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 »

 
"Thoughts are free," the Pirates say, echoing
the old German freedom song. But they are finding that
it's not quite as simple as that

FOR A POLITICAL PARTY claiming to embody the spirit of a new, hip generation, Germany’s Pirates just can't seem to steer out of the wake of the… Read full post »

 
Germany's former First Couple,
Christian and Bettina Wulff

MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR IS moving out the same week I’m moving in. There’s nothing remarkable about that, particularly when the neighbor in question happens to be the Federal President of Germany and has been abso… Read full post »

Benno Ohnesorg was shot on June 2, 1967

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER, AS Alice would say. Perhaps the most poisonous cold case of postwar German history, namely the shooting death of student Benno Ohnesorg at the hands of a Berlin plainclothes police officer during a demonstration against th… Read full post »

...but how does he compare with America's candidates in 2012? 

President Wulff may be moving too

MY GIRLFRIEND AND I are moving to a new flat at the end of this month and it’s located dead-center between the palace of Germany’s Federal President and one of Berlin&rsquo… Read full post »

 
Click image for trailer

WHEN I FIRST HEARD that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were teaming up to produce The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, I felt both excitement and foreboding. Finally my favorite adventure comic book set from childhood (and later years as well)/… Read full post »

 
The free and easy veneer of Dutch society
has been hiding a hideous secret.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THE STORY of the little Dutch boy who supposedly stuck his finger in a leaky dike, thus preventing an entire region from being flooded by the North Sea. The Catholic Church of the Netherland… Read full post »

 
This game doesn't end well:
The NSU's "Pogromly"
(Source: FAZ)

GAMES ARE A PREPARATION for real-life situations. According to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung yesterday, the German neo-Nazi terror trio calling itself the National Socialist Underground designed and mar/… Read full post »

  
A far-right Baader-Meinhof Gang?:
Neo-Nazi terrorists Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Böhnardt,
and Uwe Mundlos of the "National Socialist Underground"

NEW EVIDENCE IN THE case of the self-styled “National Socialist Underground,” which is suspected for at least ten m/… Read full post »

 
Terrorist Beate Zschäpe of the
"National Socialist Underground"
(Source: STERN)

HAVE YOU EVER STOPPED to wonder whether the hundreds of billions we have been investing in “security” over the past decades have actually made us any safer agains… Read full post »

Or: Tom Swift and me. How an argument over adverbs killed my new novel

 
Empty shelf syndrome:
While I'm prohibited from exhibiting the cover art for my
aborted novel, if you click on the above image fast enough you might
still catch a glimpse of it on Amazon

IT WAS SUCH A… Read full post »

 
"Claimed innocent victims":
Would-be Hitler assassin and latter-day national hero,
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (1907-44)

MAYBE GERMANY'S MOST PROMINENT neo-Nazi faction, the National Democratic Party (NPD), has been hitting the beer and Jägermeister a little more strongly… Read full post »

 
Germany's obsession with academic honors
hits a new iceberg

THIS SOUNDS LIKE YESTERDAY'S news, but I suspect it's tomorrow's as well: the dodgy dissertation scandal that has already sunk a half dozen senior German politicians has claimed yet another victim. The latest to hit the ice,… Read full post »

 
If a local initiative has any say in the matter,
this subway train and station could become an
alcohol-free zone
(Source: BVG)

THERE'S A MOVEMENT UNDERWAY calling for a complete ban on the consumption of alchoholic beverages in the vehicles and stations of Germany's far-flung public transpo… Read full post »

 
"Gay, and that's a good thing":
Berlin's Lord Mayor Klaus Wowereit at Christopher
Street Celebration, 2001
(Source: wiki)

WHILE NEW YORK WAS legalizing gay marriage, the city and federal state of Berlin were finalizing plans to teach “sexual diversity” in the municipal primary s… Read full post »

 
The news from Vienna recalls the horrific
Reichstag fire of February 1933
(Source: wiki)

WHEN THE NEWS BROKE it seemed like 1933 all over again: Yesterday an Austrian newspaper announced that the Vienna police had arrested a 25 year-old convert to Islam, charging him with conspiracy to des… Read full post »

 
You are so busted!
Ex-German defense minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg
(Source: wiki)

IT’S A BLACK DAY for Germany’s Black Baron, former Defense Minister (Dr.) Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg. Four months after a left-wing scholar in Bremen reviewed Baron Guttenberg’s… Read full post »

 
Ready to rumble:
Representative Peter T. King (R-NY)

WITH REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING'S Muslim radicalization hearings opening this week and with anti-Muslim sentiment reaching a fever pitch in the United States, it could be enlightening to look across the Atlantic and see how other Western… Read full post »

 
Why do they hate us?:
The scene at Frankfurt Airport yesterday
(Source: spiegel.de)

GERMANY’S NEWLY APPOINTED INTERIOR minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, didn’t exactly begin his new position on a harmonious note today.  In his first press conference he said: “Th/… Read full post »

 
Germany's "Shoe Revolution":
Angry grad students take to the streets of Berlin on February
26 to demonstrate against the lying baron's cavalier attitude
toward footnotes and intellectual property
(Source: Berliner Morgenpost)

THERE WAS A WHIFF – but only a whiff – of North… Read full post »

Will a "dodgy dissertation" take down Germany's conservative golden boy?

 
Baron Guttenberg is finding Afghanistan to be
a much friendlier environment than Germany these days

YOU MIGHT BE EXCUSED for thinking that German defense minister Baron Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenber… Read full post »

 
German producer, director, and
screenwriter Bernd Eichinger

THE SAYING GOES THAT the best German movies deal with German topics. There is no better proof of this truism than the career of Germany’s top producer, Bernd Eichinger, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Los… Read full post »