Word: heer
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...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...
...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 warped by rust, a thorny bush of twisted language screaming to the heavens...
Omega Minor screams to the heavens when it confronts the Holocaust, perceptively recounted thorough De Heer's eyes. The Nazis "are not killing a people," De Heer posits. "What they want is to turn back modernity, get rid of rationality and its twin brother uncertainty." Recounting Germany's demented diversion of resources from the war effort to the extermination camps, right up to the end, De Heer concludes that Nazism's defining goal was the Holocaust, not all that Wagnerian nonsense about Reich and glory. Yet he concedes: "History is the lie people tell to give meaning to their pasts...
...Around the corner is the caf? Alois S., whose owner, a balding 48-year-old named Lothar Heer clad in a Grateful Dead t-shirt, says his original plan was to build a tapas bar. That was 2001, when his establishment stood alongside a playground bearing the scars of communist neglect. After fighting with sluggish city bureaucrats for a couple of years, Heer got permission to break open the walls and open a terrace out onto the playground. Then, he and some local parents formed a citizens group and applied for and were actually awarded some 20,000 euros...
...Which brings us back to Ramingining time. Happy as he is with Ten Canoes ("I love it dearly - I look at it and think, This is a small miracle"), De Heer is just as proud of the effect the film will have on the lives of the Yolngu. "One of the great things at the end of the shoot was that Minygululu had picked out the tree that he was going to make his canoe from the next year," says the director, "and he'd picked out the route of his journey." For audiences too, Ten Canoes will...