The Funny Money of Weimar Germany
Notgeld was the money issued locally in Germany during the First World War and the tumultuous interwar period. What do these strange and experimental artefacts reveal about art and money?
86 Articles by:
Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley is a writer and editor, whose latest book Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC is out now.
Lenin at Leisure
A vivid, rediscovered anthology — compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher — assembles a surprising portrait of the Soviet revolutionary built from letters, memoirs, and fragments.
Modernism for the Many
In the 1960s, Kate Macintosh designed modernist public housing for the elderly. Her buildings are monuments to what architecture can achieve when liberated from the constraints of the property market.
What Was the Soviet Union?
Owen Hatherly sits down with historian Sheila Fitzpatrick to discuss how her work challenged orthodox understandings of the USSR — how its dissolution shaped the politics of modern-day Russia and the former socialist republics.
The Future of the Back Pages
The Tribune culture section may not always look like it, but it is part of the same project as the rest of the magazine — trying to provide historical grounding for a new left; but we need to look forward, too.
Defining Modernist Architecture
The roots of modernist architecture are explicitly reformist and socialist – yet it continues to defy contemporary characterisation as either an elite conspiracy or a monument to unfulfilled utopia, writes Owen Hatherley.
The Head Boy In the Bubble
Rishi Sunak might have grown up in an industrial city, but he spent most of his life in a bubble – made clear not only by the fact he never made any working-class friends, but that he seems to understand nothing about strikes.
Red Library: Korean Fiction
Amid a global wave of interest in Korean culture, Korean writers have created some of the most striking politicised fiction of the last few years.
‘I Was So Dissatisfied When Pulp Got Famous — It Didn’t Cause a Revolution’
Owen Hatherley interviews Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker about his upbringing, his politics — and what he kept that others might have thrown away.
Ian Svenonius’ Escaping Act
The records and books of Ian Svenonius exist at a silly-serious intersection of politics and comedy, revealing the potentials and pitfalls of their combination.
The Landscape of Treason
The Cold War ‘Red Scare’ went alongside a ‘Lavender Scare’, which saw the police ramp up their surveillance and blackmail of gay men. A new film inspired by the Cambridge Spies explores the relationship between the two.
When Networks Die
Elon Musk’s inadvertent mercy killing of Twitter raises again the question – why don’t we have a social media of our own?
Read Mike Davis
Mike Davis, the American geographer and historian, has died. There was no better socialist writer in the last four decades.
How the Picture Post Pioneered the Art of the Everyday
In the 1930s, Hungarian editor Stefan Lorant founded the ‘Picture Post’, which brought the radical ideas of post-revolutionary Central Europe to British newsagents – shown in its ‘inartistic’ stories of ordinary people.
Red Library: Red Ukraine
This issue’s Red Library focuses on the history of Ukraine.
Keeping Manchester’s Modernism Alive
The Manchester Modernist Society has spent over a decade popularising and democratising the neglected spaces of post-war modernism – but now they need our support.
A Revolution of Things
In the 1990s, artist Vladimir Arkhipov started to collect home-made objects in homes, markets, and junk shops. Today, his archive is both a document of poverty and a vision of liberated labour.
Doreen Massey’s Radical 1980s
A new collection of writings by geographer Doreen Massey features intense dispatches from the political battlegrounds of the 1980s, which remind us that even in eras of defeat, there are vital moments of hope.
Nostalgia, Nationalism and the New Russia
Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis talks to Tribune about the war in Ukraine, the politics that produced that disaster – and the complexities of nationalism in Putin’s Russia.
Rosa Luxemburg and the International of Letters
A new book inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s famous letters shows how dialogue can happen across a diverse and often divided international Left.