Feb 10th, 2008
by Jürgen.
Homewrecking karate teachers, hard-partying Finns, and two thumbs up from Daniel Day-Lewis: I’m having a fine time at the Berlin Film Festival. My latest update, sent from woefully sparse wifi hotspots between marathon screenings and hurried curry sausage meals, covers six more movies: Black Ice, Auge in Auge, Shiver, Gardens of the Night, Chiko, and [...]
Jan 14th, 2008
by Jürgen.
You may have heard French lounge cover act Nouvelle Vague’s version of Eisbär, but nothing beats the original 1981 Grauzone version of the song, a Neue Deutsche Welle hit in 1981. At least that’s what I thought until I saw Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing), in which a German small-town couple plays it on their dinky [...]
Nov 21st, 2007
by Jürgen.
I had a strange dream last night about Romania and Malta, India and Switzerland. In my dream, Francis Ford Coppola had made a new movie, something about an old man who is hit by lightning and grows a new set of teeth. He collects roses and languages and Bruno Ganz was there, too. He owned [...]
Like Weltschmerz and Fahrvergnügen, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is one of those German words that don’t quite have an equivalent in other languages: “working-off-the-past” has been a national project for the last sixty-odd years; it stands to reason that no other country has a history quite as heavy with guilt and horror to cope with. To be sure, [...]
