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, [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Posted in Events, Life and culture, People, Politics, Reflections on Oct 5th, 2007 Comments Off
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 [...]
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Let no one still mired out of date in world history of half a century or so ago come at me with “Hmphhh .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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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 [...]
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Posted in Life and culture, People on Sep 27th, 2007 Comments Off
As an eighteen-year-old student in the Music Department of the University of Texas College of Fine Arts in Austin, I attracted the overpowering attention of a Texas fireball named Jones who’d revised her given name from Margaret into Margo (in fact née Margaret Virginia Jones in little Livingston, Texas), whose dominant, in fact totally consuming [...]
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Posted in Administrative, Life and culture, People, Politics on Sep 25th, 2007 Comments Off
So nice to discover (in the latest issue of The Nation) this all-out tribute to my own greatest stateside television enthusiasm since I fled the country twelve years ago. I know him only thanks to occasional snippets that come my way via the Internet, but they’ve sufficed to make me an all-out fan; I share [...]
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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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