The Week in Germany: Culture

April 11, 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.

We have added one German-language article to our readings list as a new service - just in case you felt like practicing your German.

Happy Reading!

The New Delight in Story-Telling
Literature written in German is now more successful than it has been for decades, and young authors are once again telling stories that readers actually enjoy. Volker Hage provides an inventory of the cream of the crop at Deutschland Online.

Innovative Ways of Coping with Demographic Decline
Global newsweekly The Economist focuses on the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt as it deals with the general trend of depopulation observed in parts of eastern Germany in the wake of German unification in 1990.

Moby Says Love Parade Made Germany Cool in the US
NY-based, vegan pop-retro-soul synth sampler icon Moby recently told highbrow German weekly Die Zeit why Germany is now cool in the eyes of many Americans: The Love Parade. According to Moby, as Deutsche Welle puts it, "the techno bash has helped Germany polish its image". Ah, what major, semi-clad eye candy and a big outdoor party can do for a country.

Fear of the Stasi Lives on in Eastern Germany
The East German secret police may have disbanded long ago, but fear of former Stasi members lives on. A court is about to decide whether a former Stasi informant can be outed in public. The answer will say a lot about how the country deals with its past, Spiegel Online International reports.

Using all the Possibilities (in German)
Robert Kaltenbrunner, in an opinion piece featured in the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau daily, notes that our cities are becoming increasingly inhospitable while star architects such as Foster, Hadid and Gehry build ever more sensational individual "show" buildings.

"The contempt for, say, today's industrial estates echoes the antipathy for the tenement estates of the 1920s. Just as people lashed out at the lack of hygiene and the over density of those buildings in the past, today they badmouth the sprawl, facelessness, and the focus on individual traffic," he writes, as translated by signandsight.com. "The world's eyes are firmly fixed on the new cathedrals: museums, government buildings, concert halls, offices. The 'grey belts' remain an architectural terra incognita – ignored at best, endured with a shrug of the shoulders, traversed as quickly as possible if there's no other option."