Word: berliner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...next to me, who was a child during World War II and has lived his life aware that bearing the weight of German history is serious business, takes off his glasses and rubs tears of laughter from his eyes. "Why shouldn't we be able to see this in Berlin? It's been shown everywhere else in the world," he says...
...That question overshadowed the opening of The Producers in Berlin's Admiralspalast, the iconic theater where Hitler once sat in the elegant Führer's box and tapped his foot to the tunes of the light opera The Merry Widow. And answering it requires asking two more. It wasn't long into the show's premiere that the first - will German audiences laugh at a parody of Hitler? - was answered with an uproarious yes. But the second is trickier: Should they...
...singing "Heil myself" that it wasn't shown in German cinemas until the mid-1970s. The musical opened on Broadway in 2001, and has played around the world, even sparking raucous laughter from Jews in Tel Aviv. But until now, no one had the nerve to host it in Berlin. Germans who wanted to see it had to go to London, New York City or Vienna. (See 10 things to do in New York...
...says Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, as an entourage of transvestites in Bavarian drag saunter past in the theater courtyard. "I'm glad it's playing in Berlin now. A musical can't hurt anyone. After all, it's a parody of Hitler...
...Dani Levy, a Swiss filmmaker who lives in Berlin, tried to lighten things up with his 2007 comedy My Führer, which had modest success at the box office. Yet even Levy confesses to feeling queasy while watching The Producers in a theater full of Germans. "It hurts sometimes to watch people laugh at something that was so cruel," he says. "But every step we take towards dealing with the past more courageously is good...