Not enough whipped cream?

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DISGRACED GERMAN DEFENSE MINISTER (Dr.) Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, who once seemed to be on the fast track to the chancellorship,  has suffered many humiliations since losing his job and his budding career last spring over a plagiaris… Read full post »

 
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-98)
Click to hear recording

BACK WHEN I WAS a history grad student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a notion circulating among many (tenured) historians that all the real research into the recent past had already been done and now the thing t… Read full post »

THRILLER AUTHOR TOM SNEYDERS has experienced far more than most of us can ever conceive of attempting. He has been a soldier, military trainer, political prisoner, champion weightlifter, businessman, world traveler, and action-adventure writer. I caught up with him in his home outside… 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 »

Is Wikipedia replacing the Bible as the source of all wisdom?

I DON'T NORMALLY GO to The Guardian for laughs, but I sure got a chuckle a couple of days ago when I read how the Vatican has been caught with its trousers around the ankles for some sloppy/… Read full post »

Demonstrators at Bellevue Palace (Source: FAZ)

There was a whiff of Baghdad in the nippy Berlin air yesterday as some 300 surly citizens trudged over to Bellevue Palace to wave their shoes at Federal President Christian Wulff's window. How did they ever come up with such a bizarre… Read full post »

AS LIFE SPANS LENGTHEN, the problems of long-distance caregiving and elder exploitation are growing too. I recently discussed these matters with life coach Sandy Weiner, who has not only a professional but also a highly personal interest in the subject. (This picks up on a previous… 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 »

Johannes Heesters on the stage in Holland (1923)

I SUSPECT THAT BEING named the world's oldest man or woman is a dubious honor, not only because the distinction is so fleeting, but because, thanks to modern medicine and hygiene, there are now more and more centenarians in the world,… Read full post »

A German and British soldier share a cigarette, Christmas 1914 

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, 1914, the guns of war fell silent along many sections of the Western Front. Over one long night – and even into early January in some places – the German, French, and British soldiers spontaneou… Read full post »

 
"We believe in the Christ Child":
Original logo of pro-christkind.org

IT WOULD BE MISLEADING to speak of a German war on Santa Claus, since there is probably no figure more popular among ordinary Germans than the Weihnachtsmann, increasingly known just as Santa. You can find him eve/… Read full post »

  
With the Edict of Potsdam in 1685, Frederick William 
of Brandenburg introduced Berlin's tradition of tolerance

EVER SINCE FREDERICK WILLIAM, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, invited thousands of French Huguenots to settle in his territories following the revocation of… 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 »

 
I admire it, but I don't want it.

1. iPhones
Although it is undoubtedly the most remarkable piece of hand-held engineering ever developed, I simply have no use for the iPhone. On the few occasions when I've had to fiddle with one, I became claustrophobic trying to maneuver around its/… 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 »

 
It's been raining cash over Berlin's Red City Hall this
week, if nowhere else. Maybe I should move?

ONE NICE THING ABOUT being a freelance simultaneous interpreter is that, if a job is cancelled at the last moment, you still get paid for all the hours you were contracted to do.… Read full post »

 
Frank Lange has been given just months to live.
A scene from the harrowing film Stopped on Track
(Source: IMDb) 

THE FILM OPENS IN a doctor’s office where a married couple is just receiving some very bad news. In fact, the office is real and the doctor is real, as i… Read full post »

 
If even Santa is naughty, who can be nice?

IF YOU'VE EVER WONDERED where horror writers get their twisted ideas from, wonder no more: it's from news items like this one. Over the weekend I wrote about the serial poisoner who has been preying on merrymakers at Berlin's Christmas markets./… Read full post »

 
The Nostalgic Christmas Market
on Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT it, an outdoor German Christmas market is the perfect environment for a psychopath. He or she can blend in with thousands of clueless merrymakers, many of whom are tourists unfamiliar with local customs,… Read full post »

TIME WAS WHEN INTERNET sex was a tawdry business (or so I have been told), largely consisting of dirty pictures and coeds with webcams, preening and moaning as if anybody was really having a good time. But no longer. According to a recent Swedish-American study being highlighted… 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 »

 
Gone in three minutes:
Berlin's Deutschlandhalle in 1939
(Source: wiki)

IT WAS THE LARGEST multi-purpose hall of its kind when it opened in 1935 after just nine months of construction, but that was nothing out of the ordinary in the Berlin of those days. The capital wa… Read full post »

  
"Paradise can make itself scarce. That is its nature."
East German author Christa Wolf, 1929-2011
(Source: Wiki)

POST-WAR GERMAN LITERATURE lost one of its most distinctive voices today. Christa Wolf, East Germany’s best-known and still best remembered author, has died at… Read full post »

 
The "Black Baron" and wife Stephanie in better days

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT he had finally disgraced himself for good, the man is back, his eyes on high office and generating headlines everywhere he goes. No, I’m not talking about Newt Gingrich. It’s [Dr.] Baron K… Read full post »