The Gerd Arntz Web Archive collects graphics from the career of the man who - in creating over 4000 Isotypes for social scientist Otto Neurath in 1930s Red Vienna - can make a serious claim to be the inventor of the modern stick figure. He attacked the corruption of German society as the Nazis rose to power, then joined Neurath in an attempt to create a transnational visual language that bore later fruit in Otl Aicher's 1972 Olympic pictograms and the AIGA passenger/pedestrian symbol signs. [via Mark Larson and Austin Kleon]
posted on Jul 7, 2008 - View this thread

The Olympic torch is being welcomed this weekend in the UK as a symbol of the sporting spirit, uniting people around the world in peaceful competition. But the idea of lighting the torch at the ancient Olympian site in Greece and then running it through different countries has much darker origins.
posted on Apr 5, 2008 - View this thread

Right-Wing Rot: A Village In the Hands of Neo-Nazis Houses torched, pets killed and outsiders chased away: Such is life in the Eastern German town of Jamel. For years, it has been controlled by the neo-Nazis who live there. Even the mayor says he has given up.
posted on Sep 25, 2007 - View this thread

Winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, a peace activist who opposed reunification for fear Germany might once again war against its neighbors, ghost-writer of Willy Brandt's speeches, author of the great fabulist history of World War II and postwar Germany, The Tin Drum, and of My Century, a novel of one hundred chapters, one for each year of the last century, a man considered part of the artistic movement known in German as "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung" or "coming to terms with the past", Günter Grass belatedly admits the history he expunged from his personal narrative: his service as a member of the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg of the Waffen-SS. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass explained his service would stain him forever, but that only after the war did he feel ashamed of having been in the Waffen-SS:

for me, because I am sure of my recollection, the Waffen SS was nothing frightful, but rather an elite unit that they sent where things were hot, and which, as people said about it, had the heaviest losses.

posted on Aug 12, 2006 - View this thread

He has cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW] and covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but Jürgen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank". Teller's first solo show in Paris is entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of a sequence of images (annoying Flash site, sorry) taken at the infamous Zeppelintribune parade ground, site of Nazi propaganda rallies, which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over several months, Teller (.pdf) has photographed the monument, the podium and the steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not. "It wasn't really maintained, but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be mysteriously replaced with a new one." Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers and lichen [NSFW] that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany, there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that events will eventually be forgotten".
posted on Mar 22, 2006 - View this thread

The London Cage. Kensington Palace Gardens is one of the most exclusive addresses in the world. Between July 1940 and September 1948 three magnificent houses there were home to one of Great Britain'smost secret military establishments: the London office of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, known colloquially as the London Cage. It was run by MI19, the section of the War Office responsible for gleaning information from enemy prisoners of war, and few outside this organisation knew exactly what went on beyond the single barbed-wire fence that separated the three houses from the busy streets and grand parks of west London. The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. A number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948. More inside.
posted on Nov 12, 2005 - View this thread

Sophie Scholl , a member of the White Rose, was beheaded in 1943. Her crime? Being brutally honest with a brutal regime. Her punishment was death. It's now a film, Sophie Scholl, the Last Days. I'm looking forward to seeing this. Finally Germany is showing great films.
posted on Oct 29, 2005 - View this thread

Secrets of the Third Reich...UFO's? "...As Sir Roy Feddon, Chief of the Technical Mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production stated in 1945. "…I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realise that if they (the Germans) had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.".....upright, vertical take-off aircraft.....a saucer-shaped craft with enclosed twin rotors.....Cruise missiles....the V-2....[predecessor of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]....a rocket-powered fighter, the ME 163...These then, were some of the known German advances. However there were also hints of darker technologies not fully understood." Woo woo! So begins the four part "Secrets of the Third Reich" - where does fact merge into fiction? It's such a great read that it almost doesn't matter. A version with pictures lives here (go to menu, "Book 4"). Then, there's The Hunt For Zero Point We have met the aliens, and they are us ?
posted on May 12, 2004 - View this thread

Johannes Matthaeus Koelz: A Life Divided. An artist who escaped to England from Nazi Germany. From the exhibition :-
'Koelz, a painter, was living in a small cottage in the Bavarian forest estate of Hohenbrunn. One morning he travelled to nearby Munich on a routine visit to police headquarters to renew his exit visa for a planned trip to Italy.'
'At some point during the following night Koelz instructed a young man from the local woodmill to take his major work - a triptych which had occupied him since the early 1930s and cut it into pieces. He left Hohenbrunn at dawn, arranging for his family to follow ... It was the first stop on a journey that would take them to England. '
'Meanwhile the state police had raided their home and interrogated family members left behind. They were searching for the painter and his triptych, a massive anti-war painting which not only questioned the horrors of war but also the rising power of the Nationalist Socialist Party and by implication, its leader, Adolf Hitler.'
'Thou Shalt Not Kill', Koelz's tryptych.
Timeline and artworks.
posted on Dec 12, 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

"He recalls his early, naive acceptance and even admiration of Hitler..."
A rather interesting perspective of that time from a man about growing up Black in Nazi Germany.
posted on Aug 25, 2000 - View this thread

never acknowledged: evidently, reparations were never made to gay holocaust survivors in germany. never mind that's where the pink triangle came from...
posted on Jun 16, 2000 - View this thread