Tag: Germany

From Martin Luther to The Nutcracker, Germany’s original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.

What’s the German word for “the world’s most forthright people have deceit in their DNA”?

One of the first decisions any tourist had to make when crossing the German border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to “Heil Hitler.”

On storytelling in the shadow of Chernobyl, U.S. military planes, and not-so-distant German history.

Privatkliniken in Deutschland verkaufen Krebspatienten Hoffnung zu Höchstpreisen — mit durchwachsenem Erfolg.

Private clinics in Germany sell cancer patients hope — and mixed results — at exorbitant prices. Some, like the Hallwang Clinic, cater primarily to foreigners.

The German “stab-in-the-back” myth springs back to life in America, this time through scapegoating over lost jobs.

In Harper’s, Yascha Mounk examines how recent Islamic immigration challenges many Germans’ core idea of their national identity.

In Roads & Kingdoms, Milan Gagnon tells the stories of Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, and Konstanz, Germany — one city full of empty storefronts, and the other full of empty souls.

In Lapham’s Quarterly, Renata Adler returns to her familial homeland to explore Germany’s present-day reaction to the millions of people now trying to get in rather than out.

When an American exchange student discovered that the Germans never lose anything.

The story of the Nazis’ only concentration camp for women has long been obscured—partly by chance, but also by historians’ apathy towards women’s history. Sarah Helm writes about the camp, where the “cream of Europe’s women” were interned alongside its prostitutes, and members of the French resistance perished alongside Red Army prisoners of war.

In 1974 Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris, an act of faith to prevent the death of his friend Lotte Eisner. This is his account of the journey.

“The first shock was the sheer discovery of a book about my mother and my family, which had information about me and my identity that had been kept hidden from me,” Teege says. “I knew almost nothing about the life of my biological mother, nor did my adoptive family. I hoped to find answers to questions that had disturbed me and to the depression I had suffered from. The second shock was the information about my grandfather’s deeds.”

From unknown East German scientist to the most powerful woman in the world.

Down in the schwahl, Malskat and the Feys set to work, attempting to reclaim history by scraping away the paint with which Olbers had tried to recapture the past. But subtracting what their predecessor had done—whether on account of Olbers’ pigments or the Feys’ incompetence—left almost none of the original paint. A nearly 700-year-old national […]

Four stories about the Berlin Wall, from its creation to the memories it has helped shape, to mark the 25th anniversary of its fall.

“What had driven us apart? What was so important that it had turned us into strangers, even today?”

“The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi.” — Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, New York Review of Books More from NYRB