Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

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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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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[Several fans of Richter - does my personal involvement distort my own impression that the music world, especially music-lovers, have meanwhile come around to regarding him as the preëminent pianist of his time? - have for years urged me to make generally available again the story of his reunion with his mother the summer of [...]

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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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Mention the little un-iced pastry known in France as une madeleine and anyone familiar with literature thinks immediately of Marcel Proust, whom the sight and taste of a madeleine dipped in tea launched on a protracted stroll down his own Memory Lane that gave the world the great multi-volume autobiographical novel for which he borrowed [...]

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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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  “The New Yorker”, for me during my first several decades on earth the finest publication in the entire world and in recent years once again for me at least one of the finest, has now weighed in with its customary sylish grace, expertise, and authority on the continuing brouhaha about Sen. Craig’s apparently endless [...]

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My psychoanalytic avocation (a total of seven years of institutional post-analysis “informatory” training - in American terms seminar-auditing - at two of Berlin’s leading psychoanalytic institutes) has coincidentally just led me to stumble upon a paper by the New York psychoanalyst Jack Drescher, M.D., printed in the professional publication Psychiatric Times, and indirectly relevant to [...]

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