Readings: Second Opinions Courtesy of Germany.info

Nov 20, 2009

Photo of the Week © picture-alliance/dpa
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Photo of the Week
(© picture-alliance/dpa)

We scour the Internet for news you can use about Germany and provide annotated links for your reading pleasure and information.

A 350 year-old tree is wrapped in a protective bag to protect it from the effects of salt strewn on a nearby highway during the winter. Now over 80 feet tall, the tree was planted in 1642 to mark the border between two principalities within Bavaria.

Germany in the News

Kraftwerk's Craft

Kraftwerk singer Ralf Hütter grants a rare interview to the music Website Pitchfork.com.  The release of the remastered, career-spanning boxed set, The Catalogue provides a jumping off point for a conversation about the band's legacy, the thrills of 3-D visuals and Hütter's love of cycling.

Ralf Hütter Interview

Thomas Demand's Empty Rooms

German Photographer Thomas Demand uses paper, cardboard, cellophane and other flimsy, everyday materials to construct full-scale replicas of actually or formerly existing places.  Then, he takes pictures of them.  In The Nation, critic Barry Schwabsky considers the "hauntingly bland" aspect of these sculpture/photographs, now on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Thomas Demand

Bauhaus at MOMA

"Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," a new show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), depicts the rocky history of the art school that ushered in the modern era of design.  As this Time Magazine article points out, Bauhaus was hardly monolithic, but instead a "collective of fierce individuals and a continuing work in progress" that was constantly under siege from political and aesthetic enemies.

Bauhaus

Suicide of the East

This survey of literature on the collapse of Communism in 1989 by Philip D. Zelikow for Foreign Affairs finds a common thread among the raft of publications coming out to mark the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall.  According to Zelikow, they describe a rift among elites more than a revolt from below. 

Foreign Affairs

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