Staying with people abroad and getting to know their lives: “Servas” has been making this possible since 1949 – long before “AirBnB” and “Couchsurfing” tourism. Now the peace organisation is turning 70.
Category: Culture
10. July 2019
Cartoonist Sara Qaed
The cartoon activist Sara Qaed from Bahrain received the 19th Ibn Rushd Prize. This award is given to people who stand up for free thinking in the Arab world. Her pictures deal with migration, women and corruption.
Sara Qaed ©Rebecca Hillauer
Short life, big impact: Although she died at the age of 27, Janis Joplin changed the image of women in rock music forever.
She would have turned 75 on January 19.
The spirit of the Summer of Love is still alive in this tranquil town north of San Francisco
Fairfax Festival ©Rebecca Hillauer
Rock stars like Grateful Dead and Van Morrison were once at home here for a while. Half an hour’s drive from San Francisco, former flower power people have organised the Fairfax Festival for four decades. A lot has changed in forty years – and yet nothing, according to residents.
Punk, glamour and ballet – Michael Clark has been able to combine these worlds in a congenial way for more than thirty years. Hailed as an exceptional dancer, the openly gay Clark has always been considered a “bad boy,” a rebel and a rule-breaker. Now he is back in Berlin as a choreographer. His Michael Clark Company is showing his latest piece “to a simple, rock ‘n’ roll . . . song”.
22. August 2016
Arab Jews – Jewish Arabs
Filmmaker Samir ©Samir
Arab – Jew. In the conventional understanding an opposite pair.
However, both cultures are in themselves. Where does the increased interest in Jewish-Arab identities come from? How is it expressed? And what role have Jews played in the history of Arab cinema?
Is it only a matter of time before computers are superior to the human mind? That, at any rate, is the credo of many natural scientists. David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University, turns this belief in technology upside down in his book “The Tides of the Mind”.
In Japan, old dancers are revered as “living cultural assets”. In youth-oriented cultures in Europe and America, on the other hand, dance has long been equated with young and beautiful.
This notion is visibly changing. This has to do with a growing amateur dance movement and successful role models like Anna Halprin, who has not stopped dancing even at the age of 95.
Anna Halprin ©Sarah Beckstrom
The former German city of Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, is European Capital of Culture 2016. Until 1944, one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany existed there. Their history is only partially well documented. The historian Katharina Friedla has now filled these research gaps.
Abi Wallenstein was born in Jerusalem in 1945, the son of German Jews who had emigrated during the Nazi era. He has lived in Germany since 1960, when his parents returned to their homeland. For almost that long he has been one of the outstanding European blues greats.
Abi Wallenstein ©Ellen Coenders