The Berlinale – International Film Festival
The 60th Berlin International Film Festival is to be held from 11 to 21 February 2010. Berlin’s largest cultural extravaganza attracts 16,000 expert visitors every year for one of the key events in the international film scene. But the public don’t lose out! With more than 150,000 tickets usually sold, the Berlinale is the world’s largest public film festival.
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News from the Embassy
The six days preceding Ash Wednesday are known in Germany as the «crazy days» as carnival begins in earnest. In the Rhineland region, festivities start on the Thursday, a day known as “women’s carnival”. Women literally assume power and symbolically storm the town halls in many places. Men are advised to wear an old tie since the women are liable to cut it off on that day and compensate the bereft wearer with a kiss.
The «crazy days» and the humorous carnival speech
Expo 2010: Better City, Better Life
From 1 May to 31 October 2010 the Chinese mega-metropolis Shanghai will play host to the next World Fair, where the theme will be “Better City, Better Life”. The aim of EXPO 2010 is to offer solutions to the problem of how to improve the quality and sustainability of urban living. Germany is taking part, with a pavilion named “balancity” – a composite of the words “balance” and “city”, a city in balance.
The United Nations has designated 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. Reason enough for the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) as official UN partner to devote this year – the 111th anniversary of its founding – to the dramatic decline in biodiversity. Globally, 16,000 species are regarded as threatened with extinction, that’s around a quarter of all mammals, a third of all amphibians and twelve per cent of birds.
NABU
The journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935), who undoubtedly wielded one of the Weimar Republic’s most caustic pens as well as being an outstanding literary critic and an astute observer of contemporary political and social developments, would have turned 120 this year.
Kurt Tucholsky
Herta Mueller wins 2009 Nobel prize for literature
Romanian-born Herta Mueller of Germany has won this year's Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday 8 October. The Academy's citation said that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, (she) depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Mueller's parents belonged to the German-speaking minority in Romania. Her mother was deported in 1945, a fate she shared with many others from the same minority group, and spent five years in what is today Ukraine, the Academy said.
This was the name chosen by a Berlin initiative which, over twenty years ago, sought to overcome the division of Germany’s capital, using “tales of courage” to unite people across borders. Fairy tale heroes, although they might feel small, are brave enough to fight for and win their freedom. This courageous initiative gave rise to the “Berlin Fairy Tale Festival”, the largest of its kind in the world, which since then has regarded itself as a forum for intercultural encounter.
“Tales of Courage”
On 23 January 1710, the Elector of Saxony, August the Strong, founded the first European porcelain manufactory in Meissen under the name “Royal Polish and Electoral Saxon Porcelain Manufactory”. A couple of years before, the alchemist Friedrich Böttger had been the first person in Europe to create a fine, hard-paste porcelain that closely resembled the then highly regarded porcelain imported from China.
Meissen Porcelain
Latest update: influenza A (H1N1) ("swine flu")
Please take note of the current travel and safety advice for your country of destination, the Federal Foreign Office's recommendations on an influenza pandemic, as well as further information on the website of the Robert Koch Institute:
Germany is one of the countries with the highest media density and the greatest press diversity in the world. Hundreds of daily newspapers, thousands of magazines and millions of active Internet users guarantee an exceptional diversity of opinion. The relationships between the individual “voices” of the different media are changing in the age of Web 2.0: whether print, television, radio, Internet, social media, books or film, the media future will be played in an orchestra.
The World of Media
That is the motto of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in Nuremberg. The BAMF has now presented a study on Muslim life in Germany, demonstrating once again its considerable competence in the area of migration and integration research. The survey was conducted among 6,004 persons over the age of 16 (counting other members of the households interviewed, the survey actually covers some 17,000 people). The BAMF study, commissioned by the German Islam Conference (DIK), is the first nationally representative collection of data on the subject. It confirms that Muslims form an integral part of German society.
“Concentrating on People”
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