Checkpoint

Alongside its alternative scene, many visitors to Berlin want to know the best place to see the Berlin Wall or, more precisely, where to see what still remains of it. For 28 years a concrete wall over 100km long divided Berlin, and the entire country. Now it’s one of the…

Almost from the beginning, the fractious alliance that defeated Nazi Germany was in peril. The United States and Great Britain had long distrusted the communist regime of the Soviet Union, and the feeling was strongly mutual. As early as 1943, the Big Three—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill,…

Dead drops, code names, double agents, daring escapes: the stuff of great spy novels. Somehow, the eight-chapter docuseries Spy Wars (Amazon Prime, TV-PG) manages to pull off all the intrigue and complexities of a riveting espionage tale in each 45-minute episode. With British actor Damian Lewis narrating, each true story…

As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief. “When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How…

Former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s 1946 description of the Soviet “Iron Curtain” descending upon Europe is often cited as the start of the Cold War, but it actually began in Canada a year earlier.In September 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk working at the Russian embassy in Ottawa defected and…

One of the last major surviving government figures from the former East Germany, Oskar Fischer, has died. He was the GDR's last foreign minister, holding the role for 15 years. Oskar Fischer, East Germany’s foreign minister in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, has died…

Like everyone else, I listened to nothing but David Bowie in the days after hearing the news. The night Bowie died, I had felt a disturbance in the Force at 3:00 am, saw the news via text, got out of bed, bereft, and put on Station to Station, knowing that…

Like all of us, DW reporter Marcel Fürstenau's life has changed recently. He muses on how coronavirus alters the perception of a long distance runner and how you can still improve body, mind, soul and the environment. "Moin!" This typical North German greeting alone, no matter when I hear it, gives…

Veritas Entertainment has raised $10 million in funding for its esports event business, and it is also unveiling LVL, a Berlin-based esports and gaming entertainment venue designed for community and competition. Bitkraft Esports Ventures and additional angel investors made the investment so that the company can build LVL’s infrastructure, scale…

Key point: At some point, luck runs out. An international “crisis” is the anxious space between peace and war. It is defined by three things: time, threat, and the likelihood of violence. The shorter the time, the greater the sense of threat to important interests, and the greater the chance of…