by finn ballard | Nov 12, 2020 | Blog
This month, I’d like to recommend ‘Alone in Berlin’. Don’t be intimidated about it being quite a tome – it is a fast read, though a harrowing one. Based upon the true story of Elise and Otto Hampel, a working-class Berlin couple who...
by finn ballard | Nov 5, 2020 | Blog
This month, let’s remember Eva-Maria Buch, from Charlottenburg in Berlin, a devout Catholic and linguistics student at the Humboldt University. Alongside her studies, she worked in a second-hand bookstore, where she encountered leftist thinkers, and members of...
by finn ballard | Oct 29, 2020 | Blog
This month, you might be especially interested to read Deborah Feldman’s memoir ‘Unorthodox.’ Feldman left the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to move to Berlin in 2014. Her story has been adapted into a Netflix...
by finn ballard | Oct 22, 2020 | Blog
We all deserve a smile this month, so let’s have a four-legged hero! Have you heard of a Pointer named Judy, mascot of the Royal Navy and the only canine POW during WWII? On board the HMS Gnat and HMS Grasshopper, she proved a failure as a gundog, but her...
by finn ballard | Oct 15, 2020 | Blog
This month, I would like to step back from our prevalent twentieth-century themes and recommend to you ‘Measuring the World’ by Daniel Kehlmann. In case a narrative of German mathematician Alexander von Humboldt’s efforts to circumnavigate much of...
by finn ballard | Oct 8, 2020 | Blog
This month, I am thinking of Elise and Otto Hampel, a working-class couple who lived on Amsterdamer Strasse in the Northern district of Wedding. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Germany under Nazism, they began in 1940 to write postcards denouncing Hitler and...
