Out of the rubble of the First World War emerged a mythic culture in Berlin: modern and erotic, brimming with arts and ideas; a city that attracted writers, actors, painters and musicians to its aura of progress and creativity.
Year: 2005
Nein Lives
For a people as addicted to order as the Germans, this country is floundering in uncertainty. The economy has sputtered to a post-World War II record 5 million unemployed. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s exhausted left-of-center coalition is close to coughing up the fall elections to conservatives. And soccer fans aren’t even sure if their team can defend the country’s pride when it hosts the World Cup next summer.
Shadow Places: A Journalist’s Rediscovery Breaks the Long Silence in Bavaria
The town of Plattling lies at the foothills of the Bavarian Forest, which climbs mountainously off the plain where the Isar and Danube rivers meet in southeastern Germany. The sky hangs oppressively gray here, even in June when the potato and sugar beet fields emit a green summer luster and the Niederbayern, or Lower Bavaria, looks flourishing and picturesque. The human landscape is quaint the way one expects: brown painted barns, neatly tended gardens and square homes with sharp roofs and lace curtains in the windows. So little stands out about the region that few tourists ever visit–which helps explain why the beer gardens, pastry shops and silent town streets lend it an atmosphere of time standing still. Lulled by Plattling’s charm, it’s easy to feel you’ve stumbled into a story by the Brothers Grimm.
Like many fairy tales, this story too has a dark underbelly.
They’re Laughing at Jews in Germany
Dani Levy has tussled gray hair and a sleepy-looking face. It’s a classic Jewish face: tan skin, round features and flashes of irony in his small, dark eyes. He’s wearing a sweater and trousers and scratching his head, choosing his words carefully. As he reclines on a sofa and sips mineral water at Café Bilderbuch in Berlin, Levy doesn’t come across as a man who has taken Germany’s film world by storm. Ask the box office, though, and they’ll tell you: He’s the one.
A Century of Israeli Art, on View in Berlin
Pogroms in Russia before and during the First World War sent waves of Jewish emigrants fleeing to Palestine. Around the same time, Jewish painters from across Europe settled in Tel Aviv, where an arts scene flourished in the 1920s, planting the seeds of Jewish national identity. It is this compelling chapter that opens “The New Hebrews: A Century of Art in Israel,” a context-heavy exhibition running through September at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau museum. Sprawling in scope, the show examines political, historical and ideological forces that have shaped Israeli art over the past century.
Place for Mourning Fails To Stir Descendants of Hitler’s Victims
When it comes to remembering, Jews like to think they do it best.
That’s why, as the German capital unveils the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 60 years after the end of World War II, reactions from Jews in Berlin are ranging from the emotional to the apathetic and removed.
Berlin Bustle
Berlin, GERMANY—For a city that prides itself on its cultural, not its commercial, values, February’s Berlin Film Festival looked like familiar turf for the foreign critics and European, black-clad filmgoing set who pleasured in gorging on more than 400 films from around the world. The bigger surprise came for the agents, producers, distributors and buyers of those films, who quietly amassed the biggest sales record here ever.