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The Week in Germany: Culture

January 25, 2008

Readings: Second Opinions Courtesy of 'The Week in Germany'

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!

Staying Afloat Amid all Things German
If you have avoided taking a cruise because cramped quarters, casinos, las vegas style revues and nightly steel-drum serenades is not your idea of a good time, consider the high-brow alternative from Hapag Lloyd. On the MS Europa's bilingual cruises, luxury and intellectual stimulation get equal billing. The Boston Globe reports on an art-themed cruise that features lectures from several professors, critics, collectors, and well-known artists from Cologne, Berlin, and Vienna on board.

Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police
With the collapse of the East German system on the horizon, the GDR surveillance moloch known as the Stasi called in the "paper wolves" - industrial shredders - to destroy the paper trail on decades of abuse of the population. Now, engineers have developed software that can sort out the mountain of confetti by digitally pasting fragments of shredded documents back together. In this piece by Berlin-based journalist Andrew Curry for Wired, project manager Jan Schneider explains just how complicated this is: "The numbers are tremendous. If you imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle at home, you have maybe 1,000 pieces and a picture of what it should look like at the end. We have many millions of pieces and no idea what they should look like when we're done."

Pay and Punishment
While America's attention is understandably fixed on the race for the presidency and is unlikely to wander until November, democracy moves forward in other parts of the world as well. Notably, there will be elections in the German federal states of in Hesse and Lower Saxony on January 27th and in Hamburg on February 24th. For the true political junkie, the Economist provides an overview and independent analysis of the races.

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