A German politician has backpedaled on remarks comparing Israel’s security fence to the Berlin Wall. Uwe Kekeritz of the Green Party in remarks made several months ago had said the Berlin Wall, which communist East Germany built in 1961 to keep its citizens from fleeing to the democratic West Germany, “is just a toy” in…
Unknown vandals defaced a famous mural on remnants of the Berlin Wall with anti-Semitic graffiti. The attack comes during a week when several thousand Jewish visitors are participating in the first ever European Maccabi Games to be held in Germany. The mural, originally painted in 1988 as a reminder of the 40th anniversary of the…
In the fall of 1972 I moved to Berlin from Frankfurt, Germany, to begin my studies at the Free University, which was founded in 1948 in the American zone. The upper-middle-class villas of this section of town had not been bombed during World War II; they had once been owned by well-to-do Jews who had…
The French writer François Mauriac is quoted with the sentence, “I love Germany so much that I am glad that there are two of them.” This was pretty much the attitude among the Jewish community in Germany, in which I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. The Jews of postwar Germany felt protected by…
My generation knows him as the hunk from Baywatch, while my children’s generation knows him as “The Hasselhoff” from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Both generations in Germany, however, know him, as “The Hoff”: the pop singer who in 1989 belted out “Looking for Freedom” at the newly breached wall. It is in this latest role…
Although it may seem odd to hear a man who drew caricatures for a living talk about what it felt like to live through the horrors of the former Soviet Union, this is exactly what happens in the documentary “Stalin Thought of You.” Meet Boris Efimovich Efimov, a political cartoonist who witnessed every major event…
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