Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

I’d like to call your attention to what I’ve come to regard as the best Anglophone newsmagazine coverage anywhere (click here) – and it comes from neither the USA nor the UK but from the northwest German port city-state of Hamburg.  Soon after World War II ended in 1945, a budding journalistic genius named Rudolf Augstein obtained a licence from the British Occupation authorities there to start a brand-new publication, which in time changed its name to the one it bears today: Der Spiegel (The Mirror).  Augstein and his baby did uniquely courageous work in cleaning up post-war Germany’s enormous accumulated dirty laundry, at one point so outraging Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s right-wing Bavarian Minister of Defence Franz Josef Strauss (whose name today, in defiance of his less than noble record, adorns Munich’s airport) that he instituted legal action against Augstein and his magazine – which fairly soon mushroomed into one of post-war Germany’s biggest political scandals: uniformed forces actually occupied the editorial offices and Augstein even spent a punitive spell in the slammer – but soon emerged smelling like a rose, with both Strauss and Adenauer covered in vainglory but little else.  Amazingly, Der Spiegel provides that constantly updated Anglophone virtual newsmagazine totally free of charge, and I recommend it to you not only without reservations but with sincere enthusiasm.  By subscribing (also gratis), you can get it delivered daily to your email-box.

And here I also offer you, from that Anglophone Spiegel, one of the warmest and cuddliest stories out of anywhere in a long time.  Not only animal-loving Berliners have gone stark raving mad over an irresistably dear Polar bearcub named Knut (almost immediately given the bilingual nickname Cute Knut), rejected at birth by his Canadian-born mother Tosca, the traumatized survivor of years as a star attraction of the state Circus of the erstwhile German Democratic Republic.  A paragon of an attendant in western Berlin’s Zoölogical Garden temporarily abandoned his family and took up residence in Knut’s emergency quarters, where every two hours, around the clock, Knut vociferously demanded the nutritionally enhanced sort of porridge that in his case had to replace mother’s milk.  According to this Spiegel account, Cute Knut has also financially proven an absolute bonanza for the Zoo itself, with thousands and thousands of fans of all ages lining up every morning to catch his strictly limited personal appearances.  Regional Berlin/Brandenburg television has yielded to force majeure and made updaters on Knut’s development an enormously popular regular thing.  I cannot offer you here an actual animation of this captivating little beast, but I do offer you the eight-part slide-show the Spiegel‘s lined up for Knut’s enormous world-wide fan club.