Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

   Let no one still mired out of date in world history of half a century or so ago come at me with “Hmphhh . . . they should talk!”  I hope the word has finally got around that the Germany I’ve adopted as my own country today glories in one of the most vital [...]

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When I went over into eastern Berlin Sunday night to cover a premiere at the grand old State Opera on Berlin’s showpiece boulevard named Unter den Linden (because of the quadruple columns of trees marching down the center separator green strip, I had to take the subterranean U-Bahn because yesterday I got a call from [...]

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Seymour Hersh, for years now the world’s champion investigative reporter who’s wound up in recent years at The New Yorker, has given a scorching interview to our first-rate newsmagazine Der Spiegel. 
Hersh became famous almost ovemight when he single-handedly broke the story of the My Lai atrocity - the cold-blooded massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American [...]

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Volker Hagedorn, the music critic of our classy Hamburg-based weekly newspaper Die Zeit, visited Henze at his home above the Tiber valley in Italy, where he composed Phaedra, his newest opera, recently unveiled at Berlin’s Deutsche Staatsoper.  Hagedorn reports:

Henze sat in the shade of the terrace gazing at the olive trees. He seems smaller than [...]

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Siegburg, den 26. September 2007
Benefiz-Fußballturnier mit großem Rahmenprogramm
Rhein-Sieg-Kreis (mw) – Sportliche Spannung und viel Unterhaltung verspricht ein Fußballspektakel der besonderen Art: Am Sonntag, 7. Oktober 2007 von 9.30 Uhr bis 21.00 Uhr findet am Sportplatz in Sankt Augustin-Birlinghoven unter dem Motto „Knackis kicken für Kinder“ ein Benefiz-Fußballturnier mit großem Rahmenprogramm statt.
Der Erlös aus dieser [...]

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I can’t recall when I’ve read a recent news story quite so horrifying and disgusting as this one I found waiting from me when I came home from dinner this evening.  Its headline says it all: “No Justice for El-Masri” - and that summation applies to a country constantly harping so piously on “freedom and [...]

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Friends of mine have had a tough time with my recent naturalization as a full-fledged (albeit Texas-born) citizen of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland - the Federal Republic of Germany, the emphatically democratic successor of the Nazis’ ineffably hideous self-proclaimed “Thousand-Year Reich” - which in fact ceased to exist after only twelve, wiped out of existence by [...]

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In einem ungewöhnlich langen Interview mit dem Berliner Tagesspiegel schiesst Cecilia Bartoli wirklich los:
” . . . Ich habe eine enge Bindung zu dem [Opernhaus in Rom], wegen meiner Eltern und weil ich hier als Achtjährige den Hirten in Puccinis Tosca gesungen habe.  Aber um die römische Oper zu retten, reicht eine Person nicht aus, [...]

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During my years as a gung-ho Parisian Left-Banker (1949-51) - complete with full beard, beret basque, British Army surplus duffel-coat, and a grungy little walk-up hotel room that cost me $1 a night at those days’ black-market rate (and where, the New York girl who’d preceded me to Paris and got me installed there assured [...]

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“We are discussing the possibility of several millions.”  At least in this account the young Berlin lawyer Ariane Bluttner doesn’t specify Germany’s official Euro currency, as a member of the European Union, but at the prevailing fluctuating rate that would mean substantially more than even several million mere U.S. dollars.
Bluttner, a comparative legal neophyte with [...]

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