Germany
Charlie Bertsch / 23 Mar 2023

All About the Heimat

Music as Politics in 1980s Germany

Teenagers were milling about. Bright colours shot off the portable mirror ball. The DJ stepped up to his console to cue the first track.(...)
John Foster / 24 Feb 2023

The Biggest Failure Ever

R. T. Howard’s Spying on the Reich

From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the interwar period was a preamble to catastrophe.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 16 Feb 2023

Ukraine in Hindsight

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s astoundingly brutal adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about World War I – the favourite to win this year’s Best International Film Oscar – is timely to a degree that would have been hard to imagine when the project began.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 21 Dec 2022

Sonic Reporting

Everywhere But There, by Joel Schalit

Battleground editor Joel Schalit’s new album Everywhere But There forcefully demonstrates the need for a new kind of political reporting, one which presents the world as it actually is instead of distorting it in the pursuit of profit.(...)
John Foster / 25 Nov 2022

Think Different

Culture from the Slums, by Jeff Hayton

Based on the flurry of academic titles about it over the last decade, punk has become as common to college curriculums as it is to the Top 40. Why this took so long is baffling.(...)