition take place in the M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong.


title: C minor

text: C minor is a minor scale based on C, consisting of the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Its key signature consists of three flats. Its relative major is E major and its parallel major is C major.


title: C minor

text: Changes needed for the melodic and harmonic versions of the scale are written in with accidentals as necessary. The C harmonic minor and melodic minor scales are:


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander (; "Anaximandros"; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia (in modern-day Turkey). He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and, arguably, Pythagoras amongst his pupils.


title: Anaximander

text: Little of his life and work is known today. According to available historical documents, he is the first philosopher known to have written down his studies, although only one fragment of his work remains. Fragmentary testimonies found in documents after his death provide a portrait of the man.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander was an early proponent of science and tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe, with a particular interest in its origins, claiming that nature is ruled by laws, just like human societies, and anything that disturbs the balance of nature does not last long. Like many thinkers of his time, Anaximander's philosophy included contributions to many disciplines. In astronomy, he attempted to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. In physics, his postulation that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things led Greek philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. His knowledge of geometry allowed him to introduce the gnomon in Greece. He created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography. He was also involved in the politics of Miletus and was sent as a leader to one of its colonies.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander, son of Praxiades, was born in the third year of the 42nd Olympiad (610 BC). According to Apollodorus of Athens, Greek grammarian of the 2nd century BC, he was sixty-four years old during the second year of the 58th Olympiad (547–546 BC), and died shortly afterwards.


title: Anaximander

text: Establishing a timeline of his work is now impossible, since no document provides chronological references. Themistius, a 4th-century Byzantine rhetorician, mentions that he was the "first of the known Greeks to publish a written document on nature." Therefore, his texts would be amongst the earliest written in prose, at least in the Western world. By the time of Plato, his philosophy was almost forgotten, and Aristotle, his successor Theophrastus and a few doxographers provide us with the little information that remains. However, we know from Aristotle that Thales, also from Miletus, precedes Anaximander. It is debatable whether Thales actually was the teacher of Anaximander, but there is no doubt that Anaximander was influenced by Thales' theory that everything is derived from water. One thing that is not debatable is that even the ancient Greeks considered Anaximander to be from the Monist school which began in Miletus, with Thales followed by Anaximander and which ended with Anaximenes. 3rd-century Roman rhetorician Aelian depicts Anaximander as leader of the Milesian colony to Apollonia on the Black Sea coast, and hence some have inferred that he was a prominent citizen. Indeed, "Various History" (III, 17) explains that philosophers sometimes also dealt with political matters. It is very likely that leaders of Miletus sent him there as a legislator to create a constitution or simply to maintain the colony's allegiance.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander's theories were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition, and by some ideas of Thales – the father of Western philosophy – as well as by observations made by older civilizations in the Near East, especially Babylon. All these were developed rationally. In his desire to find some universal principle, he assumed, like traditional religion, the existence of a cosmic order; and his ideas on this used the old language of myths which ascribed divine control to various spheres of reality. This was a common practice for the Greek philosophers in a society which saw gods everywhere, and therefore could fit their ideas into a tolerably elastic system.


title: Anaximander

text: Some scholars see a gap between the existing mythical and the new rational way of thought which is the main characteristic of the archaic period (8th to 6th century BC) in the Greek city-states. This has given rise to the phrase "Greek miracle". But if we follow carefully the course of Anaximander's ideas, we will notice that there was not such an abrupt break as initially appears. The basic elements of nature (water, air, fire, earth) which the first Greek philosophers believed made up the universe in fact represent the primordial forces imagined in earlier ways of thinking. Their collision produced what the mythical tradition had called cosmic harmony. In the old cosmogonies – Hesiod (8th – 7th century BC) and Pherecydes (6th century BC) – Zeus establishes his order in the world by destroying the powers which were threatening this harmony (the Titans). Anaximander claimed that the cosmic order is not monarchic but geometric, and that this causes the equilibrium of the earth, which is lying in the centre of the universe. This is the projection on nature of a new political order and a new space organized around a centre which is the static point of the system in the society as in nature. In this space there is "isonomy" (equal rights) and all the forces are symmetrical and transferable. The decisions are now taken by the assembly of "demos" in the "agora" which is lying in the middle of the city.


title: Anaximander

text: The same "rational" way of thought led him to introduce the abstract "apeiron" (indefinite, infinite, boundless, unlimited) as an origin of the universe, a concept that is probably influenced by the original Chaos (gaping void, abyss, formless state) from which everything else appeared in the mythical Greek cosmogony. It also takes notice of the mutual changes between the four elements. Origin, then, must be something else unlimited in its source, that could create without experiencing decay, so that genesis would never stop.


title: Anaximander

text: The "Refutation" attributed to Hippolytus of Rome (I, 5), and the later 6th century Byzantine philosopher Simplicius of Cilicia, attribute to Anaximander the earliest use of the word "apeiron" ( "infinite" or "limitless") to designate the original principle. He was the first philosopher to employ, in a philosophical context, the term "archē" (), which until then had meant beginning or origin.


title: Anaximander

text: "That Anaximander called this something by the name of is the natural interpretation of what Theophrastos says; the current statement that the term was introduced by him appears to be due to a misunderstanding."


title: Anaximander

text: And "Hippolytos, however, is not an independent authority, and the only question is what Theophrastos wrote."


title: Anaximander

text: For him, it became no longer a mere point in time, but a source that could perpetually give birth to whatever will be. The indefiniteness is spatial in early usages as in Homer (indefinite sea) and as in Xenophanes (6th century BC) who said that the earth went down indefinitely (to "apeiron") i.e. beyond the imagination or concept of men.


title: Anaximander

text: "Nearly all we know of Anaximander’s system is derived in the last resort from Theophrastos, who certainly knew his book. He seems once at least to have quoted Anaximander's own words, and he criticised his style. Here are the remains of what he said of him in the First Book:


title: Anaximander

text: "Anaximander of Miletos, son of Praxiades, a fellow-citizen and associate of Thales, said that the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite, he being the first to introduce this name of the material cause. He says it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a substance different from them which is infinite" [apeiron, or ] "from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them.—Phys, Op. fr. 2 (Dox. p. 476; R. P. 16)."


title: Anaximander

text: Burnet's quote from the "First Book" is his translation of Theophrastos' "Physic Opinion" fragment 2 as it appears in p. 476 of "Historia Philosophiae Graecae" (1898) by Ritter and Preller and section 16 of "Doxographi Graeci" (1879) by Diels.


title: Anaximander

text: By ascribing the "Infinite" with a "material cause", Theophrastos is following the Aristotelian tradition of "nearly always discussing the facts from the point of view of his own system".


title: Anaximander

text: Aristotle writes ("Metaphysics", I.III 3–4) that the Pre-Socratics were searching for the element that constitutes all things. While each pre-Socratic philosopher gave a different answer as to the identity of this element (water for Thales and air for Anaximenes), Anaximander understood the beginning or first principle to be an endless, unlimited primordial mass ("apeiron"), subject to neither old age nor decay, that perpetually yielded fresh materials from which everything we perceive is derived. He proposed the theory of the "apeiron" in direct response to the earlier theory of his teacher, Thales, who had claimed that the primary substance was water. The notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious concept of immortality, and Anaximander's description was in terms appropriate to this conception. This "archē" is called "eternal and ageless". (Hippolytus (?), "Refutation", I,6,I;DK B2)""Aristotle puts things in his own way regardless of historical considerations, and it is difficult to see that it is more of an anachronism to call the Boundless “ intermediate between the elements ” than to say that it is " distinct from the elements.” Indeed, if once we introduce the elements at all, the former description is the more adequate of the two. At any rate, if we refuse to understand these passages as referring to Anaximander, we shall have to say that Aristotle paid a great deal of attention to some one whose very name has been lost, and who not only agreed with some of Anaximander’s views, but also used some of his most characteristic expressions. We may add that in one or two places Aristotle certainly seems to identify the “ intermediate ” with the something “ distinct from ” the elements".""It is certain that he [Anaximander] cannot have said anything about elements, which no one thought of before Empedokles, and no one could think of before Parmenides. The question has only been mentioned because it has given rise to a lengthy controversy, and because it throws light on the historical value of Aristotle’s statements. From the point of view of his own system, these may be justified; but we shall have to remember in other cases that, when he seems to attribute an idea to some earlier thinker, we are not bound to take what he says in an historical sense."For Anaximander, the principle of things, the constituent of all substances, is nothing determined and not an element such as water in Thales' view. Neither is it something halfway between air and water, or between air and fire, thicker than air and fire, or more subtle than water and earth. Anaximander argues that water cannot embrace all of the opposites found in nature — for example, water can only be wet, never dry — and therefore cannot be the one primary substance; nor could any of the other candidates. He postulated the "apeiron" as a substance that, although not directly perceptible to us, could explain the opposites he saw around him."If Thales had been right in saying that water was the fundamental reality, it would not be easy to see how anything else could ever have existed. One side of the opposition, the cold and moist, would have had its way unchecked, and the warm and dry would have been driven from the field long ago. We must, then, have something not itself one of the warring opposites, something more primitive, out of which they arise, and into which they once more pass away."Anaximander explains how the four elements of ancient physics (air, earth, water and fire) are formed, and how Earth and terrestrial beings are formed through their interactions. Unlike other Pre-Socratics, he never defines this principle precisely, and it has generally been understood (e.g., by Aristotle and by Saint Augustine) as a sort of primal chaos. According to him, the Universe originates in the separation of opposites in the primordial matter. It embraces the opposites of hot and cold, wet and dry, and directs the movement of things; an entire host of shapes and differences then grow that are found in "all the worlds" (for he believed there were many)."Anaximander taught, then, that there was an eternal. The indestructible something out of which everything arises, and into which everything returns; a boundless stock from which the waste of existence is continually made good, “elements.”. That is only the natural development of the thought we have ascribed to Thales, and there can be no doubt that Anaximander at least formulated it distinctly. Indeed, we can still follow to some extent the reasoning which led him to do so. Thales had regarded water as the most likely thing to be that of which all others are forms; Anaximander appears to have asked how the primary substance could be one of these particular things. His argument seems to be preserved by Aristotle, who has the following passage in his discussion of the Infinite: ""Further, there cannot be a single, simple body which is infinite, either, as some hold, one distinct from the elements, which they then derive from it, or without this qualification. For there are some who make this. (i.e. a body distinct from the elements). the infinite, and not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another. air is cold, water moist, and fire hot. and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise.'—Aristotle Physics. F, 5 204 b 22 (Ritter and Preller (1898) Historia Philosophiae Graecae, section 16 b).""Anaximander maintains that all dying things are returning to the element from which they came ("apeiron"). The one surviving fragment of Anaximander's writing deals with this matter. Simplicius transmitted it as a quotation, which describes the balanced and mutual changes of the elements:


title: Anaximander

text: Simplicius mentions that Anaximander said all these "in poetic terms", meaning that he used the old mythical language. The goddess Justice (Dike) keeps the cosmic order. This concept of returning to the element of origin was often revisited afterwards, notably by Aristotle, and by the Greek tragedian Euripides: "what comes from earth must return to earth." Friedrich Nietzsche, in his "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", stated that Anaximander viewed "... all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance." Physicist Max Born, in commenting upon Werner Heisenberg's arriving at the idea that the elementary particles of quantum mechanics are to be seen as different manifestations, different quantum states, of one and the same “primordial substance,”' proposed that this primordial substance be called "apeiron".


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander's bold use of non-mythological explanatory hypotheses considerably distinguishes him from previous cosmology writers such as Hesiod. It confirms that pre-Socratic philosophers were making an early effort to demystify physical processes. His major contribution to history was writing the oldest prose document about the Universe and the origins of life; for this he is often called the "Father of Cosmology" and founder of astronomy. However, pseudo-Plutarch states that he still viewed celestial bodies as deities.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander was the first to conceive a mechanical model of the world. In his model, the Earth floats very still in the centre of the infinite, not supported by anything. It remains "in the same place because of its indifference", a point of view that Aristotle considered ingenious, but false, in "On the Heavens". Its curious shape is that of a cylinder with a height one-third of its diameter. The flat top forms the inhabited world, which is surrounded by a circular oceanic mass.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander's realization that the Earth floats free without falling and does not need to be resting on something has been indicated by many as the first cosmological revolution and the starting point of scientific thinking. Karl Popper calls this idea "one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking." Such a model allowed the concept that celestial bodies could pass under the Earth, opening the way to Greek astronomy.


title: Anaximander

text: At the origin, after the separation of hot and cold, a ball of flame appeared that surrounded Earth like bark on a tree. This ball broke apart to form the rest of the Universe. It resembled a system of hollow concentric wheels, filled with fire, with the rims pierced by holes like those of a flute. Consequently, the Sun was the fire that one could see through a hole the same size as the Earth on the farthest wheel, and an eclipse corresponded with the occlusion of that hole. The diameter of the solar wheel was twenty-seven times that of the Earth (or twenty-eight, depending on the sources) and the lunar wheel, whose fire was less intense, eighteen (or nineteen) times. Its hole could change shape, thus explaining lunar phases. The stars and the planets, located closer, followed the same model.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander was the first astronomer to consider the Sun as a huge mass, and consequently, to realize how far from Earth it might be, and the first to present a system where the celestial bodies turned at different distances. Furthermore, according to Diogenes Laertius (II, 2), he built a celestial sphere. This invention undoubtedly made him the first to realize the obliquity of the Zodiac as the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder reports in "Natural History" (II, 8). It is a little early to use the term ecliptic, but his knowledge and work on astronomy confirm that he must have observed the inclination of the celestial sphere in relation to the plane of the Earth to explain the seasons. The doxographer and theologian Aetius attributes to Pythagoras the exact measurement of the obliquity.


title: Anaximander

text: According to Simplicius, Anaximander already speculated on the plurality of worlds, similar to atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and later philosopher Epicurus. These thinkers supposed that worlds appeared and disappeared for a while, and that some were born when others perished. They claimed that this movement was eternal, "for without movement, there can be no generation, no destruction".


title: Anaximander

text: In addition to Simplicius, Hippolytus reports Anaximander's claim that from the infinite comes the principle of beings, which themselves come from the heavens and the worlds (several doxographers use the plural when this philosopher is referring to the worlds within, which are often infinite in quantity). Cicero writes that he attributes different gods to the countless worlds.


title: Anaximander

text: This theory places Anaximander close to the Atomists and the Epicureans who, more than a century later, also claimed that an infinity of worlds appeared and disappeared. In the timeline of the Greek history of thought, some thinkers conceptualized a single world (Plato, Aristotle, Anaxagoras and Archelaus), while others instead speculated on the existence of a series of worlds, continuous or non-continuous (Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Empedocles and Diogenes).


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander attributed some phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, to the intervention of elements, rather than to divine causes. In his system, thunder results from the shock of clouds hitting each other; the loudness of the sound is proportionate with that of the shock. Thunder without lightning is the result of the wind being too weak to emit any flame, but strong enough to produce a sound. A flash of lightning without thunder is a jolt of the air that disperses and falls, allowing a less active fire to break free. Thunderbolts are the result of a thicker and more violent air flow.


title: Anaximander

text: He saw the sea as a remnant of the mass of humidity that once surrounded Earth. A part of that mass evaporated under the sun's action, thus causing the winds and even the rotation of the celestial bodies, which he believed were attracted to places where water is more abundant. He explained rain as a product of the humidity pumped up from Earth by the sun. For him, the Earth was slowly drying up and water only remained in the deepest regions, which someday would go dry as well. According to Aristotle's "Meteorology" (II, 3), Democritus also shared this opinion.


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander speculated about the beginnings and origin of animal life, and that humans came from other animals in waters. According to his evolutionary theory, animals sprang out of the sea long ago, born trapped in a spiny bark, but as they got older, the bark would dry up and animals would be able to break it. As the early humidity evaporated, dry land emerged and, in time, humankind had to adapt. The 3rd century Roman writer Censorinus reports:


title: Anaximander

text: Anaximander put forward the idea that humans had to spend part of this transition inside the mouths of big fish to protect themselves from the Earth's climate until they could come out in open air and lose their scales. He thought that, considering humans' extended infancy, we could not have survived in the primeval world in the same manner we do presently.


title: Anaximander

text: Both Strabo and Agathemerus (later Greek geographers) claim that, according to the geographer Eratosthenes, Anaximander was the first to publish a map of the world. The map probably inspired the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus to draw a more accurate version. Strabo viewed both as the first geographers after Homer.


title: Anaximander

text: Maps were produced in ancient times, also notably in Egypt, Lydia, the Middle East, and Babylon. Only some small examples survived until today. The unique example of a world map comes from late Babylonian tablet BM 92687 later than 9th century BC but is based probably on a much older map. These maps indicated directions, roads, towns, borders, and geological features. Anaximander's innovation was to represent the entire inhabited land known to the ancient Greeks.


title: Anaximander

text: Such an accomplishment is more significant than it at first appears. Anaximander most likely drew this map for three reasons. First, it could be used to improve navigation and trade between Miletus's colonies and other colonies around the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea. Second, Thales would probably have found it easier to convince the Ionian city-states to join in a federation in order to push the Median threat away if he possessed such a tool. Finally, the philosophical idea of a global representation of the world simply for the sake of knowledge was reason enough to design one.


title: Anaximander

text: Surely aware of the sea's convexity, he may have designed his map on a slightly rounded metal surface. The centre or “navel” of the world ( "omphalós gẽs") could have been Delphi, but is more likely in Anaximander's time to have been located near Miletus. The Aegean Sea was near the map's centre and enclosed by three continents, themselves located in the middle of the ocean and isolated like islands by sea and rivers. Europe was bordered on the south by the Mediterranean Sea and was separated from Asia by the Black Sea, the Lake Maeotis, and, further east, either by the Phasis River (now called the Rioni in Georgia) or the Tanais. The Nile flowed south into the ocean, separating Libya (which was the name for the part of the then-known African continent) from Asia.


title: Anaximander

text: The "Suda" relates that Anaximander explained some basic notions of geometry. It also mentions his interest in the measurement of time and associates him with the introduction in Greece of the gnomon. In Lacedaemon, he participated in the construction, or at least in the adjustment, of sundials to indicate solstices and equinoxes. Indeed, a gnomon required adjustments from a place to another because of the difference in latitude.


title: Anaximander

text: In his time, the gnomon was simply a vertical pillar or rod mounted on a horizontal plane. The position of its shadow on the plane indicated the time of day. As it moves through its apparent course, the Sun draws a curve with the tip of the projected shadow, which is shortest at noon, when pointing due south. The variation in the tip's position at noon indicates the solar time and the seasons; the shadow is longest on the winter solstice and shortest on the summer solstice.


title: Anaximander

text: The invention of the gnomon itself cannot be attributed to Anaximander because its use, as well as the division of days into twelve parts, came from the Babylonians. It is they, according to Herodotus' Histories (II, 109), who gave the Greeks the art of time measurement. It is likely that he was not the first to determine the solstices, because no calculation is necessary. On the other hand, equinoxes do not correspond to the middle point between the positions during solstices, as the Babylonians thought. As the "Suda" seems to suggest, it is very likely that with his knowledge of geometry, he became the first Greek to determine accurately the equinoxes.


title: Anaximander

text: In his philosophical work "De Divinatione" (I, 50, 112), Cicero states that Anaximander convinced the inhabitants of Lacedaemon to abandon their city and spend the night in the country with their weapons because an earthquake was near. The city collapsed when the top of the Taygetus split like the stern of a ship. Pliny the Elder also mentions this anecdote (II, 81), suggesting that it came from an "admirable inspiration", as opposed to Cicero, who did not associate the prediction with divination.


title: Anaximander

text: Bertrand Russell in the "History of Western Philosophy" interprets Anaximander's theories as an assertion of the necessity of an appropriate balance between earth, fire, and water, all of which may be independently seeking to aggrandize their proportions relative to the others. Anaximander seems to express his belief that a natural order ensures balance among these elements, that where there was fire, ashes (earth) now exist. His Greek peers echoed this sentiment with their belief in natural boundaries beyond which not even the gods could operate.


title: Anaximander

text: Friedrich Nietzsche, in "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", claimed that Anaximander was a pessimist who asserted that the primal being of the world was a state of indefiniteness. In accordance with this, anything definite has to eventually pass back into indefiniteness. In other words, Anaximander viewed "...all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance". ("Ibid.", § 4) The world of individual objects, in this way of thinking, has no worth and should perish.


title: Anaximander

text: Martin Heidegger lectured extensively on Anaximander, and delivered a lecture entitled "Anaximander's Saying" which was subsequently included in "Off the Beaten Track". The lecture examines the ontological difference and the oblivion of Being or "Dasein" in the context of the Anaximander fragment. Heidegger's lecture is, in turn, an important influence on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: "May you live in interesting times" is an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. While seemingly a blessing, the expression is normally used ironically; life is better in "uninteresting times" of peace and tranquility than in "interesting" ones, which are usually times of trouble.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: Despite being so common in English as to be known as the "Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced. The most likely connection to Chinese culture may be deduced from analysis of the late-19th-century speeches of Joseph Chamberlain, probably erroneously transmitted and revised through his son Austen Chamberlain.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: Despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no known equivalent expression in Chinese. The nearest related Chinese expression translates as "Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos." () The expression originates from Volume 3 of the 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong, "Stories to Awaken the World".


title: May you live in interesting times

text: Evidence that the phrase was in use as early as 1936 is provided in a memoir written by Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to China in 1936 and 1937, and published in 1949. He mentions that before he left England for China in 1936, a friend told him of a Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."


title: May you live in interesting times

text: The phrase is again described as a "Chinese curse" in an article published in "Child Study: A Journal of Parent Education" in 1943.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: Some years ago, in 1936, I had to write to a very dear and honoured friend of mine, who has since died, Sir Austen Chamberlain, brother of the present Prime Minister, and I concluded my letter with a rather banal remark "that we were living in an interesting age". Evidently he read the whole letter, because by return mail he wrote to me and concluded as follows: "Many years ago I learned from one of our diplomats in China that one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, 'May you live in an interesting age. "Surely", he said, "no age has been more fraught with insecurity than our own present time." That was three years ago.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: Research by philologist Garson O'Toole shows a probable origin in the mind of Austen Chamberlain's father Joseph Chamberlain dating around the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, O'Toole cites the following statement Joseph made during a speech in 1898:


title: May you live in interesting times

text: I think that you will all agree that "we are living in most interesting times." (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, "new objects for anxiety." (Hear, hear.) [emphasis added]


title: May you live in interesting times

text: Over time, the Chamberlain family may have come to believe that the elder Chamberlain had not used his own phrase, but had repeated a phrase from Chinese.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: The supposed curse was described in a science-fiction story titled "U-Turn", credited to "Duncan Munro", in the April 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The text from the story is as follows:


title: May you live in interesting times

text: For centuries the Chinese used an ancient curse: "May you live in interesting times!" It isn't a curse any more. It's a blessing. We're scientific and civilized. We've got so many rights and liberties and freedoms that one can yearn for chains for the sheer pleasure of busting them and shaking them off. Reckon life would be more livable if there were any chains left to bust.


title: May you live in interesting times

text: "Duncan Munro" was a pseudonym of Eric Frank Russell; over the years since this has led many people to believe, almost certainly incorrectly, that Russell originated the myth.


title: Mike Mills

text: Michael Edward Mills (born December 17, 1958) is an American multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer who was a founding member of the alternative rock band R.E.M. Though known primarily as the bass guitarist and backing vocalist of R.E.M., his musical repertoire also includes keyboards and occasional lead vocals. He contributed to a majority of the band's musical compositions and is the only member to have had formal musical training.


title: Mike Mills

text: Michael Edward Mills was born to Frank and Adora Mills in Orange County, California, where his father was stationed in the Marines. The family moved to Macon, Georgia, when Mills was around six months old. Mills met future R.E.M. bandmate Bill Berry while they attended high school in Macon. The duo started out in bands together. Early projects included the band Shadowfax, later called The Back Door Band.


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills is credited with being the chief composer behind many of R.E.M.'s songs, including "Nightswimming", "Find the River", "At My Most Beautiful", "Why Not Smile", "Let Me In", "Wendell Gee", "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville", "Beat a Drum", "Be Mine", "Electrolite", and "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" In particular, R.E.M.'s 2004 album "Around the Sun" was heavily shaped by Mills' piano and keyboard contributions.


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills is responsible for the prominent backing vocal and harmony parts found in the band's back catalog, with his vocal contributions being most noticeable on 1986's "Lifes Rich Pageant" and 2008's "Accelerate". He sang lead vocals on the songs "Texarkana", "Near Wild Heaven", The Clique cover "Superman" and The Troggs cover "Love Is All Around".


title: Mike Mills

text: R.E.M. had been talking about disbanding since 2008, and eventually did so in 2011. In a 2013 interview, Mills said there is no possibility of an R.E.M. reunion. Mills described it as "31 wonderful years and the opportunity to end it on our own terms".


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills has written and performed with friends on various projects during his time with the band and since. In 1990 he wrote music for Howard Libov's short film "Men Will Be Boys". That same year, he recorded with Warren Zevon together with Buck and Berry as the Hindu Love Gods.


title: Mike Mills

text: In 2012, Mills contributed piano to a Record Store Day single released by Drive-By Truckers member Patterson Hood, in protest of a Walmart development being built in Athens, Georgia.


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills is a member, along with Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey, Peter Buck, and Linda Pitmon, of The Baseball Project.


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills performs as part of singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur's band. On April 3, 2014, while performing with Arthur, Mills broke the news that David Letterman would be retiring in 2015. Mills took a band self-portrait that he posted to Instagram and did a short interview about "breaking" the story.


title: Mike Mills

text: Since 2010, Mills has played with a rotating group of musicians for a series of concerts built around Big Star's album "Third/Sister Lovers". Known as Big Star's Third, the concerts have taken place in London, Sydney, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York. A longtime Big Star fan, Mills wrote the liner notes for the 2014 reissue of the band's first two releases, 1972's "#1 Record" and 1974's "Radio City".


title: Mike Mills

text: In 2016, he toured to support a "Concerto for Violin, Rock Band, and String Orchestra" with childhood friend Robert McDuffie, along with guitar players William Tonks and John Neff. The tour resumed in 2022.


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills' melodic approach to bass playing is inspired by Paul McCartney of the Beatles and Chris Squire of Yes; Mills has said, "I always played a melodic bass, like a piano bass in some ways ... I never wanted to play the traditional locked into the kick drum, root note bass work." Mills has more musical training than his bandmates, which he has said "made it easier to turn abstract musical ideas into reality."


title: Mike Mills

text: During R.E.M.'s career, Mills often harmonized with Michael Stipe in songs; in the chorus for "Stand", Mills and Stipe alternate singing lyrics, creating a dialogue.


title: Mike Mills

text: Mills is an avid fantasy sports player, with interest in NFL, NBA, and PGA teams, among others. He is also a fan of his alma mater's football team, the Georgia Bulldogs.


title: Generation War

text: Generation War (, translated as "Our Mothers, our Fathers") is a German World War II TV miniseries in three parts. It was commissioned by public broadcasting organization ZDF, produced by the UFA subsidiary TeamWorx, and first aired in Germany and Austria in March 2013. The series tells the story of five German friends, aged around 20, on their different paths through Nazi Germany and World War II: as Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front, a war nurse, an aspiring singer, and a Jewish tailor. The narrative spans four years, starting in 1941 Berlin, when the friends meet up for a last time before embarking on their journeys, enthusiastically vowing to meet up again the following Christmas. The story's conclusion is set shortly after the end of the war in 1945.


title: Generation War

text: When the series first aired in Germany, each episode garnered around 7 million viewers. "Generation War" has generated much controversy. "The Economist" stated that hardly any German TV drama ever caused so much public debate. Critics have acknowledged the film to be well crafted, intense and unsparing in its depiction of combat on the eastern front. However, aspects such as the portrayal of the Polish resistance movement as anti-semites, the scant depiction of Nazi Germany's objective to purge the Reich of Jews, and the blurring of differences between non-German victims and German perpetrators have been deplored by others.


title: Generation War

text: There are three 90 minute parts: "A Different Time" ('), "A Different War" ('), and "A Different Country" ("").


title: Generation War

text: Shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, five close friends have a party at a pub in Berlin. Wilhelm is an officer in the Army, while his brother Friedhelm an enlisted man. Viktor is a Jew whose father owns a tailor shop. Charlotte has just passed her examination to become a military nurse. Greta is a beautiful bartender who hopes to become a singer. The friends are hopeful that they will meet again by Christmas.


title: Generation War

text: Wilhelm and Friedhelm witness some early victories as the German army advances toward Moscow. Charlotte gets used to seeing blood as she works in a military hospital near the front-line. Greta sleeps with an SS-SD major in order to advance her career as a singer. She attempts to use her relationship to obtain documents for Viktor to flee to New York City, but Viktor is arrested by the Gestapo and is put on a train to a concentration camp.


title: Generation War

text: The invasion is being pushed back by the Red Army, causing high casualties for the Germans. During an assault in which almost his entire platoon is killed, Wilhelm is knocked unconscious by an explosion and left for dead. When he wakes up, instead of going back to the base, he finds a cabin by a lake and lives on his own for a few weeks. He is discovered by the military police and sentenced to death for desertion. Friedhelm, having been cut off from his unit during the earlier assault, escapes the Russians by wearing a Soviet uniform, only to be mistakenly shot by his own side when returning to his lines. He is taken to a field hospital where Charlotte discovers him and convinces the doctor to operate, saving his life. While recovering, believing his brother to be dead, he tells Charlotte that Wilhelm has been killed. Friedhelm is sent back home, but seeing his father's disappointment with Wilhelm's apparent death, and lack of appreciation for Friedhelm's survival, Friedhelm cuts short his leave and returns to his unit. Viktor is sent to Auschwitz, but he manages to escape by breaking the wooden floor of the railroad car he is in, alongside a Polish woman called Alina, and joins a group of Polish partisans. He has to conceal his Jewish identity because they hate Jews. Charlotte feels despair over Wilhelm's apparent death and starts an affair with the doctor who saved Friedhelm. Greta visits the front-line to perform for the many soldiers. In the apartment where she stays, she is reunited with Wilhelm, Friedhelm and Charlotte for a brief moment. She visits Charlotte's workplace and becomes disillusioned by what she sees. Back in Germany, she returns to the bar where she works and tells the soldiers who have returned from the battlefield that victory is still a long way to go. The day after, she is arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into prison for making remarks in public that disapprove of the war and the Hitler regime and also probably because of her attempts to contact the same Gestapo Lt. Colonel in the first episode (calling him at home, which, as his mistress, was unacceptable). When the Lt. Colonel questions her, she tells him that she has become pregnant.


title: Generation War

text: The Soviets are now nearing Berlin. Wilhelm's death sentence is reduced to probation and he is assigned to a disciplinary battalion. A sadistic sergeant abuses Wilhelm, who Wilhelm eventually kills before escaping the battalion. Charlotte befriends a Russian nurse named Sonja. After liberating prisoners from a train on the way to a labour camp, Viktor is expelled from the partisans, because they found out he was Jewish. Charlotte sees Wilhelm again and has an emotional breakdown, because she thought he was dead. Viktor crosses paths with Friedhelm, who kills an SD commander, enabling Viktor to escape. When the field hospital is overrun, Charlotte and Sonja are captured and raped by a gang of Soviet soldiers. A female Soviet officer forcibly recruits them to become nurses for the Red Army. She sees Sonja being tortured as a traitor and then being executed. After the German army falls apart, Friedhelm dies while leading a group of "Volkssturm", sacrificing himself to make his troops surrender. In the war's last days, Greta is executed by the German authorities for her speech crimes, and her possession of incriminating evidence about her former Gestapo lover - who, it is implied, has ordered her execution. Shortly after the end of the war, the three survivors, Wilhelm, Viktor, and Charlotte, meet in the ruins of the same pub as before and grieve together for their lost friends, but without any sense of triumph over their survival.


title: Generation War

text: Wilhelm (Volker Bruch) is the narrator of the story. He provides the opening monologue for the episodes, and when the plot jumps forward in time his voiceovers describe the course of the war. In the pilot episode he states that he has served in the invasion of Poland as well as in the invasion of France. He is somewhat aware that Charlotte has feelings for him, but tells his brother and fellow soldiers that he doesn't want to get her hopes up, presumably as he could be killed on the front lines before he could reciprocate.


title: Generation War

text: Wilhelm firmly believes he is bound by honor to fight as a soldier for his home country. Consequently, he is determined to do what he considers his duty as a Wehrmacht officer commanding an infantry platoon and he executes a prisoner in accordance with the Commissar Order. As the war goes on he is awarded the Iron Cross 1st class and promoted to Oberleutnant but the hope for a quick victory evaporates and so does his naïve idealism. Facing the death of his whole platoon to achieve a questionable objective, he walks away from the front line after suffering from a concussion caused by a Panzerfaust anti-tank explosive. He then takes refuge in an abandoned lakeside cabin where he is arrested as a deserter by Feldgendarmerie officers. Instead of being executed, he is placed in a Strafbattalion (Penal Battalion). He is continually broken down further, through the actions of his sadistic platoon leader. Charlotte encounters him as a member of the Penal Battalion and is incredulous that he is alive, but they are quickly separated. Later he kills his platoon leader and escapes with a fellow soldier, making his way to Berlin.


title: Generation War

text: At the series' end, he, Charlotte, and Viktor gather in the rubble of the bar where Greta worked in occupied Berlin and toast Greta and Friedhelm.


title: Generation War

text: Charlotte (Miriam Stein), referred to as "Charly" by the circle of friends, secretly loves Wilhelm. When the war begins she volunteers as a nurse. She initially cannot bear to witness the suffering of wounded soldiers, but over the course of the campaign she hardens considerably. After being expelled from the operating theatre for dropping a scalpel, she is reassigned as a general nurse. Because the medical staff are overworked and in short supply, she is allowed to get assistance from local Ukrainian medical workers. She employs a Ukrainian assistant named Lilija who, when asked, denies being a Jew. After morphine goes missing, Charlotte investigates and discovers a photograph of Lilija's family standing in front of a menorah. She confronts Lilija, who admits to being a Jewish born medical doctor. Upon hearing this admission, Charlotte wrestles with her conscience but in the end decides to report her to the authorities. However, shortly afterwards, when she sees Gestapo officers approaching the ward she tries to warn Lilija to run away. But before Lilija can act, another German nurse points her out to the authorities who are "looking for a Jew hiding in the hospital" and they take her away. Charlotte's grief is further compounded when a wounded Friedhelm claims that Wilhelm was killed in action and she has an affair with the chief surgeon. Things only get worse when Wilhelm later turns up as a Penal Battalion soldier at her field hospital as the German Army is retreating on the Eastern Front. She angrily pushes Wilhelm away after confessing she is in love with him, and runs away to cry. When she regains her composure to try and speak with him again, she finds that he is gone.


title: Generation War

text: As the front very quickly closes in, Charlotte, a local aide, Sonja, and a group of seriously wounded soldiers fail to evacuate and are left behind to face the advancing Red Army, whose men kill the rest of the wounded soldiers in their beds and proceed to arrest Sonja as a collaborator and rape Charlotte. Just then Lilija, having been freed by the Russians and now in their service as an officer, shows up, interrupts the rape, and saves Charlotte from further harm (execution) by arranging her inclusion as a nurse in the Soviet field hospital. She does however proceed to shoot Sonja, stating there was nothing she could do to alter a death penalty for a collaborator, noting that she has at least saved her from suffering sexual abuse at the hand of the soldiers.


title: Generation War

text: At the war's end, she, Wilhelm, and Viktor have a solemn reunion in the rubble of the bar where Greta worked.


title: Generation War

text: Greta (Katharina Schüttler) is a bartender at a local tavern in Berlin, and an ambitious singer who wants to succeed by any means. When the Gestapo officer Martin Dorn crashes their going-away party (in the pilot episode), she admits to possessing the Teddy Stauffer swing-dance record the five friends are dancing to in order to stall the officer and prevents her Jewish boyfriend Viktor from being discovered out past curfew. She starts a love affair with Dorn to try to worm out of the charges of incitement; Dorn, in return, promotes her career for propaganda efforts. When she becomes a threat to his own marriage, he organizes a USO-like road show in the midst of the Eastern Front. She is briefly reunited with Friedhelm, Wilhelm, and Charlotte in her improvised dressing room after her performance, but cuts short the reunion (much to the other friends' dismay) to attend a private party held by the senior commanders.


title: Generation War

text: Greta is stranded when her driver and pilot leave her behind at the start of the Battle of Kursk as she takes too long to pack her belongings. Charlotte forces her to help tend to wounded Heer soldiers at her field hospital, and the experience clearly traumatizes Greta. By chance she manages to return to her bar in Berlin, where she openly expresses her doubts in the Endsieg to a group of partying soldiers, and angers Dorn by revealing their affair to his wife, both of which lead to her getting arrested and imprisoned for Wehrkraftzersetzung ("subversion of the war effort") and defeatism. When she is arrested, she reveals that she had become impregnated by Dorn. He is shocked by this and then punches her in the stomach hard, to end her pregnancy. She is imprisoned and eventually executed by a firing squad in the final days of the war.


title: Generation War

text: Viktor (Ludwig Trepte) is Greta's secret lover. Because of his Jewish background both of them live in constant fear that they will be accused of Rassenschande ("racial shame", "racial defilement", or "racial pollution"). Attempting to help him escape deportation, Greta manipulates Dorn into giving him a passport to the US, but Dorn double-crosses him and on the day of his departure Viktor is arrested by Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. On the way there he escapes from the train, along with a Polish woman named Alina, and joins a group of Polish Armia Krajowa partisans. During his time there he has to keep his Jewish background a secret due to widespread anti-Semitism within the group. As the group is about to carry out an ambush on a motorized Wehrmacht squad, Viktor, by chance, recognizes Friedhelm as one of the drivers, and feigns his participation in the attack allowing Friedhelm to pass safely through the ambush and inadvertently saving the life of Hiemer, his SD officer passenger. Later, the group ambushes and raids a German train for weapons, whereupon they discover that a large part of its cargo is Jewish prisoners, whom they refuse to free. A conflicted Viktor decides openly to defy them and frees the prisoners, angering the other partisans who consider executing him. However, their leader, having become sympathetic towards Viktor, allows him to walk away from the group in peace. Just after Viktor leaves, the partisans are betrayed and their hide-out is attacked by Friedhelm's squad, but Friedhelm recognizes Viktor and allows him to escape amidst the confusion, having shot SD officer Hiemer who has also appeared. After the end of the war Viktor returns to Berlin to find out that both his parents and Greta are dead, that new residents have taken over his family's apartment, and that Dorn is now a member of the allies' postwar administration under the protection of U.S. army, much to his fury.


title: Generation War

text: At the end of the war Viktor reunites with Charlotte and Wilhelm in the rubble of the bar where Greta worked.