FUNDUS—Writings in the histories of art, culture, and philosophy
Since 1959, more than 150 volumes have been released in the FUNDUS series. With a rich tradition with roots in the oppositional movement and intellectual milieu of East Germany, the series comprises writings on contemporary tendencies in the arts and aspects of the histories of art, culture, and philosophy. Writers’ critical engagements with the contemporary world and current affairs have been a mainstay of the series, as have been reprints and editions of seminal historic writings.
THE FUNDUS BOOKS—ALSO AN EAST GERMAN STORY
FUNDUS was launched, initially as a series of paperbacks, by Verlag der Kunst in Dresden in 1959. Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst, or Of the Necessity of Art, was the title of the first volume, edited by Ernst Fischer. Erhard Frommhold, a thinker of the GDR’s Marxist left, oversaw the series until the fall of the Wall, defying massive political pressure to toe the party line. Whether Frommhold pursued a strategic vision and hoped that the FUNDUS books would hone readers’ critical consciousness and spur them to press for changes to the system is hard to say. What is certain is that he shared the confidence of many intellectuals that broad dissemination of knowledge would gradually undermine the aporias of ideology. Doubts about the capitalist system and the conviction that, after two world wars and the Nazi era, it was destined for the ash heap of history motivated him to develop his publishing project, which he pursued with passionate dedication for four decades.
In 1952, a twenty-four-year-old Frommhold applied to Verlag der Kunst in Dresden. He was hired as an editor, became chief editor and, finally, publisher. Championing a universal intellectual and visual culture, he not only disregarded the national focus, he simply refused to acknowledge the aesthetic traditionalism that dominated in the propagandistic art media. Frommhold was determined to see the world as an unfinished reality, an open terrain in which ideas and sensual experiences could flourish. The impetus behind FUNDUS also sprang from his ethical desire to not sacrifice the creative potentials of his own history to the pragmatism of politics.
In the 1970s, the GDR at long last permitted some subjects that had been taboo to be broached. The authorities strove to modernize the public image of the socialist German state, recasting it as a sovereign and confident country that held its own in the ideological contest with the other Germany. This shift afforded thinkers the leeway to reenvision the progressive culture of twentieth-century modernity. Frommhold had braved existential challenges and prevailed. FUNDUS remained a series of meticulously produced publications: cultural-historical portraits of different periods, documents related to individual artists, writings on cultural theory, architecture, and urban planning.
INTELLECTUAL LEGACY AND CHALLENGES OF A NEW WORLD
When the Wall fell, the Treuhandanstalt, the government agency established to privatize East German enterprises, invited investors to gamble with the remaining assets of the former GDR. Among them was Frommhold’s life’s work—he left the publishing house in 1992. His erstwhile employer was subsequently acquired by Gordon & Breach, an academic publishing house. Gerti Fietzek and Michael Glasmeier gave the series a new design and edited FUNDUS until it was taken over by the German-Jewish publisher Philo in 2001. The reunification-era debut volume was an ostensibly “old” title, but one that had never been published in German translation: Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man spoke to many urgent questions raised by the new realities of a reunited Germany and its media landscape, which was undergoing profound changes.
In January 2008, the Hamburg-based entrepreneur and art collector Harald Falckenberg founded Philo Fine Arts, which secured the FUNDUS series’ continued existence until 2023. In more than six decades, FUNDUS introduced readers to the ideas and writings of scholars in the humanities including Ernst H. Gombrich, Clement Greenberg, Rosa Luxemburg, Bazon Brock, and Peter Weibel as well as artists like Jeff Wall, Almut Linde, and Jasper Johns and leading art-world thinkers like Tom Holert, Isabelle Graw, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Harald Szeemann.
Since the spring of 2024, all titles in the series that are still in stock have been made available again through booksellers across Germany and abroad; planned reissues and new releases will be published under DISTANZ’s imprint. The series’ defining characteristic—important ideas and theories set out by experts in their fields—will remain the same, while many new authors and books on issues in contemporary life, aesthetics, and culture will extend its reach.
COMPLETE LIST OF FUNDUS TITLES SINCE 1959 (PDF)
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Georg Imdahl
Ausbeute
Santiago Sierra und die Historizität der zeitgenössischen Kunst
VOLUME 221€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Michael Diers, Denis Grünemeier, Beat Wyss
Focus on Blow-Up
Die Gegenwart der Bilder bei Antonioni
VOLUME 220€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Jörg Heiser
Doppelleben
Kunst und Popmusik
VOLUME 219€26.00 Add to Cart ...
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Tom Holert
Übergriffe
Zustände und Zuständigkeiten der Gegenwartskunst
VOLUME 217€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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SOON
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Eduard Beaucamp
Kunststücke
Ein Tanz mit dem Zeitgeist (Dancing with the Zeitgeist)
VOLUME 211€16.00 Add to Cart ...
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Margit Berner, Anette Hoffmann, Britta Lange
Sensible Sammlungen
Aus dem anthropologischen Depot (From the Anthropological Depot)
VOLUME 210€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Susanne von Falkenhausen
Praktiken des Sehens im Felde der Macht (Practices of Seeing in the Field of Power)
Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings)
VOLUME 209€26.00 Add to Cart ...
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Michael Diers, Lars Blunck, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Das Interview (The Interview)
Formen und Foren des Künstlergesprächs
VOLUME 206€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Peter Geimer
Derrida ist nicht zu Hause
Begegnungen mit Abwesenden
VOLUME 205€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Beat Wyss
Renaissance als Kulturtechnik (Renaissance as Cultural Technique)
VOLUME 204€26.00 Add to Cart ...
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SOON
Wolfgang Müller
Subkultur Westberlin 1979–1989
Freizeit (Leisure Time)
VOLUME 203UPCOMING Notify me
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Thomas Becker
Die Lust am Unseriösen (The Pleasure of the Unserious)
Zur politischen Unschärfe ästhetischer Erfahrung (On the Political Blurriness of Aesthetic Experience)
VOLUME 202€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Isabelle Graw, Helmut Draxler, André Rottmann
Erste Wahl (II) (First Choice (II))
20 Jahre »Texte zur Kunst«, 2. Dekade (20 Years of Texte zur Kunst, the 2nd Decade)
VOLUME 201€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Isabelle Graw, Helmut Draxler, André Rottmann
Erste Wahl (First Choice)
20 Jahre »Texte zur Kunst« (20 Years of Texte zur Kunst)
VOLUME 200€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Uwe Fleckner
Der Künstler als Seismograph (The Artist as Seismograph)
Zur Gegenwart der Kunst und zur Kunst der Gegenwart (On the Presentness of Art and the Art of the Present)
VOLUME 198€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Hans Ulrich Reck
Spiel Form Künste (Play, Form, Arts)
Zu einer Kunstgeschichte des Improvisierens (Toward an Art History of Improvisation)
VOLUME 197€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Uwe Nettelbeck
Keine Ahnung von Kunst und wenig vom Geschäft
Filmkritik 1963–1968
VOLUME 196€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Isabelle Graw
Texte zur Kunst
Essays, Rezensionen, Gespräche (Essays, Reviews, Conversations)
VOLUME 195€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Rosalind E. Krauss
Das optische Unbewusste (The Optical Unconscious)
VOLUME 194€26.00 Add to Cart ...
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Raoul Hausmann
Dada-Wissenschaft (Dada Science)
Wissenschaftliche und technische Schriften (Scientific and Technical Writings)
Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur
VOLUME 193€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Edgar Wind
Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand (The Object of Aesthetics and Art History)
Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte (A Contribution toward the Methodology of Art History)
VOLUME 192€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Ole Frahm
Die Sprache des Comics
VOLUME 179€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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SOON
Peter Geimer
Bilder aus Versehen
Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen
VOLUME 178UPCOMING Notify me
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Ursula Panhans-Bühler
Gegeben sei: die Gabe
Duchamps Flaschentrockner in der vierten Dimension
VOLUME 176€14.00 Add to Cart ...
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Robert Pfaller
Ästhetik der Interpassivität
VOLUME 175€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Diedrich Diederichsen
Kritik des Auges
Texte zur Kunst
VOLUME 173€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky
Eidos und Eidolon. Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen
Idea. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie
VOLUME 172€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Ludwig Seyfarth
Unsichtbare Sammlungen
Kunst nach der Postmoderne
VOLUME 170€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Boris Groys
Die Kunst des Denkens
VOLUME 169€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Harald Falckenberg
Aus dem Maschinenraum der Kunst
Aufzeichnungen eines Sammlers
VOLUME 168€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Werner Hofmann
Gustav Klimt und die Wiener Jahrhundertwende
VOLUME 167€16.00 Add to Cart ...
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Hans Belting
Szenarien der Moderne
Kunst und ihre offenen Grenzen
VOLUME 164€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Beat Wyss
Die Wiederkehr des Neuen
VOLUME 163€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Michael Diers
Fotografie Film Video (Photography, Film, Video)
Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie des Bildes (Toward a Critical Theory of the Image)
VOLUME 162€28.00 Add to Cart ...
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Peter Weibel
Gamma und Amplitude (Gamma and Amplitude)
Medien- und kunsttheoretische Schriften (Media and Art Theoretical Writings)
VOLUME 161€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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Christian Janecke
Performance und Bild (Performance and Image)
Performance als Bild (Performance as Image)
VOLUME 160€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Denis Diderot
Schriften zur Kunst (Writings on Art)
VOLUME 157€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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Bazon Brock
Bildersturm und stramme Haltung (Iconoclasm and Standing at Attention)
Texts 1968 to 1996
VOLUME 155€15.00 Add to Cart ...
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Umberto Boccioni
Futuristische Malerei und Plastik (Futurist Painting and Sculpture )
(Plastic Dynamism)
VOLUME 153€18.00 Add to Cart ...
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Elke Bippus, Michael Glasmeier
Künstler in der Lehre (Artists as Teachers)
Texts from Ad Rheinhardt to Ulrike Grossarth
VOLUME 151€20.00 Add to Cart ...
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August Strindberg
Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke (Delirious Sensory Impressions)
Schriften zu Malerei, Fotografie und Naturwissenschaften (Writings on Painting, Photography, and the Natural Sciences)
VOLUME 150€14.00 Add to Cart ...
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Beuysnobiscum
VOLUME 147€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Jeff Wall
Szenarien im Bildraum der Wirklichkeit (Scenarios in the Pictorial Space of Reality)
Essays and Interviews
VOLUME 142€22.00 Add to Cart ...
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Wilhelm Fraenger
Formen des Komischen (Forms of the Comic)
Vorträge 1920–1921 (Lectures 1920–1921)
VOLUME 136€14.00 Add to Cart ...
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Peter Schjeldahl
Poesie der Teilnahme (Poetics of Participation)
Kritiken (Critiques) 1980–1994
VOLUME 135€14.00 Add to Cart ...
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Clement Greenberg
Die Essenz der Moderne (The Essence of Modernism)
Selected Essays and Criticism
VOLUME 133€24.00 Add to Cart ...
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William Hogarth
Analyse der Schönheit (The Analysis of Beauty)
VOLUME 132€14.00 Add to Cart ...
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Michel Serres
Über Malerei (On Painting)
Vermeer, La Tour, Turner
VOLUME 130€12.00 Add to Cart ...