Weimar and its environs illuminate the complex history of Germany. I went last weekend with my wife and some friends to Weimar, the home of the great German artist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his contemporary, Friedrich Schiller, and for many years the domain of Franz Liszt. When we first arrived, we left the city, full of remarkable eighteenth and nineteenth century houses and buildings, and … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2014
THEATER IN BERLIN
Intensity, imagination, and brilliant acting characterized a new German-Turkish play and a version of Hamlet that I attended in Berlin in the last two weeks. Shermin Langhoff, the General Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater and Turkish by birth, has made her name engaging Turkish actors and presenting significant dramas involving the German-Turkish relationship (The Turkish community in Berlin … [Read more...]
OPERA IN A SMALL HOUSE
Americans on the constant search in Europe not to see other Americans need only go to Detmold, a city of around 70,000 in upper northern Germany about an hour from Hannover and three hours from Berlin. As the major city in a small pre-World War I principality, it is a charming German city, never bombed as it was not strategically important and little changed from times gone by. Traffic is light, … [Read more...]