Word: berlins
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...effort to close the group down may have been spurred by its raised profile in Germany over the past year. The opening of its headquarters in Berlin in January put the organization back into the headlines, and it became the center of a national furor over the summer, when the Defense Ministry initially barred access to a key filming location for a movie about anti-Nazi hero Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, because the title role was played by high-profile Scientologist Tom Cruise. (Germany later relented...
...book has almost that many plots. Basically, it involves a Dutch cognitive psychologist, Paul Andermans, who is doing research at the University of Potsdam in 1995. After a violent run-in with those neo-Nazis, he recovers at a hospital in nearby Berlin. There he meets Jozef de Heer, an Auschwitz survivor who persuades Andermans to write down his life story, a gripping tale of escape and betrayal in the wartime German capital. Like nearly everyone in the book, De Heer isn't what he seems. Neither is Paul Goldfarb, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who fled Nazi Germany to help...
Verhaeghen has fun with academic jargon, but his writing is otherwise topologically stable. Channeling Grass and the magic realists, he has a kids' TV magician overseeing construction of the Berlin Wall, and a cat mediating Andermans' love life. Of the university dining hall, Andermans notes: "Friday's pizza was not a food item but a search engine, topped with the mercilessly burnt memories of everything that had been on the past week's menu." De Heer, describing a bombed-out house, is equally vivid: "On a metal table in one of the rooms I spot a typewriter, the type bars...
Omega Minor was born of curiosity about a past that Verhaeghen, 42, never knew. "I was doing a postdoc at Potsdam in 1995," he recalls, moments before leaving his Atlanta home for a psychology conference in California. "I took the train to Berlin and emerged at Mitte, the center of old East Berlin. I found myself alone on this huge square, except for a strange glow coming from a glass plate in the pavement. There was a small white underground chamber lined with empty bookshelves. On it was that famous [Heinrich] Heine quote, 'Where they burn books, they will...
...Overall, the report is being greeted in Europe as "good news", according to Henning Riecke, a proliferation expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. The substance of the report - the judgment that Iran is not currently engaged in building a bomb - means "we have more time" for negotiation, he said. But "the current pressure on Iran should not falter under the impression of one report," he said. The biggest surprise in Europe was less the findings themselves, but the fact that they came from the U.S. intelligence community. Washington had been identified with the most alarmist assessment...