Obama in Berlin? That was then, this is now.
“Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama’s decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany’s reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?”
“Barack is Too Busy”
Sometimes it takes a real man to make a real decision like this: Editor-in-chief Andreas Leberts has announced that starting next year, Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, will ban those skinny professional model types from its pages in favor of “real women”, whoever and wherever they are.
This decision is seen as an attempt to combat an unhealthy standard of unhealthy looking thin and flat I mean thin beauty and could also be seen as being the first step toward finally turning Brigitte into the men’s magazine it deserves to be.
Brigitte isst wieder.
American researchers have set the scientific world and everybody else in an uproar by determining that Adolf Hitler’s bullet-punctured skull fragment actually belonged to a woman, thus making the evil Nazi dictator one of those herself.
“This explains a lot of those bizarre hysterical outbreaks of his, I mean hers,” one researcher said. “And that half-ass mustache. And being a vegetarian. Like it all fits together now or something.”
“Ist der Schädel überhaupt echt?”
The SPD.
“The SPD’s decline exemplifies the crisis for Europe’s once-mighty center-left parties, which are in disarray in the U.K., France, Italy, Poland and other countries amid divisions over how to balance social protections and business freedoms in an era of rising global competition.”
“The SPD is paying a heavy price for its own boldness in trimming Germany’s welfare state and partially deregulating the labor market under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Those pragmatic moves lost the SPD many of its traditional working-class voters, and have left the party deeply split between centrists and left-wing traditionalists.”
“The voters have decided and the result is a bitter day for German Social Democracy.”
9.72 Usain Bolt May 31, 2008
9.69 Usain Bolt Aug 16, 2008
9.58 Usain Bolt Aug 16, 2009
It must be the Berliner Luft or something.
“Astounding, seemingly impossible, unreal.”
And only if you say it in English, of course. A German court has ruled that bad Nazi words, although still bad, are not nearly as bad if they are translated to English first and then said “there”, so-to-speak, making them legal, sort of, but just barely. There is a certain logic here, of course. Please tell me once you find it.
Meanwhile… Elsewhere in the English-speaking world… A signed copy of Mein Kampf (signed by you-know-who) was sold in England for a record $35000.
The guy who bought it was a Russian, however, which makes this okay, I think. If a Russian who can’t read German buys a bad German book signed by you-know-who in England then you could take the whole thing to court (here in Germany) and nobody would really much care, I think.
“In memory of our time together in prison in Landsberg.”
Hey, somebody’s got to do it, I guess. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve been told.
“In what government and arts officials are calling the most ambitious commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany, a symbolic re-creation of the wall that once separated East and West Berlin will be erected across Wilshire Boulevard in November.
The Wall Project, painted by professional and amateur artists, will close Sunday afternoon traffic on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares for three hours on Nov. 8 beginning at 3 p.m… It will be made up of two parts: The “Wall Across Wilshire” will have as its adjunct the “Wall Along Wilshire — Eastside Gallery West,” which will have a somewhat longer life in front of the 5900 Wilshire Blvd. building, remaining in place from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14.”
The location is “highly symbolic,” said Justinian Jampol, president and founder of the Wende Museum. “It connects downtown to the ocean, those two cultural anchors to the city.
Dangerous communist East German movies are still being released to this very day. Dangerous to Communism, I mean.
“While the GDR, we learn, has the lowest crime statistics in the world, Wolkenheim (literally Cloudland – suggesting a place that has no connection with reality), the town where Holms is stationed, boasts the lowest crime statistics in the GDR. Even the disappearance of a pet rabbit causes him excitement – he hopes it has been taken hostage – until he discovers it has merely escaped to a nearby lettuce patch. So, when Holms’ drinking acquaintance Pinkas hatches a plan to snatch a monument from the plinth in the main square and flog it to an antiques dealer, Holms seizes the opportunity to make his mark – and of course, discovers love in the process.”
This comic film (Hands Up Or I’ll Shoot), which gently mocks the premise that crime ceases to exist in a fully fledged communist state, was banned in 1966 by the regime’s thought police, who were unhappy with its ironic criticism of the system. It has now been dusted off and put on general release for the first time, to the delight of German cinemagoers – who have made much of the fact that this is the last remaining banned film from the old East Germany.
So what do you do now, German Intelligenzia? Nothing Quentin Tarantino does or says can do or say no wrong, right? But to call himself a fan of Nazi propaganda films, uh, isn’t that a little over the top? Even for him, I mean?
I understand the Leni Riefenstahl thing, although she’ll always stay caught between a rock and the hard place. But Joseph Goebbels? Whatever. Now at least I know why I’ve never liked his (Tarantino’s) films. Or the violence in them, I should say.
“Sie war die beste Regisseurin, die jemals lebte.“
PS: I just happened to be on the British Airways flight that he was on when he flew to Berlin last Sunday. Talk about a normal looking and talking and seeming-like dude. That should only make one all the more suspicious. Damn, what a name dropper I am, right?
Observing Hermann 