That a seminar for acting and directing should be named for a founder who was seldom present at his own institution is a truly remarkable circumstance. Just why this is not a contradiction and just how Max Reinhardt managed to make precisely this acting school into one of the German-speaking region’s most illustrious can now be learned—along with numerous other intriguing details—from a new book by Peter Roessler.

In late 1924, just over a century ago, the then-Academy of Music and Performing Arts was joined by a Fachhochschule of Music and Performing Arts—a further predecessor of today’s mdw that was intended to operate in parallel with the Academy. Just a few years later, however, the Fachhochschule was dissolved—plunging its sister institution into a deep crisis.

We live in an age of information. Never before has so much information been produced, and never before has obtaining quick access to it been so easy. Information is everywhere—and it’s often said that we’re dealing with a flood of it. At the same time, untold quantities of information are lost on a daily basis, with much content being ephemeral and/or generated only for the sake of a brief moment. Thereafter, it disappears into the infinite depths of the Internet.