Blog – Page 3

General Wolf fabricates the truth

Markus Wolf was the legendary head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the East German foreign intelligence service. The HVA was much better at its work than its West German counterpart, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Intelligence gathering by the BND in East Germany was of persistently low quality and rarely went beyond what anybody could have read in the newspapers. The reason is simple. Markus Wolf had inflitrated the BND so effectively that much of its activity was steered from the HVA.

Why did German reunification take so long?

For over forty years, from 1949 to 1990, Germany was divided into West and East, each side calling itself a Republic. From the beginning, there were serious attempts at reunification. Why did it take so long? Here are a few reasons.

Nailing the Ninety-Five Theses

It is 500 years to the day since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and unleashed the Reformation. While Germany celebrates one of its most famous sons – some Germans, that is, for fast swathes of the population spend their time playing computer games or foaming at the mouth over football, and couldn’t care less – it is worth asking whether there is any truth to the legendary deed of Wednesday, October 31, 1517.

Bad Buddhists

What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West? Thus begins one of the teaching dilemmas, or koans, through which practitioners of Zen Buddhism strive for Enlightenment. If a student imagines he has the answer to the question, the master may well rise up and clout him with a stick. If the answer is a good one, he might clout the student even harder.

Is God male or female?

The ‘Our Father,’ the prayer that Jesus taught us, booms around our churches with hearty maleness, bringing the liturgy down an octave or two. The congregation may or may not believe in God, but the men among them, it seems, believe strongly, and viscerally, that God, if He exists, is male.