A review of German culture in the English-language media

Rafaël Newman considers the tumultuous lifespan of painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) and an intriguing new exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Roads Not Taken,” on key caesuras in German history between 1989 and 1848.  (3 Quarks Daily, 1/30/23)

Sebastian Smee contemplates Two Men Contemplating the Moon, one of Caspar David Friedrich’s best-known masterpieces.  (The Washington Post, 1/4/23)

Emanuel Leutze painted his two versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware in Düsseldorf, shortly after the failed revolutions of 1848. “His intention was not to ignite the patriotic passions of Americans, but to inspire his fellow Germans to be as patriotic as he knew Americans were.”  (The Washington Post, 12/25/22)

“FANTASTIC FUTURISTIC FATALISTIC”: See how Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was marketed to audiences all over the world through this gallery of vintage movie posters.  (Open Culture, 12/16/22)

Onkel Toms Hütte is one of Berlin’s most distinctive U-Bahn stations, with a name that references Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, a long-gone Biergarten, and a modernist housing development designed by Bruno Taut. Once a flashpoint in the great “roof war” of 1928, it’s now the center of a 21st-century controversy about the anti-Black slur that “Uncle Tom” has become. NPR, (7/30/08; Atlas Obscura, 1/19/17; The Washington Post, 11/27/22)

“Almost safe, she returned to Munich and lost her painting and her life”: A Renaissance portrait owned by Ilse Hesselberger, who was deported and murdered in 1941, is now being auctioned to benefit Holocaust survivors and other charitable causes.  (The New York Times, 11/22/22)

Dylan Moriarty had no grand plans for his trip to Germany, but he knew he wanted to illustrate it: “A camera is one way to capture the world, but the meditation of re-creating moments in ink felt like a better, more personal tribute.”  (The Washington Post, 10/15/22)

A “showpiece of socialist realist architecture” in Potsdam gets a new lease on life as the Minsk Kunsthaus.  (The Guardian, 10/2/22)

The Slavs and Tatars art collective in Berlin, with activities “rooted in the giant swath of land between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China,” publishes books, puts on interactive performances and installations, and runs Pickle Bar pop-ups around the world.  (The New York Times, 9/22/22)

Meet Winold Reiss, “the German modernist who painted a multicultural United States.” His subjects included Langston Hughes, members of the Blackfeet Nation, and a very young Isamu Noguchi.  (Hyperallergic, 8/25/22; The New York Times, 8/25/22)

“By collecting water towers the way someone else might collect cookie jars, they cut industry down to size.” Bernd and Hilla Becher are at last getting their due at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  (The Art Newspaper, 7/13/22; The New York Times, 7/28/22)

In praise of the Plattenbau: “In a new book, Jesse Simon presents these structures in all their grid-like beauty.”  (Aesthetica, 2/24/22)

“It was wrong to take the bronzes and it was wrong to keep them.” Germany is returning two Benin bronzes and more than one thousand other items from its museums’ collections to Nigeria.  (Artnet, 6/29/22; The Guardian, 7/1/22)

Documenta 15 couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start, but there’s a lot more to see—including vegetable plots, a skateboard halfpipe, a sauna on the lawn of a Baroque castle, and a floating stage on the Fulda River.  (The Guardian, 6/23/22; The New York Times, 6/24/22; Hyperallergic, 6/28/22)

A mural with offensive imagery is removed, and a panel on antisemitism hastily convened, at Documenta 15. (Artnet, 6/21/22; ARTnews, 6/29/22; The New Fascism Syllabus, 7/24/22)

Candida Höfer’s stunning photographs of empty museums, libraries, cathedrals, and theaters “have acquired a haunting resonance during the pandemic.”  (Financial Times, 2/19/22)

In memoriam: Ali Mitgutsch (1935–2022), father of the Wimmelbuch. “He delighted readers with detailed, cartoonish tableaus crammed with jokes and anecdotes.” (The New York Times, 1/18/22)

“Holbein’s seamless union of materiality and symbolism was more than merely showy. Instead, it’s what makes the flesh-and-blood verisimilitude of his portraits so captivating.” Hans Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance is now on display in Los Angeles and moving to New York City in February.  (Los Angeles Times, 10/2621; The Wall Street Journal, 11/13/21)

“Like an imposing Disneyland castle minus the fun,” the Humboldt Forum is “an institution manufactured to fill a building, rather than the other way around . . . But the symbolism of rebuilding an imperial palace, crowned with a golden crucifix, as a showcase for colonial booty now seems almost comically misjudged.”  (National Geographic, 12/16/20; The New York Times, 7/22/21; The Guardian, 9/9/21; Hyperallergic, 12/15/21)

In Neo Rauch’s art, “events seem to take place in a parallel world . . . Alongside patches of preternatural calm, a discordant color breaks in, or a reptilian tail, or a burning backpack, or a Converse sneaker. The over-all effect is of allegorical painting, but these are allegories to which Rauch has thrown away the key.”  (The New Yorker, 9/27/21)

Don’t look for Benin bronzes in the Humboldt Forum: “Germany is on course to be the first country to return to Nigeria sculptures looted by British troops from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897.”  (The Guardian, 3/23/21; The Art Newspaper, 3/24/21; AICGS, 5/11/21; The Art Newspaper, 10/15/21)

Eco-friendly and koselig, too: WoHo “could serve as a template for how to build a charismatic architectural showpiece in an up-and-coming neighborhood without exclusion or displacement.”  (Bloomberg, 2/11/21; Bloomberg, 2/27/21)

Göring’s Man in Paris is “the story of a Nazi art plunderer and his world”—and how historian Jonathan Petropoulos became part of that world more than fifty years later.  (The Art Newspaper, 1/7/21; The New York Times, 1/17/21)

Tholey, the oldest working abbey in Germany, has a beautiful new look—stained glass windows by the artists Gerhard Richter and Mahbuba Maqsoodi.  (The New York Times, 9/18/20)

“There was nothing half-hearted about either Lovis Corinth or his pictures”: an appreciation of the artist and his Walchensee paintings, created a century ago.  (New Statesman, 2/10/21)

“Antisemitism for beginners”: the Jewish children’s book publisher Ariella Verlag has released a darkly humorous collection of cartoons.  (PRI, 2/3/21)

Brighten your day with a (virtual) visit to Michael and Petra Mayer’s architectural glass and mosaic studio in Munich.  (The New York Times, 12/2/20)

“From 1974 to 1984, Zusammenleben subtly depicted the reality of everyday life in East Germany.” Ute Mahler’s compelling black-and-white photos are now on display at La Maison De L’Image Documentaire.  (The Guardian, 1/6/21)

“The task of the work of art,” said Caspar David Friedrich, “is to recognise the spirit of nature and to imbue it with heart and feeling and to absorb it and represent it.”  (New Statesman, 7/22/20)

The message of “Unveiled: Berlin and Its Monuments” at the Spandau Citadel is clear: “A monument is not a descriptive account of history, but instead a historical artifact that tells a story about power. In a setting that invites scrutiny, visitors can study Berlin’s monuments to grasp more clearly who had power and how that power was used.”  (Atlas Obscura, 8/14/20)

It may have taken a pandemic, but now the rest of us can get into Berghain. The Berlin nightclub is temporarily reinventing itself as a gallery for local artists.  (The Art Newspaper, 8/12/20; The Guardian, 8/13/20)

“In 1986 a treasure trove of German film posters from the first four decades of film history were found, profoundly damaged by a fire, in the mine where they had remained for forty years.” Many of the restored posters are now on display at the Deutsche Kinemathek and in its online gallery.  (MUBI Notebook, 7/17/20)

“With its heavy armour plating, its second horn halfway up the back, its three-toed feet and its cruel face, the poor animal looked more like a tank than the real thing.” Albrecht Dürer’s oddly inaccurate rendering of a rhinoceros shaped Europeans’ imagery of the animal for centuries.  (History Today, 8/2020)

Adele Schopenhauer’s Scherenschnitte, unpublished in her lifetime, “vanished into an intimate constellation of private albums, self-conscious repositories of emotion.”  (Collage Research Network, 8/1/20)

Hello, Lenin? As a 35-year-old statue of the Soviet leader stands firm in Schwerin, Gelsenkirchen bucks worldwide trends to become the first western German city to display a statue in his honor.  (Digital Cosmonaut, 6/2020; Deutsche Welle, 6/20/20)

In memoriam: photographer Astrid Kirchherr (1938-2020). “In a dingy, disreputable Hamburg bar, amid the noise and squalor, she detected something beautiful.”  (The New York Times, 5/16/20; The Guardian, 5/19/20)

The bottom half of Kang Sunkoo’s Statue of Limitations, an 11-meter-high sculpture referencing Germany’s colonial past, has just been installed at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The upper half will be placed in the city’s Afrikanisches Viertel, so-called for its streets that were in named in the colonial era.  (London Review of Books, 10/4/19; The Art Newspaper, 5/18/20)

Germany’s museums are opening back up—with online ticketing, social distancing, plexiglass shields, and a lot of disinfectant.  (artnet, 4/22/20;  The Art Newspaper, 5/4/20)

The Old Masters Picture Gallery gets a major upgrade at the Semperbau in Dresden.  (The Art Newspaper, 2/27/20; artnet, 2/27/20)

“In her etchings, prints and sculptures, [Käthe] Kollwitz continues to remind us what it means to be an artist and the possibilities of art in the most troubling of times.”  (Lithub, 2/14/20; The Economist, 7/20/20)

In 1926, architect and activist Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the first fitted kitchen, to simplify food preparation in close quarters for (especially) working-class women. Her “Frankfurt Kitchen” was just the start of a long and eventful career. (The Wire, 1/26/20; MoMA, 2/14/20)

Ai Weiwei has some choice words for Germany, and for Berlin taxi drivers in particular.  (The Guardian, 1/21/20)

What does it mean for a society to master its past, and what is the role of individual citizens? Despite the existence of an extensive archive for the files of the East German secret police, a recent study shows that “the majority of people on whom the Stasi kept files have not opened them.”  (The Guardian, 11/28/22)

“It was wrong to take the bronzes, and it was wrong to keep them for 120 years.” Germany has begun the process of repatriating its more than one thousand plundered Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. When will other countries follow suit?  (The New York Times, 12/20/22; The Guardian, 12/20/22)

“Rachel Posner, a rabbi’s wife in Kiel, Germany, took a photograph in 1931 that she had no idea would one day resonate with people across the world.” Ninety years later years after the Posner family fled for their lives, their descendants and renowned menorah have returned to Kiel.  (The New York Times, 12/19/22)

“The impression one gets from these sanitized histories is that this was a man who had materialized out of nowhere, with no discernible past, like an astrophysical Mary Poppins who had come to teach the people of Huntsville how to make rockets.” U.S. institutions have a long way to go in examining their relationship with pivotal figures of the Nazi war machine, such as Alfried Krupp and Wernher von Braun.  (The New York Times, 12/13/22)

The newly renamed Manga-Bell-Platz and Cornelius-Fredericks-Straße in Berlin’s “African Quarter” now honor African resisters, not German colonizers.  (The Guardian, 12/2/22)

“Many of Germany’s most powerful memorials did not begin as state-sanctioned projects, but emerged—and are still emerging—from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.”  (The Atlantic, 11/14/22)

“While we tend to think of courts as the guardrails of democracy, in 1920s Germany they were among its most implacable and insidious enemies.”  (The Washington Post, 10/29/22)

Germany’s fight over which weapons to give Ukraine, says Anne Applebaum, is really a fight over the lessons of 1945. Which is more important: preventing another genocide in Europe, “even if that means a military engagement,” or preventing “war at all costs by refusing to engage in one”?  (The Atlantic,  10/20/22)

Murdered at Dachau in March 1933, Arthur Kahn is believed to be the Holocaust’s first Jewish victim. Mattie Kahn honors and grieves the great-uncle she never knew.  (The Atlantic, 5/5/22)

The Habsburg empress Elisabeth is enjoying a 21st-century media moment—but this isn’t your grandma’s Sisi.  (The Guardian, 7/8/22; The New York Times, 10/7/22)

Not so banal after all: Hours of old tape recordings—once inaccessible to Israeli prosecutors, but now the basis of a new documentary—expose Adolf Eichmann’s “visceral, ideological antisemitism, his zeal for hunting down Jews and his role in the mechanics of mass murder.”  (The New York Times, 7/4/22)

When thousands of perpetrators of Nazi-era war crimes were still alive, German prosecutors were reluctant to pursue them. Now 90- and even 100-somethings are being charged as accessories to murder.  (The Irish Times, 7/2/22)

“It was wrong to take the bronzes and it was wrong to keep them.” Germany is returning two Benin bronzes and more than one thousand other items from its museums’ collections to Nigeria.  (Artnet, 6/29/22; The Guardian, 7/1/22)

“Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.”   (The Conversation, 2/26/22; The New Fascism Syllabus, 2/26/22; New Statesman, 3/2/22)

“Germany’s much-vaunted memory culture,” writes Eric Langenbacher, “is no longer producing the progressive effects that were always a key justification behind it.” Instead, it’s leading to inaction and “providing moralistic cover for anti-democratic, autocratic threats.”  (The New York Times, 1/25/22; AICGS, 2/14/22)

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith, is “a fine example of everyone’s favourite genre: the genre-defying book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and finished with a jeweller’s eye for detail.”  (The Guardian, 12/4/20;  The White Review, 1/2021)

“The underlying Ostpolitik gambit of Egon Bahr, Brandt’s adviser, was a judo throw: entice your heavy, slow-moving opponent, the Soviet Union, to lean so far into your embrace that with a skilful twist you can throw him over your shoulder. Now it is Putin, a judo black belt, who is trying to throw heavy, slow-moving Germany over his shoulder.”  (Financial Times, 2/9/22)

Nina Gladitz, director of the 1982 documentary Time of Darkness and Silence, spent the rest of her life consumed by Leni Riefenstahl, “in the attempt to find evidence that would finally, conclusively, condemn” the notorious filmmaker as a knowing perpetrator.  (The Guardian, 12/9/21)

The 9th of November—Germany’s Schicksalstag— “is a good moment to remember that democracy should not be taken for granted.”  (The Spectator, 11/9/21)

In 1953 Reinhart Koselleck, “still at the beginning of his career, postulated that we need to discard the conceptions of history that provided ammunition for the ideological furies of the 20th century . . . and start rethinking from scratch what constitute the actual ‘conditions of possible histories.'”  (Aeon, 9/1/20)

“Like an imposing Disneyland castle minus the fun,” the Humboldt Forum is “an institution manufactured to fill a building, rather than the other way around . . . But the symbolism of rebuilding an imperial palace, crowned with a golden crucifix, as a showcase for colonial booty now seems almost comically misjudged.”  (National Geographic, 12/16/20; The New York Times, 7/22/21;  The Guardian, 9/9/21; Hyperallergic, 12/15/21)

“Upon publication, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna was quickly embraced by critics and readers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.” Thomas Bender recalls the historian Carl Schorske and his remarkable work.  (Public Books, 9/21/21)

“Two opposite, potentially even hostile, societies unite—that’s one of the most exciting sociological experiments you could imagine.” Sociologist Steffen Mau discusses Rostock’s Lütten Klein district and the traumas of German reunification.  (Jacobin, 10/3/21)

“There is no archive of spiritual malaise induced by catastrophic defeat or fears of your past coming back to haunt you, the way that there are archives for political parties and institutions of state.” Monica Black investigates the “post-Hitler spiritual and psychological distress” of a demon-haunted Germany after 1945.  (Cabinet, 9/14/21)

Judy Batalion wanted to write about “strong Jewish women,” and she found them: the unsung “courier girls” and other resistance fighters “who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then killed them.”  (The New York Times, 3/18/21; The Economist, 5/1/21)

Endpapers “is more than a book of history; it’s a transnational, intergenerational reckoning” about the extraordinary Wolff family and the idea of Bildung, too.  (The Boston Globe,  2/25/21; Lithub, 3/10/21)

Göring’s Man in Paris is “the story of a Nazi art plunderer and his world”—and how historian Jonathan Petropoulos became part of that world more than fifty years later.  (The Art Newspaper, 1/7/21; The New York Times, 1/17/21)

“Stepping into the past, sometimes, happens through art like the Stolpersteine creating unforeseen connections, and via technology bringing strangers across the world with a story to share together.” Now journalist Deborah Cole shares a story with the Ibermann family, who once lived in her Berlin building.  (AFP Correspondent, 2/23/21)

A dilapidated Boeing 707 with an unusual history is the last plane at Berlin’s Tegel airport. It’s slated to be removed by the end of April 2021.  (Atlas Obscura, 2/17/21)

Tom Rapoport‘s family emigrated from the US to the GDR in 1952. After German reunification, the molecular biologist lost his old job and found a new one at Harvard. He’s commuted between Boston and Berlin for the past 26 years.  (Berliner Zeitung, 2/13/21)

Why has it taken so many decades for Germany to charge now-elderly defendants who were once camp guards or other low-level personnel for Nazi war crimes? The 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk was a watershed moment for the German justice system.  (The New York Times, 2/9/21)

Muslim-background Germans are not engaging “wrongly” with Holocaust education programs, says Esra Özyürek. Rather than remorse, they may respond with anxiety, fear—and radical empathy.  (Haaretz, 2/1/21)

Americans still have a great deal to learn from the Germans about coming to terms with a difficult past.  (Bloomberg, 1/30/21; Foreign Policy, 1/30/21)

“Holocaust museums for years have been asking visitors: ‘Beware the Holocaust because you could have been a victim.’ I suppose we are thinking: ‘Beware the Holocaust because you could have been a perpetrator.'” A new Imperial War Museums gallery reframes the experience of genocide.  (The Guardian, 1/27/21)

Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a prisoner at Dachau, secretly recorded his experiences on more than 1,800 pages between November 1942 and October 1944, then buried the diary underneath a concrete floor. He survived, and his testimony was unearthed after the camp’s liberation.  (The New York Times, 9/4/20)

“The presiding scientific genius of the Romantic age, when science had not yet been dispersed into specialties that rarely connect with one another, Alexander von Humboldt wanted to know everything, and came closer than any of his contemporaries to doing so.”  (The New Atlantis, Winter 2021)

The Dolchstoßlegende and the Big Lie are back in the news—and historians are here to explain why this is very bad news.  (The Washington Post, 11/23/20; The Washington Post, 1/9/21; The New York Times, 1/9/21; New Statesman, 1/13/21; Foreign Policy, 2/6/21)

The Jewish Museum in Berlin has a new director and a new permanent exhibition.  (The Wall Street Journal, 8/21/20; The New York Times, 8/26/20)

The Bohemians by Norman Ohler, translated by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough, is “a detailed and meticulously researched tale about a pair of young German resisters that reads like a thriller.”  (The New York Times, 7/14/20; The Spectator, 8/6/20)

The message of “Unveiled: Berlin and Its Monuments” at the Spandau Citadel is clear: “A monument is not a descriptive account of history, but instead a historical artifact that tells a story about power. In a setting that invites scrutiny, visitors can study Berlin’s monuments to grasp more clearly who had power and how that power was used.”  (Atlas Obscura, 8/14/20)

One hundred years after the redrawing of the German-Danish border, a once “bloody European frontier” has become “one of the world’s most successfully integrated and multilingual border regions.”  (The Economist, 8/22/20)

Hitler’s Northern Utopia, by Despina Stratigakos, “tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway’s Atlantic coast.”  (Metropolis, 7/24/20; The Washington Post, 8/20/20)

Suzanne L. Marchand “uses porcelain as a vehicle to weave a sweeping economic, social and cultural history of central Europe. Along the way, she traces the transformation of the hundreds of German principalities into a powerful state that, by the late 19th century, was producing porcelain on an industrial scale.”  (The Economist, 7/16/20; The Wall Street Journal, 7/28/20)

Scott Calonico’s short documentary Betrayal tells “the story of how the flight of an East German spy affected the family members he left behind.”  (The New Yorker, 8/5/20)

How do we identify Albert Einstein? For the man himself, “being Jewish and German were not questions of identity but rather mutable matters of identification.”  (Aeon, 4/2/20)

“With its heavy armour plating, its second horn halfway up the back, its three-toed feet and its cruel face, the poor animal looked more like a tank than the real thing.” Albrecht Dürer’s oddly inaccurate rendering of a rhinoceros shaped Europeans’ imagery of the animal for centuries.  (History Today, 8/2020)

The villa where it happened: a new exhibition at Cecilienhof commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Potsdam Conference.  (The New York Times, 6/29/20)

“For postwar Germany, the United States was savior, protector and liberal democratic model. Now, Germans, in shock, speak of the ‘American catastrophe.'”  (The Guardian,  7/23/20; The New York Times, 7/24/20)

Pömmelte, a sacred site from the Late Stone Age, is helping scholars “build a picture of the dawn of the Unetice culture, sometimes described as Europe’s first ‘state.'” You can visit the reconstruction near Magdeburg.  (The Art Newspaper, 6/2/20)

Freya von Moltke held onto her uncensored correspondence with her husband Helmuth, written during his last months in a Nazi prison, until her own death in 2010.  Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, 1944–1945 has been newly translated by Shelley Frisch.  (Lithub, 9/18/19; National Review, 2/29/20)

“Available at train stations, supermarkets, bakeries, kiosks, factories, Portuguese beach resorts, online, and everywhere else Germans buy things, Bild Zeitung squats like a large toad on German life.” Thomas Meaney examines the history and persistent influence of Germany’s largest tabloid newspaper.  (The Guardian, 7/16/20)

Learning from the Germans? Thomas Laqueur explains why “it seems far-fetched to imagine that comparing slavery to the Holocaust can help us to come to terms with the granular ubiquity of American racism.”  (London Review of Books, 6/18/20)

“The well-intentioned determination of German politicians and academics to take exclusive responsibility for the Nazi genocide is now aiding other perpetrators to whitewash their participation”: A thoughtful critique by historian Jan Grabowski.  (Haaretz, 6/22/20)

Through the Darkest of Times and Attentat 1942 are among a new breed of video games that seek to portray the historical experience of National Socialism, and the difficult moral choices that accompanied it, in a more nuanced way.  (The New York Times, 3/20/20; The Washington Post, 7/6/20)

“The Habsburgs are a writer’s gift, offering a regal cast of mad, colourful and deeply flawed characters.” In a new book, Martyn Rady charts the rise and fall of one of history’s most powerful families.  (Financial Times, 5/20/20; TLS, 6/26/20)

“In the postwar era, Germany fundamentally redesigned law enforcement to prevent past atrocities from ever repeating. Its approach may hold lessons for police reform everywhere.” (The New York Times, 6/23/20)

Hello, Lenin? As a 35-year-old statue of the Soviet leader stands firm in Schwerin, Gelsenkirchen bucks worldwide trends to become the first western German city to display a statue in his honor.  (Digital Cosmonaut, 6/2020; Deutsche Welle, 6/20/20)

The biographies of Wolfgang Leonhard and Markus Wolf were “strikingly similar” until March 1949. “Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?” Anne Applebaum has answers; please read them.  (The Atlantic, July/August 2020)

Samuel Moyn weighs in on a stubborn problem for (not just) German historians: “It is true that in the face of novelty, analogy with possible historical avatars is indispensable, to abate confusion and to seek orientation. But there is no doubt that it often compounds the confusion as the ghosts of the past are allowed to walk again in a landscape that has changed profoundly.”  (The New York Review of Books, 5/19/20)

The bottom half of Kang Sunkoo’s Statue of Limitations, an 11-meter-high sculpture referencing Germany’s colonial past, has just been installed at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The upper half will be placed in the city’s Afrikanisches Viertel, so-called for its streets that were in named in the colonial era.  (London Review of Books, 10/4/19; The Art Newspaper, 5/18/20)

Of course, there’s a history behind the history. In History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise, Philipp Stelzel positions “the dialogue between German and American historians as a key part of the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and of Cold War transatlantic relations.”  (Mosse Program Blog, 1/11/19; New Books in History, 12/2/19)

“We have to sort this through and say: ‘These parts of my national history I can be proud of and I can stand by, and these parts I’m sorry for and I’d like to do my best to somehow make up for.'” A good place to start is Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman’s comparative study of how Germans and Americans have come to terms (or not) with the injustices and atrocities in their national histories.  (The Guardian, 9/13/19; The New Yorker, 10/21/19; The New Republic, 10/31/19; The New Yorker, 7/6/20)

What lessons can we take away from the previous history of pandemics? Richard J. Evans, author of Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (1830–1910), places Covid-19 in historical perspective.  (The New Yorker, 3/18/20; New Statesman, 4/2/20)

Konrad Adenauer, who served as the Federal Republic’s first chancellor between the ages of 73 and  87, “shaped West German politics and Germany’s relationship with the wider world more than any other single person.”  (The Washington Post, 3/9/20)

Did the Hohenzollern family “substantially abet National Socialism”? Millions of euros, and the fate of important cultural treasures, depends on the answer.  (Berlin Policy Journal, 2/20/20; The New York Review of Books, 2/26/20)

“The gulf between America’s ideals and its realities hit home particularly hard for one group: the thousands of black occupation troops sent to a defeated Germany to promote democracy.”  (The New York Times, 2/19/20)

Sinclair McKay has written a new history of the firebombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945.  (The Spectator, 2/1/20; The Economist, 2/6/20)

Donna Rifkind shines an overdue spotlight on Salka Viertel, “a destroyer of walls, a builder of bridges, a welcome among strangers,” in a new biography, The Sun and Her Stars.  (Harper’s, 1/2020; Time,  1/2/20)

Sheindi Miller’s diary, which documents her ordeal as a 14-year-old prisoner and forced laborer at Auschwitz, is now on display at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Seventy-five years after the camp’s liberation, she attended the opening of the exhibition with her extended family.  (The Wall Street Journal, 1/24/20)

Mietskasernen, or “rental barracks,” have shaped Berlin’s culture and counterculture for more than a century.  (Citylab, 1/13/20)

“But even as Germany is regularly commended as a nation that has faced and taken responsibility for dark periods of its history, it is struggling to reckon with its colonial role.”  (The Washington Post, 1/3/20; Deutsche Welle, 1/19/20; Jacobin, 7/3/20)

“A cult voice of East German feminist literature” is finally getting her due in English. Lucy Jones’s translation of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Die Geschwister (Sisters) will be published by Penguin in February, fifty years after the author’s premature death.  (The Guardian, 1/4/23)

Sibylle Berg’s Grime, newly translated by Tim Mohr, “is a novel so caustic it should be printed with hydrochloric acid.” Berg “sprays her fury across the whole landscape of technological and economic manias that are rendering the 21st century intolerable.”  (The Washington Post, 12/13/22)

The rules of gender in German-speaking Europe are bending, and Kim de l’Horizon is leading the way. They received the 2022 German Book Prize for Blutbuch, “a formally adventurous work centering on a nonbinary character, also named ‘Kim,’ grappling with gender identity while exploring the traumatic histories of women in their Swiss family.”  (The New York Times, 11/30/22)

Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 novel Die Wolke (The Cloud), about a fictional nuclear accident, was standard reading for young West Germans. “To this day, critics argue over whether she empowered children—or traumatised them for life.”  (BBC, 11/3/22)

In memoriam: Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929–2022), “free-spirited intellectual who suggested a new literary direction for the country out of the rubble of World War II, writing poems, essays, novels and travelogues that were by turns witty and incisive, united by their vivid imagery and close attention to detail.”  (Deutsche Welle, 11/25/22; The Washington Post, 11/28/22; n+1, 11/29/22)

Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns “reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time.”  It has just been rereleased with a revised translation by Joshua Cohen.  (The New York Times, 10/3/22; The New York Times, 10/6/22)

In the new novel Identitti author Mithu Sanyal and translator Alta Price “take readers on a wild ride in which every assumption about race, interpersonal relationships, and academic language is brought under scrutiny.” (Words without Borders, 9/1/22; The New York Times, 9/29/22; Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/24/22)

The Ravensburger Verlag withdrew two children’s books based on the work of Karl May, who created an utterly fanciful—but wildly successful—world of cowboys and Indians at the end of the 19th century; his 21st-century defenders aren’t conceding quietly. (The Guardian, 8/23/22; The Times, 9/12/22)

Karl Bartos recalls his innovative musical career in The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond, translated into English by Katy Derbyshire.  (The Guardian, 8/3/22; Clash, 8/8/22)

“A cage went in search of a bird”: There’s much to contemplate and appreciate in a beautiful new edition of Kafka’s aphorisms, translated by Shelley Frisch and introduced and edited by Reiner Stach.  (Times Literary Supplement, 4/29/22; Forward, 7/7/22)

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith, is “a fine example of everyone’s favourite genre: the genre-defying book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and finished with a jeweller’s eye for detail.”  (The Guardian, 12/4/20;  The White Review, 1/2021)

With the reissue of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man and Colm Tóibín’s biographical novel, Thomas Mann is having a moment. Before you pick up either one, read Alex Ross first!  (The New Yorker, 1/17/22)

In memoriam: Ali Mitgutsch (1935–2022), father of the Wimmelbuch. “He delighted readers with detailed, cartoonish tableaus crammed with jokes and anecdotes.” (The New York Times, 1/18/22)

Robert Habeck, “the man who will spend the next four years trying to bring about a green transformation of Germany’s coal-hungry industry once faced another daunting challenge in a previous, less publicly exposed career: translating the most controversial poems in recent British history into German.”  (The Guardian, 12/6/21)

“In modern Germany, Krimis are everywhere. More than 3,000 new crime novels are published every year, and the deluge of crime shows (both televised and theatrical), murder mystery dinners, and crime fiction festivals is near constant.”  (Foreign Policy, 10/24/21; New Books in German, 11/14/21)

“Greater Einland (population: 1,000) has no internet and no ATMs . . . Even more remarkably, it is being gradually sucked down into a vast subterranean hole of unknown provenance.” Raphaela Edelbauer’s debut novel, Liquid Land, combines a “dreamy, Gothic strangeness with whimsical humour and an element of farce”—and it’s translated into English by Jen Calleja.  (Lonesome Reader, 8/19/21; The Guardian, 9/10/21)

“Upon publication, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna was quickly embraced by critics and readers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.” Thomas Bender recalls the historian Carl Schorske and his remarkable work.  (Public Books, 9/21/21)

“From the first assured pages of Afterlives, a book of quiet beauty and tragedy, it is clear one is in the hands of a master storyteller.” Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah “leads us by the hand into the world of German-occupied east Africa, before Germany lost its territories after defeat in the first world war.”  (Financial Times, 10/22/20; The Economist, 10/7/21)

“Two opposite, potentially even hostile, societies unite—that’s one of the most exciting sociological experiments you could imagine.” Sociologist Steffen Mau discusses Rostock’s Lütten Klein district and the traumas of German reunification.  (Jacobin, 10/3/21)

Take it from translator Shelley Frisch: “One of the cruelest barbs one can level against a writer’s style in English is to accuse a text of sounding ‘translated from German.'”  (Princeton University Press, 9/30/21)

The Magician is Colm Tóibín’s own “Mann-sized” novel about the author of Buddenbrooks and Doctor Faustus.  (Times Literary Supplement, 9/10/21;  The Washington Post, 9/14/21; The Guardian, 9/17/21)

Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man “is a strange, frequently off-putting book, a 500-page assault on democracy, enlightenment and reason . . . And yet, at the moment, the book feels not just worthy of our attention but somehow indispensable.”  (The New York Times, 9/17/21)

“Condemned to live in an idolatrous world with the outlook of Hegel’s ‘beautiful soul,’ they spent their lives finessing waspish denunciations for like-minded readers rather than striving to transform it.” Stuart Jeffries discusses Martin Jay’s new essay collection—and American conspiracy theorists—on the Frankfurt School.  (The New Statesman, 8/18/21)

“In a belated plot twist, the German chancellor is the heroine of a new novel detailing her post-chancellery career as a hobby detective. Get off the stage, Miss Marple, it’s time for Miss Merkel.”  (The Irish Times, 4/16/21)

Stefan Weber, plagiarism hunter: “Critics describe him as a persnickety crusader who takes pleasure in character assassination. Even his supporters acknowledge that his drive to hold writers, academics and others to the highest standards can be vexing.”  (The New York Times, 9/10/21)

“His unease about a disappearing world echoes our own, as does his denial about the onrushing future.” Thanks to translator Isabel Fargo Cole, you can now read Adalbert Stifter’s complete Motley Stones in English.  (The Economist, 6/26/21; The Nation, 9/13/21)

Göring’s Man in Paris is “the story of a Nazi art plunderer and his world”—and how historian Jonathan Petropoulos became part of that world more than fifty years later.  (The Art Newspaper, 1/7/21; The New York Times, 1/17/21)

“In the shouty Valhalla of pointlessly destructive literary feuds, a place of honor must go to the verbal duel between the poets Heinrich Heine and August von Platen, which amused and disgusted the German literary world in 1829.”  (The New Yorker, 2/5/21)

Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians, translated by Shaun Whiteside, takes us back to the tumultuous decade between 1919 and 1929, as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer, and Benjamin were thinking “intently, obsessively and sometimes dangerously about how to answer the oldest questions of philosophy.”  (The Guardian, 8/13/20;  The New York Times, 8/14/20; New Statesman, 12/10/20)

“Antisemitism for beginners”: the Jewish children’s book publisher Ariella Verlag has released a darkly humorous collection of cartoons.  (PRI, 2/3/21)

What better time to revisit Stefan Zweig’s 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday: “His plaintive ode to serendipitous meetings in free and open cities is one that echoes, too, from the shuttered windows of our own era’s locked-down metropolises.”  (New Statesman, 1/27/21)

In memoriam: Helga Weyhe (1922-2021), “Germany’s oldest bookseller.”  (The New York Times, 1/14/21)

It’s Hegel’s 250th birthday—here’s to reason in history and notoriously difficult German philosophers in the news.   (Deutsche Welle, 8/27/20; The Guardian, 8/27/20)

The Bohemians by Norman Ohler, translated by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough, is “a detailed and meticulously researched tale about a pair of young German resisters that reads like a thriller.”  (The New York Times, 7/14/20; The Spectator, 8/6/20)

A bestselling book about Angela Merkel’s response to the European refugee crisis (Die Getriebenen) has since inspired a popular TV movie. “Any attempt to understand the legacy of the summer of 2015 must reckon with both works—and the crucial differences between them.”  (Foreign Policy, 8/23/20)

Suzanne L. Marchand “uses porcelain as a vehicle to weave a sweeping economic, social and cultural history of central Europe. Along the way, she traces the transformation of the hundreds of German principalities into a powerful state that, by the late 19th century, was producing porcelain on an industrial scale.”  (The Economist, 7/16/20; The Wall Street Journal, 7/28/20)

“‘Michael Kohlhaas,’ which was recently reissued by New Directions in a sparkling new translation from Michael Hofmann, makes for a fine entry point into Kleist’s passionate, grotesque, hysterical, and deeply strange body of work.”  (The New Yorker, 5/20/20)

Reality TV meets the refugee crisis: “The first thing to say about Timur Vermes’s second novel, The Hungry and the Fat, is that Jamie Bulloch’s translation is immaculate . . . The second striking thing about this novel is how very good it is.”  (The Guardian, 2/8/20; Financial Times, 2/14/20)

“The Habsburgs are a writer’s gift, offering a regal cast of mad, colourful and deeply flawed characters.” In a new book, Martyn Rady charts the rise and fall of one of history’s most powerful families.  (Financial Times, 5/20/20; TLS, 6/26/20)

James Kirchick recalls The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Nobel prizewinner Heinrich Böll, and shows us how “a biting Cold War-era German novella helps explain our current moment.”  (The American Interest, 6/28/20)

“Christine Wunnicke’s glittering, absurdist jewel of a novel,” The Fox and Dr. Shimamura, is “itself a translation from the German.” And a prizewinning one at that! Philip Boehm is the 2020 recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.  (Music & Literature, 3/28/19; The New York Times, 5/31/19)

“The zoos were microcosms of postwar Germany, subsumed, like everything else during the Cold War, into the ideological struggle.” The Zookeepers’ War by J. W. Mohnhaupt, translated by Shelley Frisch, is the cultural history of Cold War Berlin you didn’t know you were missing.   (Time, 11/12/19; Air Mail, 11/23/19)

Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel Tyll, translated by Ross Benjamin, reanimates “the old German chronicle of mobile mischief by placing its protagonist, Tyll Ulenspiegel, in a deeply imagined early-seventeenth-century world, a Europe ruined by the Thirty Years’ War.” (The New York Times, 2/3/20; The New Yorker, 2/10/20)

“In the nineteen-forties, the West Side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile. It was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard.”  (The New Yorker, 3/2/20)

Sinclair McKay has written a new history of the firebombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945.  (The Spectator, 2/1/20; The Economist, 2/6/20)

An “entirely unimportant young lady alone with her questions” becomes an interpreter at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in The German House by Annette Hess, translated into English by Elisabeth Lauffer.  (The Washington Post, 12/30/19; The Economist, 1/8/20)

Donna Rifkind shines an overdue spotlight on Salka Viertel, “a destroyer of walls, a builder of bridges, a welcome among strangers,” in a new biography, The Sun and Her Stars.  (Harper’s, 1/2020; Time,  1/2/20)

How to build a multicultural and pluralistic Germany?  Max Czollek provocatively tells the country’s minorities to “de-integrate” themselves.  (The New York Times, 1/16/20)

Haven’t made it through Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities? Try Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister, in a new translation by Joel Agee. Its 36 chapters are “a novel within the novel,” zeroing in on the unusual love story between Ulrich and Agathe.  (The New York Times, 12/5/19; The Paris Review, 1/8/20)

“Whatever the case may be, the Berliner Schnauze strikes without warning, usually unprovoked, delivering a brutal level of honesty you never asked for.”  (BBC, 12/5/22)

What’s better than a model train around the Christmas tree? A visit to Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland, with its 53,000 feet of track, the world’s largest model airport, and detailed tiny replicas of the world’s landmarks, “bursting with whimsy and humor.”  (The New York Times, 12/21/22)

An early-morning raid swept up more than more than two dozen co-conspirators—including Prince Heinrich XIII and a former Bundestag delegate for the AfD. It turns out they’re among the ringleaders of the Reichsbürger movement, “citizens of the Empire” who believe that the Federal Republic is a sham and sundry other conspiracy theories.  (The Guardian, 12/10/22; The New York Times, 12/11/22)

“Let’s face it: sometimes to sum up a concept in English (or Spanish or Slovenian or whatever our language) we need a word in German, even it doesn’t exist yet”: An English-language article about Freudenfreude evoked Schadenfreude for some German readers, and Freudenfreudefreude for others.  (The New York Times, 11/25/22; The Local, 12/2/22)

Look who’s back: “Global even before globalisation, Blue Nun was once the biggest name in the mass market wine business, selling a staggering 35 million bottles in 1985 alone.” (The Irish Times, 11/26/22)

Germany’s fight over which weapons to give Ukraine, says Anne Applebaum, is really a fight over the lessons of 1945. Which is more important: preventing another genocide in Europe, “even if that means a military engagement,” or preventing “war at all costs by refusing to engage in one”?  (The Atlantic,  10/20/22)

“What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?” Germany’s reluctance to send battle tanks to Ukraine is costing lives and frustrating allies.   (Financial Times, 9/14/22; Bloomberg, 9/15/22)

“German pillows are oddly huge.”  (The Wall Street Journal, 7/17/22)

The term Rasse is taboo in a way that “race” isn’t. This has consequences for German constitutional law and data collection, and for the lived reality of people in marginalized groups.  (Wired, 7/13/22)

The watershed that wasn’t? Germany’s support for the Ukrainian war effort has been maddeningly indecisive.  (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 4/29/22; Bloomberg, 5/22/22; The New York Times, 6/14/22; Tablet, 6/26/22; The Telegraph, 6/26/22; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6/27/22)

Katrin Bennhold scores quite an interview with former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, “the most prominent face” in a long era of miscalculated relations with Russia, “not only because he expresses no regret, but because he also profited handsomely from it, earning millions while promoting Russian energy interests.”  (The New York Times, 4/23/22; The New York Times, 5/1/22)

Harsh words for Germany from Volodymyr Zelensky (and other observers): “Every year politicians repeat ‘never again.’ And now, we see that these words simply mean nothing.”  (The Washington Post, 3/17/22; The New Statesman, 4/5/22; The New York Times, 4/7/22)

A Zeitenwende in German foreign policy: It was the “political cataclysm that no one saw coming—not from a novice chancellor known for his caution, not from a coalition of German parties with pacifist roots, and certainly not from a government led by the Social Democrats, with their history of close ties to Russia.”  (Bloomberg, 2/27/22; Foreign Policy, 2/27/22; German Marshall Fund, 2/28/22; The Atlantic, 3/1/22; The Washington Post, 3/1/22)

Kultur? No thank you, says Ulf Poschardt: “German pop culture is—apart from Kraftwerk and Christoph Waltz—boring, soporific, moralistic crap produced and financed by people who (always) aim for a common denominator in a society where morals and morality are more important than punch lines and success.” (Politico, 2/19/22)

“Germany’s much-vaunted memory culture,” writes Eric Langenbacher, “is no longer producing the progressive effects that were always a key justification behind it.” Instead, it’s leading to inaction and “providing moralistic cover for anti-democratic, autocratic threats.”  (The New York Times, 1/25/22; AICGS, 2/14/22)

“The underlying Ostpolitik gambit of Egon Bahr, Brandt’s adviser, was a judo throw: entice your heavy, slow-moving opponent, the Soviet Union, to lean so far into your embrace that with a skilful twist you can throw him over your shoulder. Now it is Putin, a judo black belt, who is trying to throw heavy, slow-moving Germany over his shoulder.”  (Financial Times, 2/9/22)

“The vision of foreign policy set out in Berlin’s new coalition agreement,” writes Rachel Tausendfreund, “is thus, on the whole, the right kind of feminist. It is inclusive, broad, and progressive without being binary or reactionary. It recognizes serious threats to Germany and the global order that more pacifism will not solve.”  (German Marshall Fund, 11/20/21)

Years after his lunch with a Holocaust denier and rising star of the far right, Jay Rayner “went looking to see what had become of the man who hated me because I was a Jew.” He had hoped to meet a changed man, “but real lives are murkier than that.”  (The Observer, 1/23/22)

Robert Habeck, “the man who will spend the next four years trying to bring about a green transformation of Germany’s coal-hungry industry once faced another daunting challenge in a previous, less publicly exposed career: translating the most controversial poems in recent British history into German.”  (The Guardian, 12/6/21)

As her 16 years in office draw to a close, how should we interpret the legacy of Chancellor Angela Merkel? Here’s a collection of answers from some of the brightest Merkel-watchers in the English-language media.  (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2021; Bloomberg, 6/9/21; The New York Times, 6/12/21; The Washington Post, 7/15/21; The Irish Times, 7/24/21; The Guardian, 8/31/21; The New Statesman, 9/13/21; The New Statesman, 9/15/21; The New York Times, 9/25/21)

“In the summer of 1971, a young German couple set off on a trip that would take them farther from home than any of their journeys before.” Their daughter Edda Schlager, born one year later, has curated a remarkable collection of photos of Uzbekistan then and now.  (The Calvert Journal,  8/12/21)

“What lessons can Americans concerned about the current state and future of their democracy take from the German experience?” Political scientist Stephen Szabo has suggestions.  (Foreign Policy, 10/17/21)

Merkel-Raute, Muttivation, asymmetrische Demobilisierung, and more: Here are 16 terms that Angela Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship helped usher into the German language.  (The Guardian, 9/22/21)

“Angela, Angie and sometimes Merkel: For some refugee families who traveled to Germany during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016, gratitude for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome them comes via a namesake.”  (The New York Times, 9/19/21)

“It’s a nail-biter, German-style: Who can most effectively channel stability and continuity? Or put another way: Who can channel Ms. Merkel?” Voters will elect a new chancellor and governing coalition on September 26. (The New York Times, 9/1/21)

The Greens and the CDU/CSU will settle on their chancellor candidates soon. “With both choices imminent, and an unusually competitive election looming, the focus is on the individual rivalries. but the contest also deserves to be seen as a broader one, on the character and location of Germany’s post-Merkel political centre.”  (New Statesman, 4/14/21)

Why Märklin is thriving: “For many people, the chance to create a separate, better world in the living room—with stunning mountains, tiny chugging locomotives and communities of inch-high people where no one needs a mask—is hard to resist.”  (The New York Times, 3/18/21)

Abstandsbier, Coronaangst, overzoomed, and more: more than 1,000 new German words are here to help us describe pandemic life.  (The Guardian, 2/23/21; Slate, 2/24/21)

A dilapidated Boeing 707 with an unusual history is the last plane at Berlin’s Tegel airport. It’s slated to be removed by the end of April 2021.  (Atlas Obscura, 2/17/21)

Confused about German politics? “Keep squinting at the overall hue of the national palette,” Andreas Kluth advises. “It’ll always tend toward mud-brown. But a black-green pattern is also becoming discernable.”  (Bloomberg, 2/17/21)

There’s a new political leader on Germany’s national stage. By a narrow majority, the CDU elected the “Catholic, moderate, consensus-oriented, no-experiments” Armin Laschet to be its new leader. But will he represent the party in the September election?  (New Statesman, 1/16/21; The Economist, 1/23/21)

In Germany, “the virus is not an ‘enemy,’ and the process of containing it is not a war.” In response to the pandemic, German politicians tend to forego martial imagery and opt for expressions like “challenge,” “crisis,” “task,” and even “long-distance run.”  (The Conversation, 5/22/20)

“Whatever the question, the answer is Germany”—it seems Britain and the U.S. could use some help.  (The New York Times,  7/19/20; The Guardian, 8/22/20; The New York Times, 8/25/20; The Economist, 8/29/20; The Irish Times, 8/31/20; New Statesman, 9/2/20)

One hundred years after the redrawing of the German-Danish border, a once “bloody European frontier” has become “one of the world’s most successfully integrated and multilingual border regions.”  (The Economist, 8/22/20)

“Merkel has been chancellor since 2005, when her fellow world leaders included Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and George W Bush. It is hard to imagine Germany, and the continent, without her.” Here’s a useful overview of what might come next in Germany’s political landscape.  (New Statesman, 8/7/20)

Germans, socks, and sandals—here’s all you need to know.  (Deutsche Welle, 7/29/20)

“For postwar Germany, the United States was savior, protector and liberal democratic model. Now, Germans, in shock, speak of the ‘American catastrophe.'”  (The Guardian,  7/23/20; The New York Times, 7/24/20)

“Available at train stations, supermarkets, bakeries, kiosks, factories, Portuguese beach resorts, online, and everywhere else Germans buy things, Bild Zeitung squats like a large toad on German life.” Thomas Meaney examines the history and persistent influence of Germany’s largest tabloid newspaper.  (The Guardian, 7/16/20)

Through the Darkest of Times and Attentat 1942 are among a new breed of video games that seek to portray the historical experience of National Socialism, and the difficult moral choices that accompanied it, in a more nuanced way.  (The New York Times, 3/20/20; The Washington Post, 7/6/20)

“Germany has a problem . . . Cases of far-right extremists in the military and the police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly.”  (The New York Times, 7/3/20)

“Confronted with a pandemic that has cratered Europe’s economy, Ms. Merkel and Mr. Macron, who have often found themselves at odds over the years, dragged the rusty Franco-German motor out of the garage and got it running again.”  (The New York Times, 5/19/20; Bloomberg, 5/20/20)

“The leader of the free world gives a speech, and she nails it.”  (Intelligencer, 3/18/20; The Atlantic, 4/20/20)

What do CDU leaders Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz, and Norbert Röttgen all have in common? They studied law with Constanze Stelzenmüller in 1980s Bonn, and she has a thing or two to say about that.  (Financial Times, 3/5/20)

Philip Oltermann casts Angela Merkel as the “anti-hero Arthur Dent: an everywoman who remains bewildered by—rather than in charge of—the strange alien universe she has landed in.”  (The Spectator, 1/29/20)

Thomas Kemmerich’s sudden rise—and fall—as minister president of Thüringen “displayed the disastrous state of Germany’s political center—and how far the country now stands from the anti-fascist consensus it proclaims to maintain.”  (Foreign Policy, 2/7/20; The New York Times, 2/7/20; Bloomberg, 2/10/20)

Berlin’s clubs are dying? Long live Berlin’s clubs!  (The New York Times, 1/24/20; The Economist, 1/30/20; The Irish Times, 2/1/20; The Guardian, 2/12/20)