This article, based on my chance encounter with retired Bavarian police superintendent Otto Oeder and subsequent invitation to the Stammtisch, appeared in the Mindener Tageblatt’s January 13/14, 2024 weekend edition. Captions to photos are in English so you can follow along even if you don’t read German! Leuchtende Berghänge: sattgelbes Eschenlaub, das Hellgelb frühherbstlicher Buchenblätter,… Read more Working through History over Beer
Book launch July 9, 2023! The Burlington Writers Workshop announces the release of this year’s anthology. You can join us one of two ways: in person at Hotel Vermont or, for the geographically and time-zone-challenged (like me), online. Either way, you can get your free ticket – and order your own copy – here. Find… Read more Cold Lake Anthology Release
You’ve been reading along—or maybe you just came across this little island in the vast virtual ocean—and now you want to see these places for yourself? Now you can! Find out more. AFTER THE WALL: DISCOVER GERMANY’S HIDDEN HEARTLANDThis special tour [dates TBA] will take you to the Green Belt—the nature preserve that has been… Read more See for yourself!
Just like the Iron Curtain once separated families and friends, today’s politically polarized divisions cut through families and ruin friendships. And they cause just as much pain. Is there anything we can do? Here’s an op-ed I wrote for the Montpelier Times-Argus I grew up in a divided country, and I don’t just mean polarized.… Read more The Walls in Our Heads
Why “the end of the world?” you may ask. For the people who lived near it, the border between East and West Germany might as well have been the end of the world. For birds – and for countless other wild creatures – the deadly border was a lifeline in an increasingly inhospitable modern agricultural… Read more The Birds at the End of the World (part 1)
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… and other stories from Kella, the little village that found itself next to the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. After Kaffeetrinken with a view of Braunrod – the former “window on the GDR” – Anna took me up the hill behind her house to the chapel I had read about in Daphne’s book.… Read more The chapel in the no-man’s land, and the monk who pushed the envelope
One of my favorite places on my border expedition was the German Unity Sculpture Park in the Rhön Mountains. The park sits directly in the former border strip between East and West Germany and was created by the artist and engineer Jimmy Fell. I found the installations – among them “Expulsion”, the “Miracle of Leipzig”,… Read more News from the German Unity Sculpture Park
Germany is fast approaching the 30thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took the country and the world by surprise on November 9, 1989 (for more on how this actually came about, stay tuned for the book!) Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, for a tiny East German village 130 miles northwest… Read more The Villagers’ Rebellion
