Word: berliner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...renounced Karl Marx, the people of the east are finding that Europe is like the club described by Groucho: not quite so desirable now that it will take them as members. What began as a grand project to reunite the sundered halves of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is ending as a cold calculation of structural funds and subsidy levels. What used to be about blood and passion - binding wounds, seizing the historical moment, forging a common future - is now about getting paid and looking out for No. 1. Make a stirring speech about unifying...
...greatest pieces of art in the last 20 years—Magnolia, a film that weaves a beautiful tableau of the ups and downs of human existence and, ultimately, of redemption. Though in some respects a huge critical success (it won the Golden Bear Award at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival) the film was met with a mixed reaction—some loved it because of its daring and compassion, while others felt that it was nonsensical (it features a musical interlude and the strangest storm you will ever see) and at over three hours much too long. Some believed...
...floor of a deconsecrated Evangelical church in Berlin's Kreuzberg area, Ismet Dertli puts the finishing touches on the curriculum for a new subject being offered in the city's public schools. It's a course that hasn't previously been taught in any government-sanctioned school, at least not for a few centuries: Turkish Alevism. This mystic brand of Islam is practiced by 25% of the more than 2.5 million Turks in Germany and up to 30% of Turkey's 66 million people - though you won't find them in any census. That's because Turkey, mindful...
...gave the piece to a friend, who passed it along to others until it landed in the hands of Stephanie Hunziger in Frankfurt, who's been my German agent ever since. She arranged for a production of it--in German--in West Berlin in 1959, on a double bill with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The reviews were favorable, word traveled to New York, and in January 1960 some people put it on in New York, where it ran for 311/42 years...
...That's why, Lewis and others argue, in the New Age bookstores and yoga centers from Berlin to Los Angeles where Barks' and other modernized versions of Rumi have found such an enthusiastic following these days, a certain tension is often missing. Barks' versions, Lewis claims, "teleport the poems of Rumi out of their cultural and Islamic context into the inspirational discourse of non-parochial spirituality." Cut free from the ground of orthodox Islamic belief from which they grew, the Persian poet's lyrical reports from the outer fringes of mystical experience risk becoming mere souvenirs...