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The Week in Germany: Culture

July 6, 2007

Readings: TWIG Cannot Cover it All - But We Can Tell You Where to Find it!

As you might imagine, the TWIG editors spend a lot of time sifting through the mountain of information available on the Internet about Germany. For those of you who are not quite as surflustig, we continue our roving weekly selection of links to top-notch writing about Germany on the Web. If you like TWIG, you might find these stories interesting as well.

Happy Reading!

Rescue Dawn stars Christian Bale of Batman Returns fame.

Werner Herzog's New Film: Rescue Dawn
Werner Herzog's first Hollywood-funded film was released on July 4th in Manhattan. Starring Christian Bale, it is the true story of Dieter Dengler, a German-American pilot who escaped from a Laotian POW camp in an epic trek across the jungle. This New Yorker profile from 2006 criticism takes a fascinating look at what happens when film's most famously quixotic adventurer butts heads with gaff-tape-wielding, make-up fussing Hollywood pros. While Herzog tramps around the Thai jungle eating grubs with an emaciated Bale and insists dogmatically on purist documentarian principles, his peeved crew secretly adjusts lighting, films closeups and alternate angles, and generally tries to make the film look, well, professional. The result of all that on-set drama, according to reviews already up on the criticism aggregator site "Rotten Tomatoes", may be some of Herzog's best work - Bale is a modern Aguirre whose psychosis is not based on megalomania, but irrational hope in the face of almost certain doom.

Berlin's Art Scene, once Wild and Free, is Increasingly Commercialized
The LA Times' Jeffrey Fleishman takes a look at Berlin's art scene and wonders whether the poor but sexy capital can stay sexy when it is no longer poor. The artists he interviews say that Berlin is still a cheap and uninhibited place to work, but they increasingly feel the influence of international gallerists.

An Orchestra of International Repute – 125 Years of the Berlin Philharmonic
The Berlin Philharmonic celebrated the 125th anniversary of its foundation on May 1, 2007. The story of the most important German orchestra offers a multifaceted insight into more than just recent music history. The history of the Berlin Philharmonic is also German history.

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