Arts and Culture
-
John le Carré- a Very Personal Obituary
Roland Freudenstein, December 2020 “Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying over the market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black, guarded by policemen.” – These…
-
Book review – Piotr Siemion: Bella Ciao
My summer reading in 2023. “They are seven, moving through mapless, measureless land. They are surrounded by a no man’s world, a bloodstained bedsheet of earth, a shroud at dawn. No kingdom of kindness, just the tired, trampled football field that our millennium has become.” (my translation of the opening lines, with apologies to the…
-
Book review – Sönke Neitzel: Deutsche Krieger
‘German Warriors’: My primary summer reading in 2023. Mind blowing, I dare say. So Germany’s leading young military historian, Sönke Neitzel, asks what the Kaiser’s soldiers in 1914, the Wehrmacht ones in WW2, the Bundeswehr’s ‘virtual’ soldiers in the Cold War, and the post-unification first (few) real warriors since 1945 (Afghanistan) had in common. Not…
-
Odd Taxi – a brilliant Japanese anime series on YouTube
Oddo takushii ( = odd taxi), the simultaneously weirdest and best Japanese anime series I’ve seen in a long time. Somewhere between jazz and rap, alternately strange, brutal and miraculous, forever lost in the nocturnal cityscapes of Shibuya, Harajuku, highbrow hotels and junk food places, the docklands and other more or less well known Tokyo…
-
Capitani – an RTL Netflix serial
If it is indeed true that our European brains were ‚wired‘ in the medieval village community, then that goes a long way to explaining the mesmerising effect of this Netflix serial. At least on me – I’m totally hooked. Essentially, it’s Twin Peaks in provincial Luxembourg. Minus evil spirits, but everything else is there: the…