Latest news with #German-British
Economist
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
Berlin's culture bosses must become more commercial
'I don't really know that much about art,' joked Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum, the top fine-arts museum in Frankfurt. 'In Frankfurt it's all about money.' Mr Demandt was speaking on April 11th at the inauguration of 'Dioscuri—the Given Day', a special exhibition of a monumental painting, 65 metres long and consisting of 24 panels, one for each hour of the day. The work, based on the Greek myth of the unequal twins Castor and Pollux and created by Michael Müller, a German-British artist, is now being shown in the vast staircase of the Neues Museum in Berlin.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
A French university is offering ‘scientific asylum' for US talent. The brain drain has started
In six weeks, the Trump administration's 'rapid scheduled disassembly' of American science has been as sharp and deep as its trashing of the US's alliances and goodwill; Earth science, weather forecasting and early warning systems, medical research (including cancer research), Nasa. Academic grants more broadly have been cut, paused and subject to review for a long list of banned words (including such contentious terms as 'political' and 'women'). This has caused universities across the country to reduce their intake of PhD students, medical students and other graduate students, introduce hiring freezes and even rescind some offers of admission. More than 12,500 US citizens currently in other countries on Fulbright research grants recently had their funding paused, along with 7,400 foreign scholars currently hosted in the US, leaving them financially stranded. And, when it came to one foreign academic visiting the US, detaining them and refusing them entry. Even more worryingly, the administration is specifically targeting some universities, including pulling $400m in funding from Columbia University, and $800m from Johns Hopkins, forcing it to lay off 2,000 people. Furthermore, the legally dubious arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, and the cancelling of his green card, is sure to have a chilling effect on foreign students and researchers already in the US – and on the desire of others to go there in the future. As Christina Pagel, a German-British professor at University College London, writes: 'This isn't chaos.' Instead, the attacks on research appear to follow a three-pronged objective: to forcibly align science with state ideology; undermine academic independence and suppress dissent; and maintain geopolitical and economic goals. The Saturn V rockets that took US astronauts to space – and eventually the moon – in the 1960s owed their existence to Operation Paperclip, which brought 1,500 former Nazi scientists (such as Wernher von Braun, the former director of Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center) to the US. In the week after Donald Trump's election, I wondered whether the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas may inadvertently get his wish (of a Europe that unified through opposition to the US) and suggested that Europe position itself to reverse the decades-long transatlantic brain drain by welcoming highly educated American researchers and scientists who were sure to find themselves under attack. This time, there is no moral quandary about it, no Nazi pasts to ignore; only as much advantage to be gained as can be in a world where the EU must hold the ground for liberal democratic society, joined by Canada to the west, and Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to the east. To some extent, EU governments and institutions are already picking up on the opportunity. For example, on 7 March, the University of Aix-Marseille announced Safe Place for Science, a three-year, €15m programme to bring 15 American scientists working in climate, health and astrophysics to its campus. According to a university spokesperson, more than 60 applications have been received, 30 of them coming within the first 24 hours. The university indicated that it has been in contact with other universities and the French government about expanding 'scientific asylum' on both a national and European level, and to help coordinate welcoming and relocating different researchers. US federal government spending on all research and development (R&D) totalled roughly $195bn in 2024. That sounds imposing, but let's put it into greater context. As of 2023, US GDP was $27.7tn and EU GDP was $26.5tn, when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Taken as a whole, both polities are roughly the same economic size. Let's imagine that the EU were to put real money on the table to lure science of all kinds out of the US and to the continent. It wouldn't need to match $195bn, euro for dollar, in part because more than half the US total is defence R&D, and the EU is already boosting defence spending … bigly. So, say it just picked a bold, round number that lends itself well to narrative, storytelling and headlines, and is enough to rope in the cuts happening in the US. A sum of €25bn a year would represent just under 0.1% of the EU's GDP, and even less if the UK, Norway and Switzerland (all of which participate in the Horizon Europe research funding programme) were included. As it is, R&D spending in the EU lags behind the US – and a report ordered by the European Commission's research department recently recommended more than doubling Horizon Europe's €95bn, seven-year budget. What I'm suggesting goes further, yes. But not only is it well within the EU's ability to afford, it would ultimately pay for itself: research found that non-defence R&D spending returned 200% for the US during the postwar period. But let me push the boundary of fantastical again, and suggest that the EU may lure not just American researchers, but American universities themselves. According to the Cross Border Education Research Team, US universities maintain 29 actual campuses in Europe (and far more if you include 'centres' and study abroad programmes). There are dozens of American colleges and universities with enormous endowments that regularly splash out hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on new buildings. If US crackdowns (like the recent demands made of Columbia) on academic freedom, funding, and foreign students and faculties become more frequent, they may find the idea of second campuses in Europe tempting indeed. Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
The Independent
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Artist Peter Sedgley, founder of Space Studios, dies aged 94
Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Artist Peter Sedgley, founder of Space Studios with painter Bridget Riley in the 1960s, has died aged 94, the studio has said. Sedgley, known for his kinetic and optical art, founded the workspace, which is the oldest continuously operating art studio in London, in 1968. Announcing Sedgley's death on March 17, Space said: 'Peter Sedgley was an artist who looked at the world with a particular kind of social conscience. 'He imagined the site of the artist's studio as one of unbounded imagination – a prospective seat for social, political and economic change. 'Sedgley was a very specific kind of person, adventurous, seemingly not afraid of risk, but also a deep thinker. 'After all, the discipline required of his intricate incandescent paintings, which over time evolved to become sculptures, was something that he pursued largely independently. He was consistently innovating.' He also created an Art Information Registry, which was used by members including singer David Bowie and German-British painter Frank Auerbach, to find places to exhibit, perform, sell their work and be commissioned. Sedgley became an artist after a period in the army, and a short career as an architect. His first major solo exhibition was in 1965, at the McRoberts And Tunnard Gallery in London. It sold out and several works were placed in major galleries such as Tate Britain. His best known works include Glide, Colour Cycle, Suspense and Blue Pulse. The London-born artist continued to work until well into his 90s, and created a retrospective of his work, dedicated to his late wife Inge, with whom he had two children, at the Redfern Gallery in London, in November last year. The studio's statement added: 'It is thanks to Peter's pioneering vision that today Space remains the oldest continuously running artist studios provider in London.'
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Once the Deed Is Done by Rachel Seiffert review – mystery in the aftermath of the Third Reich
It is late afternoon, March 1945, when a German schoolboy cycling home through the dusk sees a number of women under armed guard at the verge. The boy has grown used to the regular transport of workers to the munitions plant beyond town and instinctively senses that this group is different; out of place and suspicious. But by now the war is in its death throes and abnormality has become a given. Allied forces are pouring in, foreign labour is bleeding out. Everyone on Lüneburg Heath, south of Hamburg, seems depleted and confused, no longer sure who belongs and who doesn't. Hitler's war machine was propped up by millions of workers, predominantly brought in from Poland and Ukraine and forcibly deployed to canneries, factories and farms. Once the Deed Is Done, the fine fifth novel from the German-British author Rachel Seiffert, covers the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich's collapse, when this vast pool of slave labour became a logistical headache and a humanitarian disaster. Ruth Novak, a 32-year-old Red Cross volunteer from England, arrives at the plant to find the guards fled, paperwork burned and scores of hunched, hungry men left behind the iron railings. Undeniably, there is more than enough relief work for Ruth and her colleagues to tackle. But the mystery of those missing women throbs like a sore tooth. There ought to have been more labourers inside the factory, Ruth thinks. So what has become of the rest of them? Seiffert is drawn to small figures on a big canvas. Her subjects are the everyday casualties of 20th-century European history and the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war. Once the Deed Is Done stirs memories of the centrepiece tale from Seiffert's Booker-shortlisted debut, The Dark Room, with its depiction of a people cast adrift, struggling to find a route home. But its panoramic sweep owes as much to 2017's A Boy in Winter, a miniature epic that viewed the Nazi invasion of Ukraine at ground level. The tale shuttles between a set of parallel narrative strands that turn out to be more braided than they first appear. While principled Ruth provides the novel's moral compass, she's an outsider. Seiffert efficiently joins the dots between the shuttered factory and the community that surrounds it, tracing the lines of interdependence and complicity. She shows us the vanquished young soldiers dealing contraband cigarettes in the town square; the stoical parents waiting for official word on their sons; the hard-bitten old timers, furiously protesting their ransacked plum orchards. The townsfolk aren't wicked, exactly, but none is entirely blameless either. 'These people,' marvels shrewd, wary Stanislaw, who works as Ruth's translator. 'They let all of this happen right under their noses?' Seiffert has cited Joseph Roth – that great chronicler of mittel-European dislocation – as a literary influence. She writes in a similar fashion: plainly, almost bluntly, keeping every character at arm's length and dispassionately explaining what each is thinking and feeling at any given moment. The pace is steady and the palette strictly limited; the occasional splash of bright colour might have offset its shades of grey. But Seiffert's direct approach serves the characters well, brings this straitened and provisional world to life and provides a bedrock of basic humanity. The people are exhausted and careworn, reduced to their bare essentials. Their focus, therefore, is largely on manageable, practical tasks. What is to become of the abandoned workers at the plant? Under Ruth's supervision, the site is made over as a camp for displaced persons (DP). The Poles take the near quarter, the Ukrainians the far side, while the remaining nationalities spread out through the tents in the field. In town, the Germans drape white pillowcases from their windows to reassure the British soldiers. Out here the inmates are stitching homemade Bohemian, Belgian and Italian flags, carving temporary embassies out of their former prison until they are allowed to depart for whatever remains of their homes. The factory fills up and becomes almost boisterous. It is a fine sight, Ruth decides, 'like a continent in miniature'. The back wall of the DP camp gives out on a lush water meadow. Beyond that, though, lies the Heide, the heath, an open country of juniper, gorse and bogland which appears to extend all the way to the coast. The Heide's borders are uncertain. People walk in and get lost, or run there to hide out, and the children are warned not to swim in the millpond. The Heide, Seiffert implies, might be another Europe in miniature. If so, it serves as the camp's dystopian cousin: pitiless and exposed, sometimes treacherous underfoot, and offering scant shelter to the displaced people passing through. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Once the Deed Is Done by Rachel Seiffert is published by Virago (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
CairoScene
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
German-British Composer Max Richter to Perform at Dubai Opera
The concert will see Richter perform his latest album, 'In a Landscape', as well as his classic 'The Blue Notebooks'. Feb 24, 2025 German-British composer and pianist Max Richter - renowned for blending classical compositions with modern electronic sounds - is throwing a concert at Dubai Opera on Wednesday, February 26th. The concert is part of his 2025 world tour, which sees him perform live in Canada, Australia, Italy and Spain, as well as various US cities like Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, Chicago. The concert will see Richter perform his latest album, 'In a Landscape', in addition to selected pieces from Richter's 20-year-old 'The Blue Notebooks' album. The concert begins at 8 PM sharp, with ticket prices ranging from AED 330 to AED 580 via Dubai Opera's official site.
