Plenty of Nothing

DDR Museum

 

If in Berlin, don't hesitate to visit the DDR Museum. Dedicated to recreating the history and culture of the late German Democratic Republic, it might also be the institution most enthusiastically preserving the material culture of the 1970s.

Anhalter Bahnhof

Peter Falk in Wings of Desire. In this scene Falk pauses to look at the ruined facade of the Anhalter Bahnhof, where Berliners used to catch the train in the direction of the state of Anhalt. There's a pun on the verb anhalten, "to stop", which leads to the line "Not the station where the train stopped, but the station where the station stopped."

Autobahn

Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn. Kraftwerk, Autobahn.

Die Grünen

Following the March 11th Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the German Green Party jumped from the mid-teens to the high twenties and have remained there for the nine weeks since. Der Stern.

"Entartete Kunst" im Bombenschutt

If you're in Berlin head over to the newly reopened Neues Museum and check out the exhibition "Entartete Kunst" im Bombenschutt (Degenerate Art in the Bomb Debris). On display are early 20th-century sculptures that were recently excavated from the site of a bombed-out house in Berlin and have been identified as pieces from the Nazi's 1937 "Entartete Kunst" exhibition. Before it too was blown up in the war, the Neues Museum was the German state's repository of Egyptian and prehistoric art, the sort of artifacts that inspired the pieces in this show, so the exhibition has meaning on a number of levels. (Reuters photo.)

The Germans Reached Space in 1944

If you'd asked me before very recently which country was the first to get into outer space, and when, I'd've said, "Russia, 1957, duh."  And been totally wrong.  Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, but it was by no means the first man-made thing to leave the atmosphere.  The decade prior to 1957 saw all kinds of suborbital flights cross the 100-km-high boundary between air and space (the Kármán line) as both America and Russia worked up their ICBM arsenals.  Both superpowers relied heavily on rocket technology looted from the Germans at the end of World War Two.  America began test-firing captured V2 rockets in New Mexico in April 1946, and put a monkey into space in 1949.  The Russians were getting into space with their R-1 version of the V2 by 1951.  But did the Germans themselves put a V2 into space?  Five times, apparently, between June and December 1944, from their launch site at Peenemuende.  One rocket reached a height of 189 km, a little more than half the distance to the International Space Station today.  The V2 was such a sturdy design that one of the groups vying for the 2004 X Prize, Canadian Arrow, showed up with a version of it.  Douglas (image from Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond)