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Keywords: Berlin

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Costly pageantry: The Olympics and the blank cheque syndrome

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 August 2024

    The pain cities endure while hosting large sporting events like the Olympics has proved considerable. They exert a remarkable strain on budgets, disrupt commerce, compromise valuable real estate, inflict environmental harm, and often result in evictions and displacements of vulnerable residents. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Going carless is still a privilege in Australia

    • Celeste Liddle
    • 28 October 2019
    10 Comments

    A year ago, I made the decision to call a wrecker and get my car crushed into a cube. While realising how much money I was wasting was the tipping point, it was not the sole deciding factor. Firstly, there was the car accident I had nine years ago. Then there was going to Europe and seeing what public transport could be.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Passport paradox at the Israel-Jordan border

    • Brian Matthews
    • 22 January 2019
    5 Comments

    As you couldn't enter Jordan with a passport in which there were Israeli stamps, officials in the Australian Embassy advised us to arrange a second, 'clean' passport. This was a weird business because we would be entering Jordan from Israel — our physical presence in Israel would deny the cleanliness of our passports.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Strong women heroes of grim abduction parables

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 May 2017
    1 Comment

    If two current Australian films are anything to go by, then one social issue weighing on local filmmakers in 2017 is the danger to women of emotionally and physically violent men. Neither film is a mere portrait of victimhood. The heroes of Cate Shortland's recent Berlin Syndrome and Ben Young's upcoming Hounds of Love - in the former, an Australian traveller in Europe, in the latter, a teenage school girl in suburban Perth - are ordinary women with both the will and capacity to fight back against their assailants.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Nanny state Australia could learn from Europe

    • Cam Hassard
    • 21 August 2015
    17 Comments

    After almost two years living abroad in Germany, I have observed a stark difference in how European societies strike a balance between legislative oversight and individual freedom. More or less anything is tolerated here, as long as you respect the rights and freedoms of others. Tolerance and 'least intervention' thrive on personal responsibility and eschew knee-jerk intervention. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Dawn of a human rights revolution

    • Pat Walsh
    • 28 June 2013
    4 Comments

    The Cold War not only divided Berlin. It divided human rights into two politicised and hostile camps. Socialist nations championed social and economic rights over the civil and political rights prioritised by capitalist nations. Twenty years ago this month, the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna rejected this demarcation and declared that human rights were indivisible, complementary and interdependent.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Vegemite interrogation on the Prague night train

    • Anne M. Carson
    • 19 February 2013

    Cash-strapped, post midnight. Transport police rifle our rucksacks, suspicious of backpackers. One prises open my Kodak canister, sniffs, says 'ach!', fires Czech questions at me. 'Vegemite fur frustuck,' I say, trying to convince Vegemite is not hash resin. I smile the smile of someone who doesn't know how bad it can get.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    East Germany's angel of peace

    • Donna Mulhearn
    • 04 July 2012
    6 Comments

    In her tweed skirt and sensible shoes, 60-something church elder, Sigrid, doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She carries neither iPhone nor gun. But revolutionary she is, having been at the heart of a movement that toppled an oppressive regime, thawed the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall.

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  • RELIGION

    Imagining nationalism through Anzac suffering

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 23 April 2012
    10 Comments

    Political theorist Isaiah Berlin argued that nationalism manifests most strongly in communities that have suffered some wound. In a period of unparalleled wealth, in which most Australians are far removed from war, Anzac Day is a way of instructing ourselves about the place of suffering in Australia's history.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Behind Berlin's and Israel's walls

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 22 August 2011
    8 Comments

    Walls are not merely concrete manifestations but cultural and psychological ones. One East Berlin native recalled his mother 'cried for hours when the Wall fell'. Israel, in constructing a wall around Jerusalem, faced a host of issues as complex as those that faced East Germany.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Students in sex work

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 16 June 2011
    4 Comments

    In May a German study revealed that one in three students in Berlin would consider sex work as a means of paying for their education. We've seen similar phenomena in Australia. In Sleeping Beauty, Lucy is a university student who finds herself drawn into working a bizarre niche in the sex industry.

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  • RELIGION

    Beatifying the Polish Pope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 April 2011
    15 Comments

    John Paul II was as much a Polish Catholic as Mary MacKillop was Australian. His moral force eroded the legitimacy of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The controversy about his beatification is not about his virtue or historical significance, but about his legacy to the Church.

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