Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Oh, you poor dear people who have to live anywhere else in the world except Berlin - for me by far the most fascinating of all the fascinating cities I’ve managed to live in, and those others include New York (seven years), Paris (two), Munich (five), and San Francisco (thirteen), before my belated awakening to [...]

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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 [...]

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   Let no one still mired out of date in world history of half a century or so ago come at me with “Hmphhh .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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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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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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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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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 [...]

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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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