by finn ballard | Sep 10, 2020 | Blog
This month, let’s think about Hilde Meisel. She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, and her parents moved to Berlin while she was still an infant. As a teenager, she moved to England, where she joined the International Socialist Combat League,...
by finn ballard | Sep 3, 2020 | Blog
Today I wholeheartedly recommend the much-lauded family autobiography ‘Red Love’ (2009) by East German journalist Maxim Leo, born in 1970. Leo presents a German family perhaps remarkable, perhaps indeed very average, in which can be found traces of...
by finn ballard | Aug 27, 2020 | Blog
This month, I am thinking of August Landmesser, born on May 24, 1910, of whom rather little is known. He was a shipyard worker in Hamburg, and loved a Jewish woman named Irma Eckler. He had, in fact, joined the Nazi Party in the hope of gaining better employment, but...
by finn ballard | May 30, 2019 | Blog
Berlin is in mourning over the decision to remove the city’s iconic cylindrical advertising columns (known as Litfaßsäule after their philanthropic inventor, Ernst Litfaß). Used throughout Germany and Austria since 1855, plans to incorporate urinals (!) within many of...
by finn ballard | May 23, 2019 | Blog
This month, I am thinking of Rose Valland (1898-1980), art curator, who became one of the most highly-decorated women in European history. During Valland’s tenure at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the German occupying forces began to use the building to store...
