I go into the cafe at Möbel Hübner, order a latte, open Adorno's Minima Moralia:
Was einmal den Philosophen Leben hieß, ist zur Sphäre des Privaten and dann bloß noch des Konsums geworden, die als Anhang des materiellen Productionsprozesses, ohne Autonomie und ohne eigene Substanz, mitgeschleift wird.
What was once life for the philosophers has become the sphere of the private and then simply of consumption, which is dragged along as an appendage of the material production process, without autonomy and without its own substance.
I read on for a paragraph or so, happen to look up. My eye falls upon a brochure for designer sofas, which announces:
Auch ein Sofa kann eine kulturelle Einrichtung sein.
Even a sofa can be a cultural installation.
I pull out the brochure, open to the first page:
Deutschlands berühmte Sofas
Bekannt ist das Sofa nicht nur als Möbel in privaten Räumen, sondern auch als eine wichtige Requisite unseres Kulturlebens. Denken Sie nur an Goethes Diwan, der die westliche mit der östlichen Kultur verbindet. Oder an Freuds legendäre couch zur Psychoanalyse. Oder das Jugendstil-Sofa, auf dem Loriot seine Bonmots präsentierte. Auch Talkshows kommen kaum mehr ohne ein (meist rotes) Sofa aus, um Prominenten Geheimnisse zu entlocken. Überall ist das Sofa ein Symbol für entspannte Atmosphäre; es schafft eine gute Voraussetzung für interessante Gespräche. ...
Germany's famous sofas
The sofa is known not only as a piece of furniture in private rooms, but also as an important requirement of our cultural life. Just think of Goethe's Diwan, which links western and eastern culture. Or of Freud's legendary couch for psychoanalysis. Or the Jugendstil sofa on which Loriot presented his bon mots. Even talk shows hardly ever get by without a (usually red) sofa, to seduce secrets out of prominent people. The sofa is generally a symbol of a relaxed atmosphere; it creates a good setting for interesting discussions. ...
Ein Philosofa namens zara.
Philosofa
With rare self-restraint I do not have hysterics on the floor of the cafe of Möbel Hübner.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
time out
I got an e-mail from my sister yesterday saying my father had died at 3am that morning at the hospice, so am on my way back to Florida. I meant to write more on the interface question, have not been sulking in my tent just preoccupied, if anyone else has been expecting to hear from me they probably haven't for the same reason.
Monday, February 4, 2008
fixes
I spent the weekend on an intensive course in CSS at the Volkhochschule in Alt-Mariendorf. Given a choice I would rather not have learnt CSS, but things kept going wrong with my website. The purpose of the website is to enable professional existence to continue at times when I am lying on the floor staring at the wall, I will not say unable to move but unable to interact with my fellow man without a reenactment of that film with Richard Gere and Edward Norton. When things go wrong with the website, however, it is necessary to interact with my fellow man, or, more specifically, with the friend who set up the website in CSS and is currently the only person capable of setting it to rights. The strain at times (o petty concerns, how can I think of my petty concerns when tomorrow is Super-Tuesday but wotthehell) of being pleasant instead of lying motionless on the floor is such that no excess amiability is available for dealing with possible professional associates. Publishers, producers, potential payers of bills.
Although I would rather have been working on a book than learning CSS it turns out to be profoundly interesting. As you probably know (i.e. the odds are that 90% of you already know more about these things than I do), websites are realised differently on different browsers. So the languages in which you write for the web are forced to confront an issue natural languages ignore: how to allow for, or rather preempt, different interpretations. Any sentence one uses in a natural language is going to undergo distortions depending on the person reading or hearing it; with natural language sentences, however, we can't really adjust for anticipated distortions. Working with CSS shows you the level of analysis that's necessary if a language operates in an environment of guaranteed distortions and wants (OK, I am anthropomorphising shamelessly, tant pis) to ensure that a predeterminated "message" gets through. So it's exceptionally interesting - and it's also extraordinarily reassuring, because one has stepped into a little world where such things are subject to control. Not only has one stepped into a world where such things can be controlled, one has stepped into a world whose natives believe in purifying the language of the tribe and have done something about it.
The course was also a very good thing for an unrelated reason. Last week I managed to register with my language school for the last week of the preparatory course for the TestDAF - the course they refused to let me sign up for at the beginning of term. On Friday we had a model test in Reading Comprehension and another on Hearing Comprehension. The first was straightforward, the second worrying. Luckily I had signed up for the intensive course in CSS, in other words for 2 days of 6 straight hours of German in a natural environment. I wish I'd know earlier how helfpul this would be, total immersion in a context where the speaker is not making allowance for language learners. Not to mention coffee and meal breaks when a wide variety of styles of speech could be heard, and stumbling attempts at speech imposed on innocent native speakers. Fantastic.
This morning I turned up for Axel's course and got the result of our test last week. According to Axel I did not really need to take the course, because I got 12 out of a possible 12 - but this is really just a case of Axel being large-minded about the fleabitten carcase which I send out into the world as German. In the afternoon I turned up for the terrifying TestDAF course, where we did various exercises on grammar and vocabulary. When a word was unfamiliar to the class my fellow-students had a habit of explaining it to other fellow students with the English term (Eindecker = monoplane, Libellen = dragonflies). (Awwww.) After the break we had a written test, an essay to be written with a graph on self-employment as a starting point. I wrote madly, committing grammatical howlers right and left, having failed to wear a watch and so having no idea how much time was available.
I think these activities are not the sort of thing people generally associate with the writing of fiction. It's interesting to see how things actually work.
Although I would rather have been working on a book than learning CSS it turns out to be profoundly interesting. As you probably know (i.e. the odds are that 90% of you already know more about these things than I do), websites are realised differently on different browsers. So the languages in which you write for the web are forced to confront an issue natural languages ignore: how to allow for, or rather preempt, different interpretations. Any sentence one uses in a natural language is going to undergo distortions depending on the person reading or hearing it; with natural language sentences, however, we can't really adjust for anticipated distortions. Working with CSS shows you the level of analysis that's necessary if a language operates in an environment of guaranteed distortions and wants (OK, I am anthropomorphising shamelessly, tant pis) to ensure that a predeterminated "message" gets through. So it's exceptionally interesting - and it's also extraordinarily reassuring, because one has stepped into a little world where such things are subject to control. Not only has one stepped into a world where such things can be controlled, one has stepped into a world whose natives believe in purifying the language of the tribe and have done something about it.
The course was also a very good thing for an unrelated reason. Last week I managed to register with my language school for the last week of the preparatory course for the TestDAF - the course they refused to let me sign up for at the beginning of term. On Friday we had a model test in Reading Comprehension and another on Hearing Comprehension. The first was straightforward, the second worrying. Luckily I had signed up for the intensive course in CSS, in other words for 2 days of 6 straight hours of German in a natural environment. I wish I'd know earlier how helfpul this would be, total immersion in a context where the speaker is not making allowance for language learners. Not to mention coffee and meal breaks when a wide variety of styles of speech could be heard, and stumbling attempts at speech imposed on innocent native speakers. Fantastic.
This morning I turned up for Axel's course and got the result of our test last week. According to Axel I did not really need to take the course, because I got 12 out of a possible 12 - but this is really just a case of Axel being large-minded about the fleabitten carcase which I send out into the world as German. In the afternoon I turned up for the terrifying TestDAF course, where we did various exercises on grammar and vocabulary. When a word was unfamiliar to the class my fellow-students had a habit of explaining it to other fellow students with the English term (Eindecker = monoplane, Libellen = dragonflies). (Awwww.) After the break we had a written test, an essay to be written with a graph on self-employment as a starting point. I wrote madly, committing grammatical howlers right and left, having failed to wear a watch and so having no idea how much time was available.
I think these activities are not the sort of thing people generally associate with the writing of fiction. It's interesting to see how things actually work.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
integration
Signed up for another month at my language school. My teacher said he thought I could skip two months and move on to the preparation course for the next level of exams. I'm not convinced this is the best course to take next, but he is an exceptionally gifted teacher; it cheers me up to turn up at 9 and watch him in action for 3 hours.
Today he talked about the days before the fall of the Wall. When he was young West Berlin was a demilitarised zone, by requirement of the Americans, French and British; this meant that Germans living in West Berlin were exempt from military service. At the time he thought Communism was A Good Thing and would go out on anti-American demos against the Vietnam War; West Berlin was a good place to do this, because the S-Bahn belonged to East Berlin, even the parts that were in West Berlin. Even the tracks were East German. So demonstrators could disappear into an S-Bahn station, or jump onto the tracks, and the West German police couldn't do anything. When his family came up from Karlsruhe to see him they all wanted to see East Berlin, so they would all go over for the day; it was necessary to pay 20DM per person per day to do so. That is, they were required to exchange 20 DM per person into Ostmarks, but prices were so low it was impossible to spend them. A meal in a restaurant would cost 1.35 Ostmarks. One might buy a book; it would cost 1.75 Ostmarks. It was strictly forbidden to take Ostmarks back to West Germany; if one was caught carrying Ostmarks one could get a year in prison. People would think, OK, I'll give them to an Ossi; they'd see someone near the station who looked like an Ossi and try to hand over the money. But this was dangerous because it was forbidden to have any contact, the Stasi was everywhere watching, someone who was caught could face 5 years in prison.
There is a deal for immigrants and refugees that I am just too competent to benefit from. Foreigners who have been in Germany a long time - those who have married Germans, or have the right to stay for some other reason, or are EU citizens, or some others - are legally entitled to 600 hours of German language instruction and 45 hours of Orientation. Those who are unemployed get this for free; the rest pay 1 euro an hour, the remainder subsidised by the government. Unfortunately the Integrationskurse only cover linguistic instruction up to Level B1, which I have just completed, and the deal covers only designated courses, not any course at the relevant level. It's a bit silly, because part of the point is to facilitate employment, and the level of competence certified would not be enough to qualify one for much of a job. Be that as it may, I thought this was a fabulous deal that might be of some use to the incomparable TAR ART RAT, who is married to a German, has lived here for years, gets by in German but has an approach to the grammar which is an invention of his own. I thought he might extract grammatical enlightment from the B1 end of the range. Which he might well. Unfortunately - and again idiotically, given the purpose of connecting participants with employment - none of the language schools offering IK have evening courses, or rather the only evening courses start at 5.45 or 6.
There have been pieces in the press deploring the fact that only about 45 percent of participants complete the course and take away a certificate, also that only a tiny proportion land a job. It's hard to see this as surprising, given that those providing the courses have neatly eliminated from the pool all the people who have managed to land some kind of job. TAR ART RAT works for a PR firm, but it's easy enough to imagine people who, without being positively unemployed, are underemployed - making less use of their skills than they could - for want of better linguistic competence. The fact that there is no support for the level of study that would qualify people for good jobs presumably means that the not-so-good jobs are heavily oversubscribed. Not that it is not a good thing as far as it goes, better than anything comparable in the US or Britain.
Anyway, meanwhile, no good deed goes unpunished. Over a year ago, in December 2006, I gave a end-of-book party to celebrate the second completion of Your Name here, and I sent an invitation to a reader who had sent me an e-mail, a Russian musician. It is not possible, obviously, to invite people to a party without disclosing one's address. It is not normally necessary to spell out the fact that an invitation to a party does not constitute a standing invitation to turn up one's doorstep. So there has been a year of phone calls and reader on doorstep. Most of the time I leave the phone unplugged to avoid interruptions. I have explained that I don't like people turning up uninvited. To no avail. Perhaps I should move to China.
Today he talked about the days before the fall of the Wall. When he was young West Berlin was a demilitarised zone, by requirement of the Americans, French and British; this meant that Germans living in West Berlin were exempt from military service. At the time he thought Communism was A Good Thing and would go out on anti-American demos against the Vietnam War; West Berlin was a good place to do this, because the S-Bahn belonged to East Berlin, even the parts that were in West Berlin. Even the tracks were East German. So demonstrators could disappear into an S-Bahn station, or jump onto the tracks, and the West German police couldn't do anything. When his family came up from Karlsruhe to see him they all wanted to see East Berlin, so they would all go over for the day; it was necessary to pay 20DM per person per day to do so. That is, they were required to exchange 20 DM per person into Ostmarks, but prices were so low it was impossible to spend them. A meal in a restaurant would cost 1.35 Ostmarks. One might buy a book; it would cost 1.75 Ostmarks. It was strictly forbidden to take Ostmarks back to West Germany; if one was caught carrying Ostmarks one could get a year in prison. People would think, OK, I'll give them to an Ossi; they'd see someone near the station who looked like an Ossi and try to hand over the money. But this was dangerous because it was forbidden to have any contact, the Stasi was everywhere watching, someone who was caught could face 5 years in prison.
There is a deal for immigrants and refugees that I am just too competent to benefit from. Foreigners who have been in Germany a long time - those who have married Germans, or have the right to stay for some other reason, or are EU citizens, or some others - are legally entitled to 600 hours of German language instruction and 45 hours of Orientation. Those who are unemployed get this for free; the rest pay 1 euro an hour, the remainder subsidised by the government. Unfortunately the Integrationskurse only cover linguistic instruction up to Level B1, which I have just completed, and the deal covers only designated courses, not any course at the relevant level. It's a bit silly, because part of the point is to facilitate employment, and the level of competence certified would not be enough to qualify one for much of a job. Be that as it may, I thought this was a fabulous deal that might be of some use to the incomparable TAR ART RAT, who is married to a German, has lived here for years, gets by in German but has an approach to the grammar which is an invention of his own. I thought he might extract grammatical enlightment from the B1 end of the range. Which he might well. Unfortunately - and again idiotically, given the purpose of connecting participants with employment - none of the language schools offering IK have evening courses, or rather the only evening courses start at 5.45 or 6.
There have been pieces in the press deploring the fact that only about 45 percent of participants complete the course and take away a certificate, also that only a tiny proportion land a job. It's hard to see this as surprising, given that those providing the courses have neatly eliminated from the pool all the people who have managed to land some kind of job. TAR ART RAT works for a PR firm, but it's easy enough to imagine people who, without being positively unemployed, are underemployed - making less use of their skills than they could - for want of better linguistic competence. The fact that there is no support for the level of study that would qualify people for good jobs presumably means that the not-so-good jobs are heavily oversubscribed. Not that it is not a good thing as far as it goes, better than anything comparable in the US or Britain.
Anyway, meanwhile, no good deed goes unpunished. Over a year ago, in December 2006, I gave a end-of-book party to celebrate the second completion of Your Name here, and I sent an invitation to a reader who had sent me an e-mail, a Russian musician. It is not possible, obviously, to invite people to a party without disclosing one's address. It is not normally necessary to spell out the fact that an invitation to a party does not constitute a standing invitation to turn up one's doorstep. So there has been a year of phone calls and reader on doorstep. Most of the time I leave the phone unplugged to avoid interruptions. I have explained that I don't like people turning up uninvited. To no avail. Perhaps I should move to China.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
testing testing
I have a couple of books on the TestDAF, a test of German proficiency for foreign students who want to study at a German university. I thought I'd have a look at them. I had a look. The test was clearly devised by someone who is completely bonkers.
The written and oral sections of the test both require the candidate, among other things, to summarise the statistical information presented in a graph and comment on it. The oral section also requires the candidate, among other things, to demonstrate that he or she can competently chat with fellow students about sport, vacations and the like.
The first of these makes perfect sense for the many students who come to Germany to study 'technical' subjects with a substantial quantitative component. It's simply irrelevant to the type of student who comes to Germany to study, as it might be, classics, or philosophy, or, um, German literature. One might perfectly well be able to quote from memory
Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten
Das ich so traurig bin
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten
Das kommt mir nicht aus den Sinn
or
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat baut sich keines mehr
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
and yet stare appalled at a bar graph. Same for the wretched candidate who has toiled through the Kritik der Reine Vernunft or the Phänomenologie des Geistes and for one reason or another wants to study philosophy on German soil. I am all for statistics, I like statistics, but that has nothing to do with the question of whether the ability to speak fluently for 90 seconds on a statistical subject has a bearing on one's ability to cope with philosophical German. And as for sport! I submit that the ability to chat about football in German - well, what I submit is that the anglophone philosophers I have known would be unable to chat fluently about football or cricket in their native tongue, so it would be a bit hard on them to ask them to come up with 60 seconds of friendly chat in a foreign language as a prerequisite for studying, as it might be, Frege.
The thing that really is odd, anyway, is that the test gives the candidate no opportunity to show knowledge of, as it might be, Heine or Rilke, Kant or Hegel, Adorno or Habermas. The teacher of my German class says 80% of foreign students at German universities fail to finish a degree. I wonder if this is so very surprising. If you require foreign students to demonstrate that they can engage in chit-chat about football and holidays, and make no attempt to determine whether they are competent in the area of German relevant to the subject they wish to study, you are not selecting for students with the best chance of profiting from study at a Germany university; you're selecting for the type of student who has a good chance of making lots of friends in, as it might be, Berlin. If you require students to engage with randomly selected scholarly texts, you're again failing to select for the kind of student who has sensibly focused on the kind of German necessary for his/her field of specialisation. There is, I comment in passing, every reason to expect such a student to have worked on the language independently, precisely because most language programmes share the broadbrush approach of the test.
Anyway, there is more to be said, but work to be done.
The written and oral sections of the test both require the candidate, among other things, to summarise the statistical information presented in a graph and comment on it. The oral section also requires the candidate, among other things, to demonstrate that he or she can competently chat with fellow students about sport, vacations and the like.
The first of these makes perfect sense for the many students who come to Germany to study 'technical' subjects with a substantial quantitative component. It's simply irrelevant to the type of student who comes to Germany to study, as it might be, classics, or philosophy, or, um, German literature. One might perfectly well be able to quote from memory
Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten
Das ich so traurig bin
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten
Das kommt mir nicht aus den Sinn
or
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat baut sich keines mehr
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
and yet stare appalled at a bar graph. Same for the wretched candidate who has toiled through the Kritik der Reine Vernunft or the Phänomenologie des Geistes and for one reason or another wants to study philosophy on German soil. I am all for statistics, I like statistics, but that has nothing to do with the question of whether the ability to speak fluently for 90 seconds on a statistical subject has a bearing on one's ability to cope with philosophical German. And as for sport! I submit that the ability to chat about football in German - well, what I submit is that the anglophone philosophers I have known would be unable to chat fluently about football or cricket in their native tongue, so it would be a bit hard on them to ask them to come up with 60 seconds of friendly chat in a foreign language as a prerequisite for studying, as it might be, Frege.
The thing that really is odd, anyway, is that the test gives the candidate no opportunity to show knowledge of, as it might be, Heine or Rilke, Kant or Hegel, Adorno or Habermas. The teacher of my German class says 80% of foreign students at German universities fail to finish a degree. I wonder if this is so very surprising. If you require foreign students to demonstrate that they can engage in chit-chat about football and holidays, and make no attempt to determine whether they are competent in the area of German relevant to the subject they wish to study, you are not selecting for students with the best chance of profiting from study at a Germany university; you're selecting for the type of student who has a good chance of making lots of friends in, as it might be, Berlin. If you require students to engage with randomly selected scholarly texts, you're again failing to select for the kind of student who has sensibly focused on the kind of German necessary for his/her field of specialisation. There is, I comment in passing, every reason to expect such a student to have worked on the language independently, precisely because most language programmes share the broadbrush approach of the test.
Anyway, there is more to be said, but work to be done.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
less clueless than commonly supposed
The FT has a little Flash movie explaining monolines, how they work and why they matter, here. Good news. (For all of you who've been taken aback by yet another crisis in the finance industry, again triggered by some obscure financial entity of whose existence you were previously unaware.) But they have billed it as an interactive graphic. I don't know about you, but when I am promised interactivity I expect something more than the opportunity to click the arrow for Play. It's always inexpressibly cheering to find someone has plumbed depths of cluelessness unknown even to me.
In the same issue of the FT I find a piece by Peter Carey, who has taken his website live. Carey had a look on Google and was appalled to find that, as one of THE great living writers in the English language (my words, not his), his fame had gone before him - that is, the first 85 hits or so for Peter Carey were for totally unrelated sites with idle chit-chat about one of THE GREAT LIVING WRITERS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (my words, not his), with the result that the fledgling website was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay Down Under. I'm actually baffled by this, because he paid someone to set up the site, and normally when you pay someone one of the things they do is register it with Google and Yahoo! as the eponymous website. Google does not say, What do you think we are, dumb or something? when you suggest that people running a search for YOU would probably be deeply thrilled to have your very own personal website at the top of the hitlist - they have a mechanism in place that enables you to accommodate the madding crowd. For reasons that remain unclear Carey's designer skipped all that boring stuff. I used to be aggrieved because my ex-webdesigner seemed to be more interested in her gigs with Sugar Cowboys than in my website, but she certainly did the boring paperwork (or rather etherwork) to get it squared with the search engines.
Carey's life, it has to be said, has not been made easier by coming late to the parade. A realtor in San Jose has staked a claim to petercarey.com, the domain name on which fans are likeliest to gamble a dime, and he seems to have rejected pleas to relinquish it to the more famous bearer of the name. (Talks about talks have clearly taken place, since the site of the California realtor includes a tip: Are you looking for Peter Carey, the Australian Author? If so, go to www.petercareybooks.com, or Click here!) Anyway. Even if you weren't LOOKING for Peter Carey, the Australian Author, but just hoping for more idle chit-chat about Our Man in Port Moresby (another Australian Author), why not Click here?
In the same issue of the FT I find a piece by Peter Carey, who has taken his website live. Carey had a look on Google and was appalled to find that, as one of THE great living writers in the English language (my words, not his), his fame had gone before him - that is, the first 85 hits or so for Peter Carey were for totally unrelated sites with idle chit-chat about one of THE GREAT LIVING WRITERS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (my words, not his), with the result that the fledgling website was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay Down Under. I'm actually baffled by this, because he paid someone to set up the site, and normally when you pay someone one of the things they do is register it with Google and Yahoo! as the eponymous website. Google does not say, What do you think we are, dumb or something? when you suggest that people running a search for YOU would probably be deeply thrilled to have your very own personal website at the top of the hitlist - they have a mechanism in place that enables you to accommodate the madding crowd. For reasons that remain unclear Carey's designer skipped all that boring stuff. I used to be aggrieved because my ex-webdesigner seemed to be more interested in her gigs with Sugar Cowboys than in my website, but she certainly did the boring paperwork (or rather etherwork) to get it squared with the search engines.
Carey's life, it has to be said, has not been made easier by coming late to the parade. A realtor in San Jose has staked a claim to petercarey.com, the domain name on which fans are likeliest to gamble a dime, and he seems to have rejected pleas to relinquish it to the more famous bearer of the name. (Talks about talks have clearly taken place, since the site of the California realtor includes a tip: Are you looking for Peter Carey, the Australian Author? If so, go to www.petercareybooks.com, or Click here!) Anyway. Even if you weren't LOOKING for Peter Carey, the Australian Author, but just hoping for more idle chit-chat about Our Man in Port Moresby (another Australian Author), why not Click here?
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Another Country, the English-language bookshop in Kreuzberg, will be showing Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (with English subtitles) on Thursday 24 January (8.30) and Sunday 27 January (5pm). For Berliners new to the bookshop, the address is Riemannstraße 7, nearest U-Bahns Gneisenauerstraße (U7) and Mehringdamm (U7 & U6), also just around the corner from a bus stop for the 140 (runs between Ostbahnhof and Tempelhof). Full announcement below:
This Thurs with a repeat on Sunday we will begin showing R.W. Fassbinder´s *
* Berlin Alexanderplatz **(with English subtitles) Check out
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20944
for an excellent article on this wonderful film. Of all the films we have
shown at the bookshop this is one of the few films I recommend that no one
should miss, this is a true masterpiece by one of the greatest film
directors of German film, no 20th century film. If you are going to live in
Berlin you owe it to yourself to see this film and learn some of the history
that makes Berlin Berlin. Give the first part a try and enter into
Fassbinder's vision of Berlin in the 1920's, meet the bums, cheats,
prostitutes and the every day people of Berlin all just trying to get by in
hard times in one of the most Interesting cities of the world. (we are
working on getting some of the people who worked on Berlin Alexanderplatz to
come and have a discussion about working with RWF on the film)
k
*
****
** Thursday 24 January 8:30
**Berlin Alexanderplatz Part 1 Die Strafe beginnt (1980)***
**Sunday 27 January
Bookshop open 12-6pm around 5pm Film
**Berlin Alexanderplatz Part 1 Die Strafe beginnt (1980) *
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