This wall is your wall,
From Mountain View, California,
To Seoul, Korea,
From Buenos Aires,
To the island of Langeland,
This wall was made for you and me.
Sanna E.
German Of The Day: Der Elende Rest
That means “the miserable remnants” and that’s what singer-songwriter and former East German dissident Wolf Biermann just called SED leftovers the Left Party today at a ceremony commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. To their faces. In the Reichstag itself.
Somebody’s got to remind folks about this now and then. Not that anybody here cares…
“Eure Sprüche, die habt ihr drauf … ihr müsst mir gar nichts erzählen.”
Let There Be Wall
I mean Lichtgrenze.
The LICHTGRENZE is the light installation along the former path of the wall through the city center. It will trace the division of the city over a stretch of approximately 12 kilometers and with thousands of illuminated balloons as an impressive installation in Berlin from 8 to 9 November, 2014. At once emotional, poetic, and serious, this installation remembers the recent historical event, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
Germans Being Assured That Bad Republicans Didn’t Actually Win
“Why the Democrats’ debacle isn’t really a victory for the Republicans,” the title of this here article goes, for instance.
I would have loved to have read what was surely the profound explanation for just how on earth that can possibly be but then that scary photo of that evil Republican lurking in the shadows wearing a black hat there caught my eye and I just had to click away real pronto-like before he could get the chance to draw me into a maelstrom of evil and villainy and consuming despair.
Die Republikaner feiern einen Erdrutschsieg im Senat. Doch der Machtwechsel wird an der Lähmung der US-Politik kaum etwas ändern.
Once An Ex-Communist Always An Ex-Communist
Another Ex-cellent chance to ex-ceed, I’d say. And a great way to celebrate the coming 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall!
Well isn’t this special. Germany’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats (SPD) – currently in power in Berlin with Merkel & Co. – said Tuesday a party ballot in eastern Thuringia state showed 70 percent favoring negotiations to join a regional government led by Left Party candidate Bodo Ramelow. The Left Party used to be the PDS which used to be the SED (the East German communist party), of course, but nobody with any manners likes to put it that way so I figured I would.
Do you think this coming ex-communist coalition with the SPD upsets anyone over here? Of course not. The only thing that ruffled a few folks’ feathers was the audacity Germany’s president Joachim Gauck had – a former East German pro-democracy activist – by openly questioning whether a party with communist roots like the Left Party could really be trusted or not. Can you imagine that? Who does this president of Germany think he is anyway? The president of Germany?
“There are parts of this party where I, like many others, have problems developing this trust (he means like the openly Stalinist folks).“
Squealer Mania!
Cult: A religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
His story has popped up in advertisements for lingerie and a travel agency. His face appears on merchandise ranging from T-shirts to skateboards. His deeds are celebrated in works by artists and musicians.
Meet Edward Snowden, Germany’s latest pop culture icon...
To find parallels for Mr. Snowden’s current cult-hero status in Germany, you have to go back to Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh, said Johannes Krempl, an advertising executive in Berlin.
GedächtnisEsser?
You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘tomato’… You say ‘Wesen‘, I say ‘vessen’…
The stupid creature names are fine. What isn’t, however, is that for the entire duration of the show, every single actor on it has mispronounced the very easy German word for creature…
I kept hearing “vessen” this and “vessen” that, and I had no idea what the characters were talking about, until I saw an episode summary on Hulu with what I surmised was that word written out: Wesen, which literally translates to being or creature (from gewesen, of one of the past-tense forms of the verb to be, sein)…
Trouble is, any German 5-year-old will tell you that word is pronounced VAY-zen, with a V sound (which Grimm gets right), a long E (in the German sense—pronounced like in dreidel), and a soft S (that approximates the English Z).
Andrea F.
Wetten, dass..? 101
Will Arnett finally explains this classic German TV show to you in a proper fashion, if you’re interested. While it’s still here, I mean. It’s finally been cancelled.
“I’m fascinated by the German mentality. Jokes don’t work at all.”
Observing Hermann 