'berlin' - tagged features

Last year, Berlin received some very unflattering media coverage. The country’s most respected news magazine, Der Spiegel, said Berlin was no longer a hip and happening European metropolis -- unlike Barcelona, Copenhagen or even the Estonian capital Tallinn. Berlin had, in the words of the magazine, missed the boat. But the city has refused to accept defeat. This week, Berlin launched a new slogan as part of a multi-million-euro advertising campaign, aimed at spicing up the German capital’s appeal. And as Thomas Marzahl reports from Berlin, the campaign for starters targets Berliners themselves. 

The Berlinale, Berlin’s annual film festival has again provided a feast of moving pictures this week. Along with the Venice film festival it’s considered one of the most important exposés for the movie world outside of Hollywood. This year, as in previous years, eyebrows have been raised at certain movies making it into the line-up. Some for being controversial, some for being not good enough. Film critic Brendan O’Shea has been at the festival all week and he was impressed by a brave film dealing with homosexuality in the Moslem community. 

Staying with the issue of national identity now, but from a rather different angle... The Second World War is high on the agenda again in Germany. But this time not because of German war crimes, but instead because of German war victims: the millions of Germans that were expelled from territories the country lost to Poland and Russia. The German government wants to erect a "visible sign", or a permanent exhibition, describing their fate. The proposal has sparked a fierce debate with neighboring Poland. Radio Netherlands Worldwide correspondent Laurens Boven spoke with Hertha Mahlow, an elderly woman from Berlin who experienced the expulsion as a young woman. 

As the years pass, the tragedy of the Holocaust, now more than six decades ago, is fading from living memory. The last survivors and eye witnesses are dying, and there are concerns that communicating the scale of the Nazi genocide and its importance to current and future generations will become more difficult. To try and counter that, the Berlin campus of a Jewish-American university has put together Germany's first master's degree dedicated to communicating the Holocaust to the public. This week the seven master students attended their first seminar. 

In a new feature we have a brief Postcard snapshot from one of Network Europe’s producers. This week Deutsche Welle’s Liah McDonell is in the famously rude Berlin, where it seems being nice is suddenly all the rage.