Berlin Wall

• Chosen by a jury of international journalists, practitioners and scholars, the Gelber Prize is awarded annually to the best book on international affairs published in English.
• Homelands: A personal history of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash (Yale University Press)
  Timothy Garton Ash, Europe's "historian of the present," has been "breathing Europe" for the last half century.
• The Lionel Gelber Prize was founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber.
• The award is presented annually by the Lionel Gelber Prize Board and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

• Now, the Deutschlandmuseum has been honoured with the THEA Award for Outstanding Achievement, informally known as the 'Oscar of the entertainment sector'.
• This is the first time a German museum received this award.
• Previous recipients include institutions such as Universal Studios, Disneyland, the Shanghai Astronomy Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
• Along the way, places and events from German history are recreated to appeal to the senses and provide an unforgettable experience.

• Harts Services recognized seven Hometown Heroes during the Rainiers' 2023 season for their commitment and sacrifice.
• Harts Services also donated $4,300 to the Wounded Warrior Project at the end of the season — $100 for every Rainiers home win in 2023.
• "We have many service members and veterans in the area, and we're proud to be able to give something back to them," said Richard Hart, co-owner of Harts Services.
• Harts Services also offers top-notch electrical services, including breakers, circuits, outlets, lighting, EV charge stations, generators, and more.

• It is about chance encounters and finding one’s place in a world on the cusp of disintegration.
• Review: Kairos – Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann (Granta) Its title is one of two ancient Greek words for time.
• Where chronos refers to linear time, kairos refers to the most propitious time for an action or argument.
• Erpenbeck’s novel starts with its protagonist Katharina going through two boxes of papers that belonged to Hans, her former lover.
• He feels nostalgic for his childhood – a childhood marked by his ignorance of history.

The burden of the past

• It is clear that the previous inhabitants of their house had to leave rather quickly.
• Six-year-old Hans doesn’t realise they have been given the house of a Jewish family, but the reader cannot help but make this assumption.
• This is part of the purity and innocence he finds so desirable in her, physically and emotionally.
• It aptly summarises the paradoxical relationship of partitioned and reunified Germany with its Nazi past, which is both distant and omnipresent, almost tangible but not quite.
• After Katharina interns at a theatre in Frankfurt, Hans becomes convinced she has had an affair with a colleague named Vadim.

The mirror

• This is emphasised in the novel through the idea of reflection and the recurring image of the mirror.
• When Katharina visits her family in Cologne, West Germany, she has the following thought:
  Each time Katharina is in the bathroom, she walks up to the mirror in the door, and each time she thinks, it’s not Hans’s mirror.
• Each time Katharina is in the bathroom, she walks up to the mirror in the door, and each time she thinks, it’s not Hans’s mirror.
• Her almost final sentence is: “If only I’d known then that I was your mirror image.” As Hans’s mirror image, Katharina sees herself on some level as a collaborator and potentially a traitor for adapting her East German identity after the fall of the Berlin Wall.