The Potsdam Declaration

A few years ago I visited Cecilienhof in Potsdam and was able to see the rooms layed out as they were for the meetings for the Tripartite Conference which led to the Potsdam Declaration. The Conference ended 65 years ago today. There were nine meetings between 17 and 25 July and then a break while the results of the British general election were declared. On July 28 Clement Attlee returned to the Conference as Prime Minister, accompanied by the new Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin. The Conference and the earlier one at Yalta shaped the course of post war history in Europe, particularly the eastern part, for four decades.

For material in German on das Potsdamer Abkommen or die Potsdamer Konferenz see http://www.kalenderblatt.de/index.php?what=thmanu&lang=de&manu_id=221&sdt=20100802 or the website of  the "Deutschen Historischen Museums"

Time Travel

Re-enactments and other so called "living history" events are becoming big business. It's quite interesting to look at some of the websites that serve this market, for instance Neuland Zeitreisen

There is a Google listing for Lebendige Geschichte and if you want to explore some more serious history on the web then take a look under Geschichte on http://www.internetbibliothek.de/ There you'll find seperate listings for Weltgeschichte, Europäische Geschichte, Zeitgeschichte (Deutschland), Neuzeit (Deutschland), Mittelalter, Vorgeschichte & Altertum, Biographien. Each site listing is accompanied by a brief description and some of the sites have themselves commented listings.

When are we going to be able to travel forward into the future?

Kino

I cannot remember the last time I visited a cinema so I find it a little strange to be recommending sources of information about cinema and film trends in Germany. My starting point is the incredibly rich http://www.filmportal.de/ which has details of 73,500 German feature films from 1895 to the present. Thy claim 7,000 titles are covered in-depth with synopses, reviews, photos or posters. On top of that 3000 biographies and introductory texts on important aspects and periods of German film history. Their multimedia section has trailers, film clips and more. This site also lets you search the literature of just about every film library in Germany.

So how do you find out about trends in German film? Just look at the Themen page and you'll find Aktuelle Tendenzen.

Deutsche Welle has a monthly film report about the latest German filems - KINO Das DeutscheFilmmagazin. Filmforen.de is a communication platform for film fans covering many genres. http://www.regie.de/ and http://www.kinopolis.de/ are worth a look. For a multi-lingual film dictionary go to http://home.snafu.de/ohei/ofd/moviedict.html

Prussian history

I find history fascinating and intend to read even more history books once I'm fully retired. The internet is also a very useful source of information, though you do have to be a little careful about the quality and reliability of the material.

Prussia grew from being one of many German states to become the most significant by the second half of the 19th Century. For an overview of Prussian history a good starting place is http://www.preussen-chronik.de/ from the broadcaster RBB. This is a true multimedia site with plenty of visual and audio material in addition to text. There is some video material but not the original broadcasts. You can navigate through the site in a variety of ways which include a timeline as well as menus and hypertext links.