Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [52]
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Visit the multilingual website www.tatsachen-ueber-deutschland.de for a complete overview of Germany’s history, culture and lifestyle.
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Around the time Beuys waved adieu in the 1980s, contemporary photographers Andreas Gursky (b 1955) and Candida Höfer (b 1944) were honing their skills under the next generation of photographers, led by Bernd Becher (b 1931) at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie (Art Academy). Leipzig-born Gursky’s work, which can be seen in Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, encompasses superb images of architecture, landscapes and interiors, sometimes reworked digitally. Höfer’s work, along with the works of other Becher students, can be found in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle.
In 2003 another photographer from the Düsseldorf academy who learned the art under Becher, Thomas Ruff (b 1958), provoked controversy with a series of nudes based on pornographic images he downloaded from the internet. More socially acceptable, London-based Bavarian Juergen Teller (b 1964) is a darling of fashion photography and has shot the musician Björk, tennis icon Boris Becker and a pregnant Kate Moss, among others.
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Tune in to current affairs in English with international German broadcaster Deutsche Welle at www.dw-world.de.
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Given Germany’s rich collections, travelling the contours of visual arts might be an interesting way to organise a trip. In addition to excellent permanent collections in major museums, you’ll find lots of smaller art spaces with changing exhibitions. Venues like Berlin’s Kunst-Werke Berlin and Galerie Eigen+Art (www.eigen-art.com) offer a contemporary ‘shock of the new’.
The Art Forum Berlin showcases video, photography, painting, sculpture, installations, graphics, and multimedia each year in September–October. For household design, the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar shows how it all began, and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein has other fascinating exhibits.
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BERTOLT BRECHT
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) is Germany’s most controversial 20th-century playwright, poet and drama theorist. He wrote his first play, Baal, while studying medicine in Munich in 1918. His first opus to reach the stage, Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night; 1922), won the coveted Kleist Prize, and two years later he moved to the Deutsches Theater in Berlin to work with the Austrian actor and director Max Reinhardt.
Over the next decade, in plays such as Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera; 1928), Brecht developed his theory of ‘epic theatre’, which, unlike ‘dramatic theatre’, forces its audience to detach itself emotionally from the play and its characters and to reason intellectually.
A staunch Marxist, Brecht went into exile during the Nazi years, surfaced in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, then left the USA after being called in to explain himself during the communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. The exile years produced many of his best plays: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children; 1941), Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo; 1943/47), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (Good Woman of Setzuan; 1943) and Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (Caucasian Chalk Circle; 1948).
Brecht returned to East Berlin in 1949 where he founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, who directed it until her death in 1971. During his lifetime Brecht was suspected in the East for his unorthodox aesthetic theories and scorned (and often boycotted) in much of the West for his communist principles. Others again saw him as a pragmatist and opportunist. His influence, however, is indisputable. Brecht’s poetry, so little known in English, is also a fascinating string in the bow of German literature.
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Berlin is not just the heart of the thriving art scene in Germany, in 2006 it became Europe’s first