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Bethany Wright

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A photograph of Lucia Lucas singing with a lance, dressed in a black gown.
LGBTQ Plus

Bravo! Brava! Opera's Overdue Embrace Of Trans Performers And Storylines

Opera has played with ideas of gender since its earliest days. Now the first openly trans performers are taking to the stage, and operas explicitly exploring trans identities are beginning to emerge.

BERLIN — The figure of the nurse Arnalta is almost as old as opera itself. In Claudio Monteverdi’s saucy Roman sex comedy The Coronation of Poppaea, this motherly confidante spurs the eponymous heroine on to ever more lustful encounters, singing her advice in the voice of a tenor. The tradition of a man playing an older woman in a comic role can be traced all the way back to the comedies of the ancient world, which Renaissance-era writers looked to for inspiration.

The Popes in Baroque Rome decreed that, supposedly for religious reasons, women should not sing on stage. But they still enjoyed the spectacular performances of castratos, supporting them as patrons and sometimes even acting as librettists. The tradition continues today in the form of celebrated countertenors, and some male sopranos perform in female costume.

“I don’t know what I am, or what I’m doing.” This is how the pageboy Cherubino expresses his confusion at the flood of hormones he is experiencing in his aria in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – one of the most popular operas of all time, full of amorous adventures and sexual misunderstandings. Cherubino cannot and does not want to choose between a countess, a lady’s maid, and a gardener’s daughter. He sometimes wears women’s clothing himself, and in modern productions the music teacher even chases after the young man.

The role of Cherubino, the lustful teenager caught between childhood and manhood, someone who appears trapped in the "wrong
body, is traditionally performed by a woman, usually a mezzosoprano. The audience is used to this convention, also seen in Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier or Siegfried Matthus’s Cornet Christoph Rilke’s Song of Love and Death, first performed in 1984.

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pro-Palestinian demonstrators stand in front of a line of policemen as they chant and wave flags.
FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

Nazi History, Muslim Immigrants, Social Media: Talking Gaza In Germany Is A Hot Mess

The debate over the war in Israel is raging on social media. In this divisive atmosphere, it is impossible to call out anti-Semitism in Muslim communities or on the right wing without being applauded by all the wrong people. What Germans are failing to acknowledge is how much the country’s own history has to do with this.

-Analysis-

BERLIN — These are dark times. The brutal Hamas attacks on Israel have crushed all hope of recovery, peace, freedom – of a victory for light over darkness. The global focus has shifted to the threat of political Islam rather than the horrors of the war in Ukraine, although this and other crises remain very much alive. Whichever way you turn, there is another threat looming: the economic crisis, the migrant crisis, climate change, the possible return of Donald Trump. There is no end in sight.

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However, since October 7, which is euphemistically being referred to in media reports as the day of "escalation" in the Middle East, there has been another form of escalation, this time around the tone of public debate in Germany. As the political boundaries are shifting, so are the limits of what is unsayable.

Admittedly, social media only represents a part of the public sphere, but nonetheless it has a profound influence on the debate. We can see this shift in all forms of online communication, which shape how we speak, what we share and what we see. The current discourse on social media reflects a wider breakdown of inhibitions and taboos, which makes it all the harder to find the one thing we need in order to have a reasoned discussion: objectivity.

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A Careful Tour With Ukrainians Clearing The World's Largest Minefield
FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

A Careful Tour With Ukrainians Clearing The World's Largest Minefield

Leading Austrian dailyDer Standard has been following Ukrainian teams braving constant danger to clear the largest minefield in the world.

LUKIANIVKA — Olga Yakimovich says she has always enjoyed working with people and wanted to pursue a career in the food industry. Her plan was to run a little café – but that was in another life, before fighting broke out around her home in the Donbas region in 2014.

Like most people here in eastern Ukraine, her life has been thrown off course, the 35-year-old explains, as she walks through the woods in the area around Kyiv, passing pretty summer houses and fruit trees. Dotted in between are signs warning about mines.

“I wanted to make a difference,” says Yakimovich. Her brown hair is plaited under her baseball cap, and she wears a radio attached to her sky-blue safety vest.

Six years ago, she decided to train as a deminer. Now she works as a supervisor for the British-American NGO Halo Trust, which clears landmines across the world. “The job is meaningful. It also pays well.”

Shortly after the organisation opened its first office in Yakimovich’s home city of Kramatorsk, her husband and sister followed in her footsteps. Her husband is now fighting on the frontline, while Yakimovich and her sister are working in liberated areas – far from the Donbas region, which they had to flee with their children.

The fact that the fields have been left to grow wild for a year and a half makes their work finding explosives with metal detectors more difficult, explains Yakimovich. “Whenever we find an object, we have to consider that there may be mines anywhere within a 25 meter radius.”

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photo of a small red car buried in sand
Green

Climate Change Is Real, But Don't Blame It For Every Flood Or Fire

A closer look at the science shows there are many factors that contribute to weather-related emergencies. It is important to raise climate change awareness, but there's a risk in overstating its role in every natural disaster.

Updated on Oct. 4, 2023 at 4:05 p.m

-Analysis-

BERLIN — In September, thousands of people lost their lives when dams collapsed during flooding in Libya. Engineers had warned that the dams were structurally unsound.

Two years ago, dozens died in floods in western Germany, a region that had experienced a number of similar floods in earlier centuries, where thousands of houses had been built on the natural floodplain.

Last year saw more than 1,000 people lose their lives during monsoon floods in Pakistan. Studies showed that the impact of flooding in the region was exacerbated by the proximity of human settlements, the outdated river management system, high poverty rates and political instability in Pakistan.

There are many factors that contribute to weather-related disasters, but one dominates the headlines: climate change. That is because of so-called attribution studies, which are published very quickly after these disasters to highlight how human-caused climate change contributes to extreme weather events. After the flooding in Libya, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described climate change as a “serial offender," while the Tageszeitung wrote that “the climate crisis has exacerbated the extreme rainfall."

The World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA) has once again achieved its aim of using “real-time analysis” to draw attention to the issue: on its website, the institute says its goal is to “analyse and communicate the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events." Frederike Otto, who works on attribution studies for the WWA, says these reports help to underscore the urgent need for climate action. They transform climate change from an “abstract threat into a concrete one."

In the immediate aftermath of a weather-related disaster, teams of researchers rush to put together attribution studies – “so that they are ready within the same news cycle," as the New York Times reported. However, these attribution studies do not meet normal scientific standards, as they are published without going through the peer-review process that would be undertaken before publication in a specialist scientific journal. And that creates problems.

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Indian Prime Minister Narendra and U.S. President Joe Biden shaking hands during PGII & India-Middle East-Europe Economics Corridor event at the G20 Summit on Sept. 9 in New Delhi
Economy

The West Has An Answer To China's New Silk Road — With A Lift From The Gulf

The U.S. and Europe are seeking to rival China by launching a huge joint project. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States will also play a key role – because the battle for world domination is not being fought on China’s doorstep, but in the Middle East.

BERLIN — When world leaders are so keen to emphasize the importance of a project, we may well be skeptical. “This is a big deal, a really big deal,” declared U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month.

The "big deal" he's talking about is a new trade and infrastructure corridor planned to be built between India, the Middle East and Europe.

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Photo of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson greeting someone at Ralston College, Savannah
Ideas

Inside Ralston College, Jordan Peterson's Quiet New Weapon In The Culture Wars

The Canadian-born psychologist Jordan B. Peterson is one of the most prominent opponents of what's been termed: left-wing cancel culture and "wokism." As part of his mission , he serves as chancellor of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, a picturesque setting for a unique experiment that contrasts with his image of provocateur par excellence.

This article was updated Sept. 21 at 5 p.m. with corrections*

SAVANNAH — Savannah is almost unbelievably beautiful. Fountains splash and babble in the well-tended front gardens of its town houses, which are straight out of Gone with the Wind. As you wander through its historic center, on sidewalks encrusted with oyster shells, past its countless parks, under the shadows cast by palm trees, magnolias and ancient oaks, it's as if you are walking back in time through centuries past.

Hidden behind two magnificent façades here is a sanctuary for people who want to travel even further back: to ancient Europe.

In this city of 147,000 in the U.S. state of Georgia, most locals have no idea what's inside this building. There is no sign – either on the wrought-iron gate to the front garden or on the entrance door – to suggest that this is the headquarters of a unique experiment. The motto of Ralston College, which was founded around a year ago, is "Free Speech is Life Itself."

The university's chancellor is one of the best-known figures in America’s culture wars: Jordan B. Peterson. Since 2016, the Canadian psychologist has made a name for himself with his sharp-worded attacks on feminism and gender politics, becoming public enemy No. 1 for those in the left-wing progressive camp.

Provocation and polemics, Peterson is a master of these arts, with a long list of controversies — and 4.6 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), and whose YouTube videos have been viewed by millions. Last year on Twitter he commented on a photo of a plus-size swimsuit model that she was "not beautiful," adding that "no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that."

A few years ago he sparked outrage with a tweet contesting the existence of "white privilege," the idea that all white people, whether they are aware of it or not, have unearned advantages. "There is nothing more racist," he said than this concept. He was even temporarily banned from the platform for an anti-trans tweet.

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Russia Flirts With The End Of "Mutually Assured Destruction"
FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

Russia Flirts With The End Of "Mutually Assured Destruction"

Retired Major-General Alexander Vladimirov wrote the Russian “war bible.” His words have weight. Now he has declared that the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine is inevitable, citing a justification that consigns the principle of deterrence to the history books.

Updated on Sep. 19, 2023 at 4 p.m.

-Analysis-

LJUBLJANANuclear war is the “inevitable” conclusion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's the opinion of retired Major-General Alexander Vladimirov, from an interview he gave last week to the journalist Vladislav Shurygin, and reported by the British tabloid The Daily Mail.

The retired general and author of the General Theory of War, which is seen in Moscow as the nation's "war bible," warned: “For the transition to the use of weapons of mass destruction, only one thing is needed – a political decision by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief [Vladimir Putin].” According to Vladimirov, “the goals of Russia and the goals of the West are their survival and historical eternity.”

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That means, he concludes, that they will use all methods at their disposal in this conflict, including nuclear weapons. “I am sure that nuclear weapons will be used in this war – inevitably, and from this, neither we nor the enemy have anywhere to go.”

Recently, Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer sparked outrage in India because it contained an intimate scene that made reference to the Bhagavad Gita. Many people took to Twitter to ask how the censor board could have approved this scene. A press release from the Save Culture, Save India Foundation read: “We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on life of a scientist. A scene in the movie shows a woman making a man read Bhagwad Geeta aloud (during) sexual intercourse.”

My response to this scene is precisely the opposite: the Bhagavad Gita portrays cruel acts of military slaughter as a sacred duty, so instead we should be protesting that a tender act of bodily passion has been sullied by associating it with a spiritual obscenity. We should be outraged at the evil of “spiritualizing” physical desire.

Isn’t Vladimirov doing something similar in this interview? He is seeking to somehow elevate a (self-destructive, murderous) passion by couching it in obtuse terms such as “historical eternity.”

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Image of  Benedikt Büesel on an agroforestry plot with an oat field.
Green

How Planting Trees Could Inject New Life Into Dry Soil

Dry soil, hardly any rain — this summer's drought is making life difficult for farmers. In one of the driest regions in Germany, environmentally friendly farmer Benedikt Bösel is turning his fields into a laboratory, experimenting with an exciting new approach.

ALT MADLITZ — In summer, Benedikt Bösel likes to set up his table out in the fields, with herds of cattle grazing nearby. The 38-year-old has an estate and a large farm in Brandenburg, the driest region in Germany. For many years now, he has been a leader in the world of environmentally friendly farming, using Instagram, a book and talk show appearances to spread the message about his mission to save the soil.

“Everywhere now, you can feel that water is becoming scarcer, and we don’t have any healthy soil left,” says Bösel, who runs a large farm with 1,000 hectares of arable land and 2,000 hectares of woodland in Alt Madlitz, in the Briesen region, about an hour from Berlin. He has turned his fields into a kind of laboratory. In a region with one of the lowest precipitation rates in all of Germany, and with very sandy soil, he is developing new ways of using the land, in response to the environmental crisis.

Agro-forestry systems play an important role in reducing the damage caused by drought and erosion. In simple terms, this means interspersing trees and bushes throughout arable fields. The trees are regularly spaced out in rows across the fields. Experts believe this helps the soil to retain moisture, meaning that extreme weather causes less damage. When tilling the land, most farmers prefer to “drive in long, straight lines,” says Bösel, who works in partnership with a number of research institutes and is supported by the German Ministry of Agriculture.

According to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research’s records on droughts, there is a vast swathe of land, running from eastern Lower Saxony across Saxony-Anhalt to Berlin and Brandenburg, that has been consistently too dry for the past five years. As a result, farms in the east of Germany, which tend to be far larger than the national average, have suffered poor harvests.

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Photo of a construction manager overlooking a construction site in Germany
Economy

How Germany's Office Building Market Went From Bubble To Bust

Higher, faster, more expensive – in German cities, renting out office space was a booming business. Then came remote working and higher interest rates.

FRANKFURT — The four towers still look like huge stone skeletons. But in some places, there are already windows appearing in the façade. The “Four” building project in Frankfurt is due to be completed in two years’ time. It will have more than 200,000 square meters of floor space, housed in tower blocks that soar to heights of 233 meters. Plenty of space for apartments, shops and, above all, offices.

A few hundred meters away, José Martínez sits at his desk in a much less spectacular building. On the wall behind him hang sketches of other planned tower blocks. Martínez is CEO of Groß & Partner, which has overseen the construction of the towering “Four” over the past 10 years.

He has no doubt that the effort has been worth it. “A mixed-use building in a prime location is an easy sell,” he says, adding that more than 80% of the office space has already been reserved.

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A hand in a yellow glove cleans the surface near a sink
Society

The Modern "Housewife" Has Another Job — And As Raw A Deal As Ever

Women play a vital role in the workplace, so the German government is introducing policies that reward families with two working parents. However, the strain of raising a family still falls unfairly on mothers, making them victims of capitalism.

-Analysis-

BERLIN — In the early 2000s, there was an advert for vacuum cleaners. A stylish woman at a party was asked in a somewhat disparaging tone what she did for work. The woman smiled briefly and flipped her immaculately blow-dried hair. Then she said, “I manage a successful family business.” So there. The other person, a high-powered career woman, hadn’t reckoned with that comeback.

The joke was that the family business was in fact not a business, but a family, and of course the punchline hinged on a recognition of what is now called “care work,” but could just as easily be called “women’s work,” because that is precisely what it is.

Today, like then, the share of housework done by men and women in Germany is ridiculously unequal. Although it is true that modern men do more around the house than previous generations, the German Institute for Economic Research estimates that, on average, women spend around 10 hours a day caring for their families, while men spend three.

German mothers therefore often work part-time because there are only 24 hours in a day, and they can’t fit in full-time employment alongside caring for their families. This means that, overall, women don’t work any less than men, but a large proportion of their work is unpaid. paid.

Germany’s Minister for Family Affairs Lisa Paus recently waded into the middle of this heated issue by announcing a cap on the parental allowance (paid to parents in the first year of their child’s life), which sparked outrage. Women! Equality! Feminists were dismayed to see hard-won advances rolled back.

It took a day before the Ministry for Family Affairs calmed fears by explaining that the cap would only affect a small proportion of those families who are entitled to the parental allowance: only those with a taxable annual income of €150,000 or more.

However, the debate raged on. This is about more than just whether a few well-off families should continue to receive a state benefit. The introduction of the parental allowance was part of a wider story about emancipation: liberating women through paid work. This announcement cuts to the heart of views about mothers, children, fathers and equality, and above all, how the state rewards families with two working parents.

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A woman on her phone.
Society

Online Dating, Where The Modern Self Goes To Die

You swipe until your fingers are sore, seeing the same poses over and over again, the same buzzwords and backgrounds. Online dating feels so hopeless because it has killed any notion of individuality.

-Essay-

BERLIN — One dating app used by millions of people asks users to complete a series of standard sentences, in order to impress potential partners with their witty offerings. One of these sentences begins: “My worst nightmare is…” Usually it is followed by harmless, childish suggestions such as “eating nothing but blue moon ice cream for the rest of my life” or “going to a Taylor Swift concert with my parents.”

The truth is that, if they were being honest, anyone who hasn’t yet waved goodbye to all their common sense and self-worth would have to write: a dating app like this one.

Dating apps are a nightmare. Of course that is an exaggeration: everyone knows that there are truly terrible existential problems in the world. But setting these aside for a moment, there is nothing worse than scrolling through tens of thousands of profiles that are all trying to be as personal and individual as possible and yet all end up looking the same.

Adults who are willing to turn the exciting game of flirtation into such a charmless process often also have to endure all kinds of aesthetically and politically objectionable content. “Abandon hope” is all there is to say to those who have ended up trapped in the nightmare of online dating.

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Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes
Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines.

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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