Crossing two taboo topics: prostitution and the sexuality of the physically and mentally handicapped.
country: Germany
Stay updated on Germany with Worldcrunch. Comprehensive articles on German politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural highlights with translations from leading international sources. Focus on Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, German engineering, philosophy, modern art, and events like Oktoberfest and Art Basel.
A stinking, snorting tale of NIMBY cruelty from the Bavarian heartland.
A German reporter takes a tour with the radical feminist group at the newly opened Barbie House in Berlin.
–Analysis- BERLIN – At the Sankt Oberholz café, Germany’s future lies in the balance. Here, in Berlin’s “trendy” Mitte district, an international crowd of entrepreneurial 20 and 30-somethings meet. They make up two camps. On one side, you have those who prefer to speak English as they discuss their new projects and business plans. On […]
MUNICH – In early July, Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone may come to Germany to attend the F1 race hosted by the Nürburgring south of Cologne. Ecclestone, the British mogul who has turned motor sports into a billion dollar business, enjoys showing up for the racing events to chat with the drivers, meet sponsors, and […]
BERLIN – A year ago, Suzanne and Andreas Willim were living in their romantic rural dream house in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Then the passionate sailors and their three sons decided on a radical break with their old life, and moved into an apartment complex. Now they have less living space than they […]
In a society designed around individual liberty, has marriage become little more than a temporary link-up of working people choosing to spend some free time together? And the kids?
The “dual” vocational training system used to be derided as limiting university degrees. Now it is being lauded in the U.S., and exported to struggling southern European countries.
School life can be pretty merciless. Kids have an astonishing repertoire of nasty things they inflict on other kids. But what factors play a role in which kids are the victims and which the perpetrators? Why do some wind up on the receiving end of the nastiness, and others become the ones meting it out? […]
Even if outwardly the UK and Germany may appear on opposite sides of the debate over Brussels’ power, the European economic heavyweights share common interests.
New programs in Germany share business and entrepreneurial know-how with the dreamer demographic.
BERLIN – The traffic on this German road moves along in a neat pattern, changed only when a car makes a right. When it does, Markus Behrendt turns to look out the window. He may only have seen the turning car – a change in pattern – out of the corner of his eye, but […]
A new study in Germany explores the role of Christian belief in driving Nazi brutality.
BERLIN – There are impressive museum collections – indeed entire museums – of works by Pablo Picasso: in Malaga and New York, Paris and Barcelona, Münster, Madrid, Basel and Cologne. The best one? Berlin – part of the legendary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen (1914-2007) housed since 1996 in a palazzo-style building across from […]
In modern life, artificial light is pervasive. A lack of natural darkness not only stops city dwellers from seeing the stars, it can cause real harm to both the environment, and human health.
LÜDENSCHEID – There aren’t many places more secretive nowadays than a certain German automobile factory, even if the shiny Mercedes sedans and Porsche sports cars it rolls out are bound for mantlepieces, not autobahns. You see, this factory makes German model cars. Still, giving visitors a tour is virtually impossible, says Britta Sieper, 35, who […]
At the German capital’s Jewish Museum, the starting point for are anonymous questions from ordinary visitors — and a sense of humor.
Out of the Cold War archives, a chilling family tale from a divided Germany.
BERLIN – With all its other problems, the euro is also getting unexpected — and “underground” — competition from a new virtual currency. It’s called the bitcoin, and in case you haven’t heard, it is the most ambitious (and to-date, successful) attempt to create a new online currency, generated by the calculations of thousands of […]
Can you guess what demographic smells the worst?
Two years after a plagiary scandal turned him into a pariah in his own country, Karl-Theodor Guttenberg is thriving in the United States. A profile in contradictions.
Categories
Big Brother – Now With Added Intelligence
Advances in software for surveillance video help make cameras “smart” about the footage they are collecting of all of us.
BERLIN – The Berlin chapters of the Bandidos gang, whose members have a reputation for being armed and dangerous, had been considerably weakened of late with many members in jail. But the Berliner Morgenpost has learned from law enforcement officials that all 15 members of the “Midtown” chapter of the Bandidos – the last remaining […]
-Essay- MUNICH – The day comes in life when you realize you don’t really need a car anymore, you can take the train, or bus. The problem is: you may not want to. It’s not as if retirement comes as a surprise, a sudden unexpected stroke of fate. We get a long time, many, many […]
South of Munich is a clinic that specializes in treating teachers with psychological problems. The causes aren’t always what you think.
ROME – The Pope’s resignation is a unique event, although not entirely without historical precedent. Benedict XVI is retiring not in failure but as freely and serenely as Charles V — who wasn’t a pope but an emperor, and one of the West’s major rulers when he put down his crown on October 25, 1555. […]
HAMBURG – For Stephan Hering-Hagenbeck, whose family has run this city’s zoo for over 100 years, there are challenges both inside and outside the gates of any such “animal park.” Inside this zoo, as for every zoo around the world, the biggest challenge is to keep the animals from getting bored. Hering-Hagenbeck explains that animals […]
BERLIN – There are more and more healthy food snobs in our society – and I’m probably one of the worst. It all began when I was sick and a friend showed up with a green smoothie, telling me that drinking it would bring “pure light” into my body. I got better right away, and […]
BOCHUM – Intensive sports make our muscles grow – nothing new there. But now clinical neurophysiologists from Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) have shown that sports can change our brain too. For their research, 26 high-performance athletes (half of them practitioners of judo and karate, the other half marathon runners and triathletes), and 12 non-athletes, had […]
MUNICH – Horsemeat passed off as beef – across Europe, the food scandal continues to make headlines. On the food circuit in Munich, at Kaspar Wörle’s horsemeat butcher shop, it hasn’t caused much of a stir – except for the fact that the phone has been ringing uninterruptedly since the scandal broke. “People want information,” […]
In our distracted, over-connected society, diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been the rage for more than a decade. The case for a hard rethink.
MUNICH – It’s all so simple in the 1998 Disney movie Mulan. The heroine disguised as a boy joins the Chinese military to fight the enemy – armies of shadowy, faceless Huns that darken the horizon. Classic good versus evil. Martin Münch says he knows who the bad guys are, and that he’s one of […]
BERLIN – In my local video store, they’ve just created a new section for TV series. The very great majority of the series are American: The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, Girls, Modern Family, Lost, 24, various CSIs, and so on and so forth. The dominant culture in Europe […]
MARKTL AM INN – Not a lot of folks out on the streets on this day after the news arrived. But not because of the wind that slices right through you, or the icy temperature. The 2,700 residents of Marktl am Inn in the German region of Bavaria are holed up inside to avoid the […]
STUTTGART – The man who called himself Ryan Davis was playing a strange game. He moved in Neo-Nazi circles, and at the beginning of the new century he created a German chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the city of Schwäbisch-Hall in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. But for years he also provided […]
BERLIN – People who were there said he cried for several minutes at the executive committee meeting on the morning after his defeat. As party members analyzed what had gone wrong in the state election campaign, the governor of the German state of Lower Saxony, David McAllister, burst into tears. Angela Merkel comforted him, and […]
ISTANBUL – Four heavily made-up, peroxide blondes are sitting on a talk show set. In broken German, they’re trying to prove that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong. It’s a particularly bizarre bit of religious propaganda – but since 2011 creationist theories have been packaged this way for Western viewers and broadcast by the […]
MUNICH – It is shortly past 10 a.m. in a Munich middle school and Tammy is lying on the floor, muzzle tucked between his paws, stomach rising and falling gently as he breathes in and out, apparently asleep. Occasionally, when Salma leafs through the pages of her book, the dog’s eyes blink open then shut […]
“This is the saddest moment in my 45-year career as a psychiatrist…” Dr. Allen Frances wrote this in a December blog post on the Psychology Today website. The reason was the approval by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) of the new edition of psychiatry’s bible – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM […]
BERLIN – Winegrower Barbara Banke of the Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates in California doesn’t just love the sun because it ripens grapes. The sunnier it is, the lower the winery’s electricity and gas bills are. And those savings are possible because of the large mirrors mounted on the football-field-sized tin roof of the winery’s production facility […]