Word: berliner
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...Like the rest of the audience at the Berlin opening of the Mel Brooks musical comedy The Producers on Sunday night, the old man waits. But when a caged pigeon named Adolf throws up a wing in a Nazi salute, no one can hold back. The self-conscious silence in the theater shatters as the audience roars. Women scream in delight. Some people in the audience wave mock Nazi flags that resemble the real ones - verboten in Germany - but with black twisted pretzels instead of swastikas. (See pictures of Hitler's rise to power...
...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...
...time bomb," says Abdul Azeez, a leading Maldivian environmentalist. For a nation of so small a size (the Maldives' population is less than 400,000), the new government's task is monumental. "It is as if, in the same country, both Saddam Hussein was toppled and the Berlin Wall fell," says Ahmed Naseer, a painter and dissident who lived in exile in Sri Lanka with Nasheed. It falls to the new President - a slight, erudite former journalist who peppers conversation with quotes from Dostoyevsky and Dante - to save the Maldives from sinking under the weight of its problems. The Intergovernmental...
...Christian-Jewish affairs, says Benedict believes "Germans have a special obligation to do something more for the Jewish-Christian relationship." But it's not apparent that the Pope views the Holocaust with a sense of personal remorse. Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin, notes that generalized remorseful feelings "started with [Germans] about 10 years younger" than the 82-year-old Pope. Members of Benedict's generation tend to judge themselves strictly on the grounds of personal culpability. Moreover, the Pope identifies heavily with his church, which he sees as having played a heroic...