Word: german
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Witness who was incarcerated by the Nazis for having refused military service. His presentation was conducted in interview format, with questions posed by graduate student Johann Boedecker. Engleithner’s biographer, Bernhard Rammerstorfer, sat alongside the survivor to translate questions into his native Austrian dialect of German. Before Engleitner spoke, Rammerstorfer told the audience the story of how he first met Englietner and what he learned from him. “It was clear for me that this man was something special and that his story could provide valuable lessons for the peaceful co-existence for mankind...
...court was upholding a law introduced in 1993, which banned multiple surnames in Germany. Before this legislation, triple- or quadruple-barreled names were rare, but they existed: there is an East German athlete, for example, named Simone Greiner-Petter-Memm, and a prominent pollster and political scientist who went by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann-Maier-Leibnitz until she dropped the second half of her name after her husband died. And members of the German aristocracy often carry extremely long names. (See pictures of Berlin...
...merely illegal to pass multiple surnames on to a child. Legislators worried that, should a child later marry someone who also had a long surname - and if their children did the same and so on - the result would be endless name chains, which could cause intolerable administrative difficulties for German officials. In 1993, the ban was extended to couples who wanted to combine their names into a three- or four-pronged surname - but this is the first time that that ban has been upheld by the Constitutional Court...
...court, however, defended the verdict by saying that German law leaves spouses enough freedom to choose how to combine their names and thereby express their identities. It also added that Thalheim and her husband are free to continue using their original names for business purposes...
...Germany and France, always wary of enlargement, have raised doubts about Turkey and the Balkans, who are currently in talks to join. Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a "phase of consolidation" in the E.U. once Croatia becomes the 28th member in a few years. Enlargement skeptics like Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy raise mainly political objections but the recession gives an added budgetary argument. (See pictures of Sarkozy...