Latest news with #EastGermany
Geek Tyrant
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Fun Trailer for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Action-Comedy FUBAR Season 2 with Carrie-Anne Moss — GeekTyrant
Netflix has released the first trailer for Season 2 of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carrie-Anne Moss' action-comedy series Fubar . Schwarzenegger is returning as grizzled CIA vet Luke Brunner, who is once again teamed up with Monica Barbaro as Emma, his daughter and fellow operative. The father-daughter duo is back on the job, and this time the threat is personal. Moss joins the story as an ex–East German spy. According to Netflix, Greta is 'an old flame from his past who threatens to destroy the world… if she doesn't destroy [Luke's] life first.' Moss talked about the experience of working with Schwarzenegger, saying: 'I watched the show, and I laughed so hard, and in the way that he described Greta, I just thought it would be really, really fun. And, of course, working with Arnold was just an amazing thought in my mind — like, how amazing would that be?' 'The first time that I met him was actually in a dance rehearsal. We just jumped in, and it was just so fun. He's just a hoot. We got to know each other, rehearsing to start with, and then on the set, and then we'd run into each other at the gym and have breakfast. I mean, fun is just the word that comes up all the time.' You'll see the two dance together in the trailer. Schwarzenegger went into filming just after open-heart surgery. Back in March, he addressed concerns about his health and the show's schedule, saying: 'I've gotten so many kind messages from all over the world, but a lot of people have asked if my pacemaker will cause any problems with Fubar Season 2. Absolutely not. I will be ready to film in April and you can only see it if you're really looking for it.' Moss joins a packed returning cast that includes Barbaro, Fortune Feimster, Travis Van Winkle, Jay Baruchel, Aparna Brielle, Andy Buckley, Milan Carter, Fabiana Udenio, and Barbara Eve Harris. Fubar is the creator of Nick Santora, who returns as showrunner, and executive producer. The series is set to premiere on June 12th.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany Arrests King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah
Last week, Germany arrested Peter Fitzek, 59, an anti-government figure also known as King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah. Historically, attempts to arrest messiahs have met with mixed results, so to stay on the safe side, the Interior Ministry not only rolled up Fitzek and three conspirators but also shut down his whole operation, known as the Kingdom of Germany. Subjects of King Peter deny the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and, over the past 13 years, have built up a counter-state with its own institutions. 'In Germany, just like in the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems,' Peter told me in 2023. 'These problems could not be solved in the old system, so we needed a completely new one.' A healer, a martial artist, and practitioner of dark arts, Peter has no royal lineage and instead takes his authority from the spiritual plane. The German government alleges that he ran unregulated financial systems, and they banned his group outright. Peter was born in East Germany in 1965. East Germany was poorer than the West then and remains so decades after unification, in 1989. Its failure to catch up economically has led to resentment by many easterners, who consider themselves neglected and forgotten. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which now controls a quarter of the seats in the German Parliament, campaigned in the East on promises to increase the region's political power. The AfD lost and was officially accused of extremism. The center-left coalition that won is now cracking down on the broader movement of eccentric political discontents. Peter, it seems, was a familiar type of East German from that generation—too old to learn the ways of the new Germany, and too ambitious to be satisfied watching others succeed where he failed. According to a profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter spent his early adulthood getting outwitted in business by West Germans, originally as the bilked investor in a slot-machine racket. [Read: Is the AfD too extreme for democracy?] When I met Peter two years ago, he had recently acquired a castle and invited me to join him there, in an annoyingly remote Saxon village called Eibenstock, near the Czech border. The journey took four hours from Berlin, and upon leaving the Autobahn and skidding around mountain roads, I began to appreciate the significance of the remoteness. Eibenstock is far from Germany's equivalent of coastal elites. It is like Montana or Idaho: You can do what you please, safe in the knowledge that few witnesses will see you doing it. It was quiet and empty with many private areas secluded by spruce and firs. I noticed a few tourists on a winter hike, and at the foot of the castle I had coffee at a tiny restaurant with the unimprovable name Goulash Cannon. Peter came into his castle's echoing, wood-paneled entryway, sporting a ponytail, pulled back tight and short, and wearing a monogrammed shirt with the words Kingdom of Germany in gold cursive on the breast. In this respect and others, he resembled Steven Seagal, another aging martial artist with delusions of divinity and grandeur. Peter then guided me to a sparsely furnished sitting room for my royal audience. He began, unbidden, by laying out proof that his kingship had been recognized internationally. This proof took the form of boarding passes that various airlines had honored, listing his name as 'Peter of Germany.' He had a 'Kingdom of Germany' passport that looked official enough, and had passed inspection, he said, at various borders. All of the airline documents I saw were from within the Schengen area, which means he could travel freely anyway. An airline agent had probably rolled his eyes and let him board his flight to Majorca. When I think of entities capable of conferring royal status, I do not think of Ryanair. His education, he said, began under the tutelage of a contract killer he met in 1989. The man understood spirituality, Peter said, and knew how to hypnotize people and take their money. Peter read up on magic, philosophy, religion, history, and finally law, before he concluded that there was an 'order to creation,' something beautiful and true, an existence freed of the corruption and disappointment of the Federal Republic of Germany. 'I slowly became aware that there is a Creator,' he told me, and that this Creator had endowed him with spiritual powers that proved his divine right to rule. 'I have sat as near to God as you sit to me right now,' he said. He determined that 'true Christianity has never existed,' and that he had been sent to establish it. He fell in love with a woman who could move objects with her mind and set them on fire; he spent time with holy men in India; he discovered cold fusion; Satanists detected his growing powers and sent assassins after him. 'I am lord of the spirits. I have an invisible army. I cannot be harmed.' At first, he said, he tried to improve German democracy by working within the system. 'Before I founded the Kingdom of Germany, I ran as a candidate for the Bundestag. I had previously talked to a lot of members of the Bundestag as well as members of the state parliament for many, many hours,' Peter told me. He said he saw how decisions were made—and how fruitless was any hope of changing a system that had grown beyond the ability of even the most patient citizen to affect. 'The system interlocks in others,' he said. 'It is a nested system, where you can't change individual segments because then they don't fit with the rest.' Foremost among his frustrations were the modern bureaucracies that seemed designed not to serve citizens and help them prosper but to frustrate and enslave them. 'The health system, the pension system, the monetary system, and the banks all have problems,' he told me. 'They cannot be solved in the system. So a new one has to be started.' He said he examined the law and found that the position of Kaiser, supposedly abolished, remained vacant. All it needed was a suitable claimant—and having been anointed by the Creator, he claimed legal succession in 2009. 'We had to claim this legal succession if we wanted to establish a new system throughout Germany and not do what the Allies, the Americans, imposed on us,' Peter said. Photos of his official coronation in 2012 show him in faux-ermine robes. 'We in the Kingdom of Germany take the view that there is a divine order of creation,' Peter said. 'The state should be a reflection of this order of creation, and should be a completely just society or community, like nothing hitherto seen on this planet.' He conducted seminars for his followers, to show off his and his fire-starter girlfriend's ability to leave their bodies, perform feats of physiological impossibility like slowing their heartbeats, and commune with the archangels Uriel and Metatron. To see this is to believe, he said. 'The Creator sent me here to be able to establish the Kingdom, and people can choose freely whether to join.' In 2016, the state imprisoned him for taking supporters' money in what appeared to be a totally unregulated banking scheme. An appeals court freed him after two years, and he insisted to me that his willingness to go to prison proved his divinity. 'Only someone who has been called by God does that.' Under Peter's watch, the Kingdom practiced a kind of primitive democracy, with—crucially—a banking and insurance system totally disconnected from that of the rest of the world. But the details of how Peter ran his kingdom are irrelevant, if colorful. He said the Kingdom will choose his successor by election. 'My son, for example, will not succeed me,' he told me, unless the young man exhibits supernatural powers like his father's and convinces other citizens of his eligibility. Peter had identified sources of frustration and indignity that might bother virtually any German: how one navigates banking, taxation, health care, law. People of much greater education and sophistication than Peter have found themselves at the mercy of these systems, and treated most heartlessly by them. Germans have a slang term, Überzwerg, which means 'head dwarf,' and refers to the petty tyrants in modern bureaucracies who ruin your day by demanding forms in triplicate and inflict other minor hassles that keep you from getting something as simple as a credit card issued or a cavity filled. Navigating modern, complex bureaucratic states is difficult but comes easier if you had an elite education in a big city—the Überzwergs' natural environment. To people without this background, and who fail in business or politics in consequence, others' success may look like the result of magic, fraud, or conspiracy. Peter resorted to at least the first of these and probably all three. In his castle, he described spiritual warfare with ghosts and devils. Who is an Überzwerg but a devil sent to torment you—and in the cruelest way, by taking human form and swearing up and down that he is no devil at all, only the most mundane creature, with a nameplate on his desk and a time clock on his wall? And if you discover that you are living in a premodern, enchanted world, why not go all the way and declare yourself king by divine right? The direction our conversation took next was as predictable as it was repulsive. Peter's ultimate prescription to treat the diseased system of money and power was to get rid of the cabal of Satanic Jews that has taken over the world outside his Kingdom. He said he did not mind Jews per se but objected to the usurers and tricksters who start and encourage all the world's great wars, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine; who deny his status as their redeemer; and who are conspiring to steer us all to the apocalypse. Peter had my attention when he talked about pyrokinesis, and he had my sympathies when grousing about bureaucracy. But Jews run the world through a network of banks and Chabad houses is the most tired claim an extremist (especially a German one) can make. It was then that I lost interest and started thinking about whether the Goulash Cannon would still be loaded and ready to fire a late lunch into my face. On the way out the door, Peter stamped my passport with a Kingdom of Germany royal seal and signed it with a scribble: Peter I, Son of Man, Imperator. Article originally published at The Atlantic
South China Morning Post
18-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
Two weeks' free accommodation offered by German city in bid to attract new residents
An eastern German city is offering two weeks of free lodgings in a bid to attract new residents as it continues to grapple with depopulation some 35 years after reunification. Successful applicants will be eligible to spend two weeks in a furnished flat in Eisenhüttenstadt, some 100km (62 miles) southeast of Berlin, from September 6-20, the city administration said. Like many other regions in the former communist East Germany, Eisenhüttenstadt has seen a sharp population decline in the decades after German reunification, with younger people in particular moving away to look for work elsewhere. City official Julia Basan noted that the current population has declined to some 24,000 in recent years, from around 50,000 in 1990. Eisenhüttenstadt was initially designed for a population of 30,000. Located on Germany's eastern edge on the border with Poland, Eisenhüttenstadt was founded in 1950 to provide accommodation for workers at a newly established steelworks.
The Independent
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Richard von Weizsäcker: Germany's President who served in Hitler's army but later promoted tolerance and became his country's conscience
Richard von Weizsäcker was a former soldier in Hitler's army who used his largely ceremonial office as president of Germany to denounce his country's Nazi past and to condemn intolerance toward immigrants and other minorities. Von Weizsäcker was elected president of West Germany in 1984 and held the office as the country's formal head of state for 10 years. During that time he helped oversee reunification with East Germany in 1990. In the German parliamentary system, the Chancellor is the head of government and exercises more authority over the policies of the government than the President (Helmut Kohl was Germany's Chancellor throughout von Weizsäcker's tenure as president). But the aristocratic, white-haired von Weizsäcker became, perhaps, the most country's popular political figure. He was, in essence, his country's chief ambassador and used his presidential office as a platform to promote important matters of national and moral principle. In an address to the Bundestag, the German parliament, on 8 May 1985 – the 40th anniversary of Germany's surrender at the end of the Second World War – von Weizsäcker directed a cleansing spotlight on the country's greatest shame when he challenged his compatriots to take responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. He dismissed the commonly held notion that ordinary German citizens were not aware of the actions of the Nazi regime. "There were many ways of not burdening one's conscience, of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum," he said. "When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything. Who could remain unsuspecting after the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the stigmatisation of the Star of David, the deprivation of rights, the ceaseless violation of human dignity?" Von Weizsäcker, who spent seven years as an infantry officer during the war, was a potent symbol of national reflection and reconciliation. "Anyone who closes his eyes to the past," he said, "is blind to the present." He called on Germans to view 8 May not as a day of national surrender but as, he suggested, "a day of liberation. It freed us all from the system of National Socialist tyranny." Von Weizsäcker's forthright speech echoed around the world, and he was hailed as his country's moral conscience. He travelled to Israel in 1985, attended the German premiere of the film Schindler's List with the Israeli ambassador and in 1993 visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "President Weizsäcker has had a major, positive influence in enhancing Germany's role and reputation on the world stage," the US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke, said in 1994. He repeatedly spoke out against intolerance toward immigrants and other minorities and attended memorial services for Turkish victims of neo-Nazi violence. He also took a leading role in preparing Germany for reunification. As mayor of West Berlin in the early 1980s he had been the first leader from the democratic western part of the country to cross the border and conduct talks with his counterparts in communist-controlled East Berlin. Throughout the 1990s he travelled extensively round eastern Europe, assuring his country's neighbours that Germany was no longer, as he put it, "haunted by Teutonic dreams of national power". As early as 1985 he had urged Germans on both sides of the divide to think of themselves as one nation, and he was among the first leaders to call for the national capital to return to Berlin. During a four-day state visit to Britain in 1986, he addressed a joint session of the Houses of Parliament, the first German to be accorded that honour. Richard Karl von Weizsäcker was born in 1920 in his family's castle in Stuttgart. He was from an aristocratic family of statesmen, theologians and scholars and had the inherited title of Freiherr, or Baron. His father Ernst was a senior official in the Nazi foreign ministry and served as German ambassador to the Vatican. An older brother, Carl Friedrich, was part of a team of German scientists that tried unsuccessfully to develop a nuclear bomb during the Second World War. Von Weizsäcker studied at Oxford and the University of Grenoble, his time in England highlighting in his mind the difference between a fully-functioning democracy and the authoritarian regime he had left behind. He joined the German army in 1938 and took part in the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Two days later his older brother Heinrich was killed in battle, which deeply affected von Weizsäcker's view of the war. Stationed on the eastern front in Russia in 1943, von Weizsäcker later recalled, he and other German officers shot holes in a portrait of Hitler, and several of his friends took part in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After the war von Weizsäcker studied law at the University of Göttingen and when his father was charged with sending French Jews to Auschwitz he joined his defence team during the Nuremberg trials. His father was sentenced to seven years' jail, which was later reduced to five, and was released in 1950; Winston Churchill had described his sentence as "a deadly error". Richard received a doctorate in law and worked for the Mannesmann steel conglomerate before being elected to parliament in 1969; he was mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984. He wrote several books about history and politics in which he advocated a moderate, centrist approach for Germany as it entered the 21st century. When he left the presidency in 1994, he reflected on the powerful speech he had delivered nine years earlier, in which he asked Germans to own up to the legacy of the Holocaust. "I wouldn't take back a single word of that speech today," he said. µ MATT SCHUDEL Richard Karl von Weizsäcker, soldier, lawyer, politician and statesman: born Stuttgart 15 April 1920; married Marianne von Kretschmann (three children); died 31 January 2015.
Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Two to One review — Sandra Hüller can't fix the flat reunification plot
Last year's awards season staple and powerhouse performer Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest) takes a qualitative tumble with this new 'feelgood' comedy about financial scams and money laundering in the week before German reunification in 1990. Hüller plays Maren, an unemployed yet fiercely proud East German who, together with her partner Robert (Max Riemelt) and ex-boyfriend Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld), discovers an enormous underground bunker in Halberstadt, near the border with West Germany. The bunker has been hastily commandeered to house several thousand tonnes of the country's soon to be defunct banknotes. And so, in the three days left before the deutschmark takeover of October 3, 1990, Maren and Co hatch a mildly convoluted plan to
