Margot Wölk finally tells her story

 IF YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE me, the twentieth century, with all its blessings and horrors, seems like a long time ago. Even if – like me – you experienced your entire youth and more within it, and both yo… Read full post »

Historian and social worker Claus Bernet

IN AN ERA WHERE the mainline churches are losing their appeal and fundamentalism is growing increasingly authoritarian, alternative forms of religion are becoming more attractive to many spiritual seekers. One counter-cultural religious movement, the R… Read full post »

An interview with stand-up artist James Harris

English stand-up comedian James Harris moved to Berlin in 2004 and is a rising star in the city’s English-language comedy scene. I caught up with him a while back at the Café Chagall near my office in central Berlin to… Read full post »

IT’S NOT EXACTLY BREAKING news that the Swiss government’s carefully cultivated image as a defender of liberty and human rights against the evil Nazis is about as solid as a wedge of bubbly Emmental cheese. Financial shenanigans, including the squirreling away/… Read full post »

Bitter harvest: Experts defuse a World War II aerial bomb in Koblenz, Germany, in 2011, requiring the evacuation of 45,000 residents (Source: wiki) 

A PARTICULARLY MESSY BUREAUCRATIC tangle in the western German town of Duisburg is giving a new meaning to the famous “ticking bomb s… Read full post »

One down, twenty-six to go: Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg was forced to resign in 2010 following accusations of child beating and embezzlement  

WHEN I FIRST STARTED blogging about the German Catholic sexual abuse scandal in this space a few years back, I did so with a feeli… Read full post »

Rabbi David Goldberg of Bavaria, displaying the tools of his trade. The southern German state's sole mohel was reported for "unlawful bodily harm" by a German physician in August of 2012. (Source: www.nordbayern.de)

THERE MAY BE SOME movement coming into the German male circumcision co… Read full post »

 
"You shouldn't make fun of us": A billion Muslims would likely agree

YOU REALLY GOT TO hand it to the French: They genuinely believe in Liberté, even if they aren’t as good at Égalité and Fraternité. Just when you thought you might one day be able to ree/… Read full post »

"Pro Germany" taunting Muslims in front of a Berlin mosque last month (Source: Die Welt)

IT MUST BE A real drag to be German Chancellor Angela Merkel these days. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate, what with the collapse of the Euro and the entire European… Read full post »

Winning one for the Führer? Ex-Olympian Nadja Drygalla (Source: Frauenachter)

“THE THOUGHTS ARE FREE“ says an old German folk song, but apparently these thoughts do not include thoughts of love. That is the experience of twenty-three year-old Olympic rower Nadja Drygalla, wh… Read full post »

Faint praise and public profanity at a "holy site" leave blot on candidate's last foreign campaign stop 

Even if Obama's presidency has been a no-hitter in many ways, he sure scored at Berlin's Victory Column in 2008

I ALWAYS ENJOY A funny story, and yet I’m really glad… Read full post »

The illustrated baritone: It looks as if Evgeny Igorevich Nikitin just might have two tattoos too many

WE ALL KNOW THAT tattoos make a statement. But one thing many of their wearers forget is that, since they are visual and not verbal, they also refuse to shut up. This… Read full post »

German circumcision ruling has rabbis comparing the Federal Republic with the Third Reich 

A court in Cologne ruled last month that circumcision is an ancient tradition whose shelf life has finally expired

THEY REOPENED TREBLINKA LAST week.

No, the Germans didn’t literally… Read full post »

BULLYING SEEMS TO BE on everyone’s minds these days. Most people seem to have experienced it at some point in their school years, and still bear the scars today, and some experience it vicariously - and helplessly - through their own school-aged children. But what does it feel li… Read full post »

Berliners have grown tired of seeing their most historic monument misused as an American political prop 

Nobody knows what trouble I've seen: The bronze Quadriga atop Berlin's Brandenburg Gate (source: wiki commons)

OVER THE WEEKEND THE German press reported that likely Republican… Read full post »

American emigré: Author Michael Luick-Thrams has gone "home"

MICHAEL LUICK-THRAMS, AN author, historian, and public speaker from Saint Paul, Minnesota, called it quits last year. At… Read full post »

Spencer Tunick's "Ring" installation in central Munich

MUNICH'S CENTRAL PARK, THE beautiful English Garden, has long been known for the full frontal nudity its visitors indulge in, particularly on warm summer days like these. But even this booming, swinging southern German metropolis h… Read full post »

Stone of contention: The "Kueka Stone"

THE TIERGARTEN, A VAST public park in the center of the Berlin, which is otherwise known as the city’s “green lung” and an oasis of peace, has become a point of contention between the German government and the native Pemón… Read full post »

US troops unpack Jan Vermeer's purported "Christ and the Adulteress" in 1945. This painting was actually a clever forgery by a Dutch counterfeiter, who sold it to Göring as the real thing in 1942.

HERMANN WILHELM GÖRING, A demobilized World War I flying ace and last commander… Read full post »

Munich, September 1972 

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN the crime of the century if there just weren’t so many others to compete with it. In the early hours of September 5, 1972, a group of Palestinian terrorists calling themselves Black September climbed over the fence surrounding the virtuall… Read full post »

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S RECENT statement of support for gay marriage in the United States is touching off an avalanche of advocacy for equal marriage rights throughout Europe as well. No, nobody died and made him emperor. But his high-level announcement might just expedite a con… Read full post »

Setting a bad example to students?
German education minister (Dr.) Annette Schavan
(Source: Wiki)

THE WAGES OF SIN is death, the Good Book tells us, and the wages of plagiarism is now increasingly disgrace/… Read full post »

It seems the Catholic Church has been doing a better job of
protecting the guilty than the innocent in recent decades
(Image source: Bode Museum, Berlin)

THE DEEPER WE DIG into the recent history of the Catholic Church, the more sordid is the image that presents itself to us. And like the… Read full post »

How a Hollywood blockbuster blasted a century’s worth of reactionary pieties straight out of the water

JAMES CAMERON’S TITANIC IS back in cinemas this month, now in a 3D makeover, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the mighty ship’s sinking on April 15, 1/… Read full post »