Displaying Hitler alongside celebrities, pop stars, world statesmen and sporting heroes at the new Madame Tussauds in Berlin was a bit controversial to begin with. And it didn't last long before one of the first visitors literally tore off the Fuehrer's head.
posted on Jul 5, 2008 - View this thread

Twenty years ago this week, the biggest escape ever over the Berlin Wall took place, but the event went nearly unreported outside of the two Germanies. The 182 persons who jumped over the Wall in the early morning hours of 1 July 1988, instead of leaving East Germany, fled in the opposite direction (scroll down to "Wolfgang Ritter") to escape the West Berlin police. East German border guards waited with trucks on the other side of the Wall in the middle of the death strip to pick up the wall-hopping protesters; they were driven to another location, served breakfast, and then taken to the Friedrichsstrasse crossing to West Berlin with the admonition to "use the usual border crossing next time."
posted on Jul 3, 2008 - View this thread

Forgotten Architects: In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime. Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.
posted on Jun 16, 2008 - View this thread

Do you like Berlin? The hippest city on the planet has some interesting video blogs. My personal favorite is First We Take Berlin which is pretty off-beat and covers a lot of not so hip areas of the city. In their current episode they go to the annual may riots in Kreuzberg (after a weird little mouse story). Then there is Mayda3000 which is the longest running video blog about Berlin. Watch Berlin is a sort of compilation of many different video blogs most of which are in german but there are some are in english as well. And last but not least there's Verbundstoff which is in german only and takes a look at the very underground Berlin electronic music scene.
posted on May 20, 2008 - View this thread

With the grounds it was built on having hosted the first demonstration of airplane flight in 1909, Tempelhof International Airport, the world's second-oldest working commercial airport, was officially opened in 1923. Also known as City Airport, it takes its official name from the Tempelhof neighborhood of Berlin, itself named for the Knights Templar who owned its land in the Middle Ages.
posted on Apr 25, 2008 - View this thread

David Lynch talks about invincible Germany in Berlin. Why Mr. Lynch should learn german.
posted on Nov 21, 2007 - View this thread

Brigid Berlin makes today's hollywood train wrecks look lame. "In the early 70s, I went to Woolworth's and bought a jigger so I could have just one getting-dressed drink. By the time I left the house, I'd had 20. One time, I was in a hairdresser under the dryer getting bored. I went to the bar across the street in my rollers and had a glass of white wine. Then another glass of wine and another. I can't remember anything else until I woke up in a Howard Johnson near La Guardia Airport. And there were pancakes and maple syrup. There was a cute boy in the room watching Kids Are People Too. I think I thought that Andy would put him on the cover of Interview. He didn't."
posted on Sep 10, 2007 - View this thread

Ruttmann vs. Milant
Alexis Milant has composed scores for three experimental animations realised by Walter Ruttmann. The pleasure in watching and [listening to] this come from the reactivity in the same temporality between sound and picture.
posted on Sep 9, 2007 - View this thread

Bilderbook.
posted on Aug 16, 2007 - View this thread

The Soviet Army fights its way into Berlin and then, in a Very Special Episode, Uncle Joe drops in for a visit.

warnings: YouTube; violence followed by extreme melodrama
posted on May 14, 2007 - View this thread

Berliner Trance. A 1993 documentary tracing the origins of modern trance music in East Berlin. Featuring interviews with many of the biggest names in trance, including a very young Paul Van Dyk, now currently ranked as the #1 DJ in the world.
posted on Apr 7, 2007 - View this thread

After twelve years of not getting laid, Yan Yan the Chinese panda finally kicked the bucket late Monday at the Berlin Zoo. Officials admits she died alone and nobody immediately noticed. Now the media is running with the story that the popularity of Knut the polar bear cub may be the reason behind the death of his neighbor. In other news, the European Union celebrated its 50th birthday in Berlin. Nobody noticed.
posted on Mar 27, 2007 - View this thread

In 1973, Berlin, Lou Reed’s somber follow-up to his upbeat, glam-rock Transformer, was described by Rolling Stone as “a disaster,” by others as “horseshit,” and was never performed live — until now.
posted on Dec 15, 2006 - View this thread

The Berlin District Court has ruled that Deutsche Bahn must rebuild whole sections of the new Hauptbahnhof according to the architect's plans, setting a spectacular precedent. Berlin's new main train station, the Hauptbahnhof, cuts a solitary figure in the surrounding wasteland as it awaits an urban development that will complement its ambition, aesthetics and vast dimensions. But the verdict pronounced by the Berlin District Court on Tuesday November 28 has brutally nipped this development process in the bud. The judges ruled that the German rail company Deutsche Bahn has unlawfully violated the intellectual property rights of the station's architect, Meinhard von Gerkan. The rail company must rebuild the station according to the architect's plans. The station opened in May this year after a 13-year construction period.
posted on Dec 4, 2006 - View this thread

On September 9th 2006, 112 of the world's writers, artists, activists, and social entrepeneurs (nominees here) will gather for a Table of Free Voices in Berlin, Germany, discussing questions about the important issues of today. Who provides those questions? You.
posted on Jul 24, 2006 - View this thread

Please, do mention the war. Really, it's hard not to. After all, in a sense football is war, as the General famously joked. Sometimes it's peace. Same goes for that other football, by the way.
posted on Jun 3, 2006 - View this thread

Postwar architecture of Berlin. Photographing architectural icons before they disappear. Some I kind of like. Some I don't. Others, I just don't know what they were thinking.
posted on Apr 3, 2006 - View this thread

Everybody knows that gangsta rap promotes sexism, homophobia... and fascism. Take Bushido, for instance - the Berlin rapper of Tunisian descent that all the neo-Nazis love. Confused? (nyt) Well, so are the Germans. And then we're not even talking about Fler, whose "This is black-red-gold, hard and proud!" nationalist lyrics never fail to piss off the German papers (in German), and who likes to pose in his videos with a nice symbolic eagle. (Then again, Helmut Kohl didn't mind.) Still, Fler's flag-waving, eagle-loving rhymes are no match for Bushido's "Salute, stand to attention, I am the leader like 'A'". The A stands for Adolf, you know.
posted on Jan 12, 2006 - View this thread

‘No one should be imprisoned – not even for a second – for expressing an opinion’ Akbar Ganji announced his hunger strike on May 20 with these words.

Ganji, an Iranian journalist and writer, was arrested on April 22, 2000 following his participation in an academic and cultural conference held at the Heinrich Böll Institute in Berlin on April 7-9 entitled "Iran after the elections," at which political and social reform in Iran were publicly debated. He was sentenced on January 13, 2001 to 10 years imprisonment plus five years internal exile. He is now on 50th day of hunger-strike, weighs 52kg, is unconscious much of the day, and may die soon. [more inside]
posted on Jul 31, 2005 - View this thread

Wladimir Kaminer represents an emerging Russo-German culture. He is a DJ spinning Russian wild ska-punk club music, he is a radio talk-show host, the author of several best-selling books depicting the life of Russian immigrants in Germany, and a sort of good-humored emblem of the emerging hybrid culture of Berlin. In a fascinating interview, he reveals post Soviet Russia, and Russian lives and literature in the West; you can read his stories, Paris Lost, and Animal Transport, and the usual overview of his works and of his significance, in the NYT Books section.
posted on Dec 24, 2004 - View this thread

What do you do if it's 1979 and you are a sixteen year old in East Germany? Your Mom and her boyfriend, an officer in the intelligence service, have decided to defect. If you are Thomas Wagner, you wait twenty-odd years, and then you post the whole experience to your blog.
posted on Jul 25, 2004 - View this thread

Superman born in Germany? It appears that "the boy's mutant DNA segment was found to block production of a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth."

"Now we can say that myostatin acts the same way in humans as in animals," said the boy's physician, Dr. Markus Schuelke, a professor in the child neurology department at Charite/University Medical Center Berlin. "We can apply that knowledge to humans, including trial therapies for muscular dystrophy."

Or other things...
posted on Jun 24, 2004 - View this thread

Urban Haute Couture "is about street art and street art only. Since a couple of years ago there's a boom in street art. To be clear we're not talking about graffiti. We're talking about street art that is spraypaint/marker template based, stickers, posters and combinations of those. This new breed of street art, except for using the urban landscape as a medium, has actually nothing to do with graffiti." Cities include Berlin, Amsterdam and the Romanian Stencil Archive.
posted on Apr 4, 2004 - View this thread

Propeller Island City Lodge "Universal Art Objects & Hotel"
posted on Apr 1, 2004 - View this thread

Now's your chance to get with Jenna Jameson... Okay, not really. Apparently, the new gig in Berlin, Germany as of last month is pr0n Karaoke - you and a partner (or two, or three?) get together on stage, with a movie up on the screen, and "act out" the parts being played out graphically. So.... practice your faking and get ready to go!
posted on Oct 22, 2003 - View this thread

German man arrested for teaching pet dog Nazi salute
And he had a moustache too.
(No, not the dog.)
posted on Oct 15, 2003 - View this thread

Berlin Love Parade - July 13, 2002 "A million and half techno fans brought together for a day is something you just don’t see in America.... It’s something every American dancer should experience." Can be seen live on VIVA.tv
posted on Jul 13, 2002 - View this thread

Blinken Lights the world's biggest interactive computer display, a special 20th anniversary present to itself and the city of Berlin by the Chaos Computer Club. Since Sept 12, 2001, the upper eight floors of the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) have been transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind each of the windows. A computer controls each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels. The icing on the cake, you can play pong on it via your mobile phone!
posted on Dec 10, 2001 - View this thread

Berlin held mayoral elections on Sunday. The winner, Klaus Wowereit, is the town’s first openly gay politician. “I'm gay and it's good that way,” became a campaign slogan, website and catch phrase. Hints of Paris and Bertrand Delanoe.
posted on Oct 23, 2001 - View this thread

Berlin Teen Fails to Stop Flying Cow Spectacle. I tried and tried to come up with an appropriate smart aleck comment for this one... but to no avail. I did learn that it is legal to have a food fight in Berlin however.
posted on Jul 20, 2001 - View this thread