Alfred Bodenheimer, Swiss Professor of Jewish Literature and Religious History at the University of Basel, gave a lecture last on this May 10 on occasion of an anti-Semitism presentation at the University of Hamburg. In the audience his wife, Mrs. Bodenheimer, member of the German-Israeli Society in Hamburg, was listening when a group interrupted the lecture and insulted the Bodenheimers, calling them – among other invectives – child murderers and physically attacked Ms. Bodenheimer. Such actions, demonstrations and aggressions directed against Israel, pro-Israel governments, Israel-explaining events and also against normal Jewish fellow citizens have been on the rise to an alarming extent in many European countries, in the USA and…

Readers’digest from a single day, October 26, 2022: China 1: The National Congress of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China (about 2.300 party members, theoretically representing the population of the PRC of about 1.400.000.000 Chinese) have chosen Xi Jingping for the 3rd time (unwritten rule provides for two terms) as Secretary General and President – tantamount to being sole leader for life. Xi is a person, traumatized as boy through elementary abuse and humiliation by the Revolutionary Guards and his father, betrayed by his mother – likely his last humane resort – and the suicide of his sister; Xi is therefore trauma-impregnated and naturally transfixed to „owning“…

King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Ludwig II. Otto Friedrich Wilhelm von Bayern) of the Wittelsbach dynasty, born in Munich in 1845, died in what has to be termed a mysterious death in 1886. He drowned in Lake Starnberg along with his medical council who accompanied him into this wet grave.  With the loss of Bavaria’s sovereignty in the ‘German War’(1866) which the Prussians won, King Ludwig’s Bavaria did not only forfeit its sovereignty. Bavaria’s finances were ruined. The splendour loving king continued to build castles, supported Richard Wagner, his favourite composer (I added Wagner’s Siegfried idyll to the video) and paternal friend in buying up Wagner’s accumulated liabilities. The king…

Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s „Mein Leben“ … nine years post MMR’s death and 23 years past first publication his autobiography still is a „hot seller“ today … On reflection on how long MMR’s memory survives him I conclude that it remains „alive“ longer than for the less prominent, or not at all prominent, but will wither as decades, centuries and … pass. Looking at it from the geological viewpoint : subject to mankind still around in a million years, memories of any prominent of our era will be forgotten … Marcel Reich-Ranickis „Mein Leben“ … neun Jahre nach MMRs Tod und 23 Jahre nach der Erstveröffentlichung ist seine Autobiografie auch heute noch ein „Bestseller“…