Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [42]
Although production stopped in 1998, the crime classic Derrick remains the most successful German TV production ever.
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Read what’s on the box this week with the online German TV program guide at www.tvtv.de (in German).
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Music
LOVE BALLADS TO CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL
German music in the 12th century is closely associated with Walther von der Vogelweide (c 1170–1230), who achieved renown with love ballads. A more formalised troubadour tradition followed, but it was baroque organist Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), born in Eisenach, who influenced early European music most. His legacy can be explored in Leipzig’s Bach-Museum in the house in which he died. Another museum in Eisenach is dedicated to his life and work.
Georg Friedrich Händel (1685–1759) was a contemporary of Bach who hailed from Halle in Saxony-Anhalt (his house is also now a museum), but lived and worked almost exclusively in London from 1714.
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TOP FIVE GDR RETRO FILMS
For more on Ostalgie, Click here.
Leander Haussmann’s Sonnenallee (Sun Alley; 1999) is set in a fantastical Wall-clad East Berlin in the 1970s, and evokes everything nostalgic for the former GDR.
Helden wie Wir (Heroes like Us; 1999), directed by Sebastian Peterson and based on the novel by Thomas Brussig, sees the protagonist (who claims to have been Erich Honecker’s personal blood donor) recount the story of his life, including how his penis allegedly leads to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Dull lives are led in dull Frankfurt an der Oder in dull East Germany – until Ellen and Chris are caught doing it. Laughs abound in Halbe Treppe (Grill Point; 2001), directed by East German–born Andreas Dresen.
The Wall falls the day the bartending lead actor hits 30 in West Berlin’s bohemian Kreuzberg district. Haussmann’s humorous Herr Lehmann (Berlin Blues; 2003) is based on a cult book by Element of Crime lead singer Sven Regener.
Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), the cult box-office smash hit by Wolfgang Becker, revolves around a son trying to recreate the GDR for a bedridden ailing mother whose health couldn’t stand the shock of a fallen Wall.
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Händel’s music found favour in the circle of Vienna’s classical composers, and it was Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) who taught Bonn-born Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), whose work reflects the Enlightenment. Beethoven is also the most important of the composers who paved the way for Romanticism. His birth house in Bonn is also a museum now Click here.
Among the Romantic composers, Hamburg-born Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47) is hailed as a sheer genius. He penned his first overture at the age of 17 and later dug up works by JS Bach to give the latter the fame he enjoys today.
Born in Leipzig and dying in Venice, Richard Wagner (1813–83) dominates 19th-century music. Other composers ignored him at their peril. Hitler, who picked up on an anti-Semitic essay and some late-life ramblings on German virtues, famously turned Wagner into a post-mortem Nazi icon. A summer music festival in Bayreuth celebrates Wagner’s life and works Click here. For more on the man, Click here.
Hamburg brought forth Johannes Brahms (1833–97) and his influential symphonies, and chamber and piano works. Two figures whose legacies can be explored today in cities such as Bonn, Leipzig and Zwickau are composer Robert Schumann (1810–56) and his gifted pianist-spouse Clara Wieck (1819–96). Schumann (born in Zwickau) and Wieck (born in Leipzig) are buried in Bonn’s Alter Friedhof. Pulsating 1920s Berlin ushered in Vienna-born Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951), inventor of a new tonal relationship that turned music on its head. One of his pupils, Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), went into exile in 1933 but returned to East Berlin to teach in 1950. Among his works was the East German national anthem, Auferstanden aus Ruinen (Resurrected