Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Habitués (naturally including any additional sons of habitués) of this playpen may recall that when my Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson finally bludgeoned me into getting it started I led off with a true - but highly improbable - nature story from here in Germany’s thoroughly metropolitan capital, of how a parental pair of crows, with [...]

Read Full Post »

Today’s Sunday edition of The New York Times carries a riveting review of what sounds like a fascinating new history of the Weimar Republic Germany gloried in during the far too brief fifteen years between the 1918 end of World War I and the total political nightfall of Hitler’s 1933 appointment as Chancellor.
The lead paragraph [...]

Read Full Post »

Only a few days ago the United States’ official “newspaper of record” started sporting this welcome innovation, combining the best of current political art (including all three of my own personal favorites, listed here in impartial alphabetical order: Pat Oliphant [allegedly born down in Astraya, according to one of his fellow countrymen who enlightened me], [...]

Read Full Post »

Well, chalk up another television first: Germany’s Armin Meiwes (pronounced My-vess), presently serving a life sentence for killing a man and eating more than twenty pounds of him, has granted his first television interview, during which, to quote the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, he “describes the taste of human flesh, provides a decent recipe for steak, [...]

Read Full Post »

BERLIN.  - “Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,” wrote Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), one of Germany’s greatest poets and most famous Jews, “Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht” - “If I think about Germany during the night, it robs me of my sleep.”  A partially sleepless night preceded the writing of this review, for [...]

Read Full Post »

To my fellow codgers, the phrase “good Germans” has specific overtones from the 1930s and ’40s, referring to those uncountable but numerous purportedly “good Germans” who emphatically did not elect the Nazis into power but, to quote one source verbatim, did “nothing … while Hitler destroyed Europe and murdered 6,000,000 Jews, and 5,000,000 Poles, Russians, [...]

Read Full Post »

When I first came to Europe as a mere stripling of twenty-five (can you think all the way back to 1949?), I couldn’t help noticing fairly early that when the French and the Germans - whether in print, on the air, or almost anywhere - meant the respective vernacular of fuck, they came right out [...]

Read Full Post »

Right here at the beginning, I wish to express my sincere thanks to that perhaps not quite Nobel but definitely noble British “public corporation” known throughout the world as the British Broadcasting Corporation, alias BBC, affectionately referred to on its home turf (which Shakespeare in King Richard II proclaimed “This precious stone set in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Herewith some additional horrifying background material on how the Lone Star State tells the country’s supreme legal authority to kiss its Lone Star ass and insouciantly continues its self-legalized killings, including some prisoners awaiting appeal proceedings that could reverse their previous sentences.
From The New York Times on June 14th:
“Texas juries in capital cases must make [...]

Read Full Post »

   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 [...]

Read Full Post »