Culture

News outlets in the US and around the world extensively cover the second administration of Donald Trump. Amid this flood of information on current events, film directors Demid Sheronkin and Can Dündar take a step back to assess the state of free speech and democracy in the US with their new DW documentary, "Democracy Under Attack: Can Dündar and Trump's America," which premiered on April 14 at the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin. Dündar, a Turkish journalist and writer now living in exile in Berlin, pointed out at the film's premiere that as they developed the project, they faced the challenge of finding an angle that could withstand Trump's turbocharged news cycle. "We decided to focus on the situation of the academics, as a kind of microcosm reflecting the attacks on democracy," he e...

Jakarta, October 1965. After a failed coup attempt, the Indonesian army and its allies killed, tortured and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Indonesians they suspected to be communists, many of them of Chinese descent.  But almost a year before that, in December 1964, the British Foreign Office had already written in an internal memo: "A premature PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] coup may be the most helpful solution for the West – provided the coup failed.” Today, some historians see the memo as evidence of a broader Cold War strategy. "Provoke the PKI into taking action against the army – or create the impression that it has – then blame the PKI and use that as a pretext to crush them", says Geoffrey B. Robinson, a historian and expert on Western involvement in the Indonesian mas...

Daniela Weiss holds a laminated map of the Middle East with the title "The Promised Land" into the camera and says: "This is the promise of God to the patriarchs of the Jewish nation."  The map shows a Jewish state that encompasses parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia – extending way beyond the 1949 armistice line, the so-called Green Line that defines Israel's territory according to international law.  "It's 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) – almost as big as the Sahara desert," Weiss adds. Weiss – sometimes nicknamed "the godmother of the Israeli settler movement" – is referring to the idea of "Greater Israel", or in Hebrew "Eretz Israel HaShlema" – "Complete Israel." It's an expansionist concept popular among the Israeli far right that originates in the Bible. ...

German actor Mario Adorf was a phenomenon. On screen, he beat people up, shot and killed them. He was loud, he was rude and used foul language. And yet, in the end, he was beloved by all. Many other actors have been around for a long time, too, but who else can claim to have been as much a part of post-war German cinema as he was of the inspiring works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff's New German Cinema movement? Who else can look back on a cinematic vita that includes Italian Spaghetti Westerns as well as classic mafia films, working with Hollywood directors as well as with leading European filmmakers?  Even as a nonagenarian, Adorf still played in films. Landing in Hollywood  Born in the Swiss capital, Zurich, on September 8, 1930 to a German mother and an Italian...

It all started in 1993 when the rock band Pearl Jam were looking for an alternative venue that was not controlled by Ticketmaster, which it was boycotting at the time.  The Empire Polo Club, a desert oasis in the Coachella Valley in California, hosted some 25,000 people for their gig, giving the promoters the inspiration for an outdoor festival at the same site.   In October 1999, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was born as an alternative to the unruly and chaotic Woodstock festival from a few months earlier. Global acts from Rage Against the Machine to the Chemical Brothers and Morrissey performed at the event. Despite its success, the promoters lost money.   But two years later, Coachella returned on an annual basis, and for much of its 26 years it has been one of the big...

In the beginning, it was just a game. One we've all played numerous times: select the squares with a stop sign, enter the text below, reassemble the puzzle — and check the box declaring, "I am not a robot." Yet, every time we select images determining whether what we see is a cat or a croissant, we end up working for Big Tech. When Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of "games with a purpose" (GWAPs) in 2004, his goal was to harness human brainpower so that computers could learn from it. His idea was simple: Get humans to solve tasks that are trivial to us but difficult for computers back then, like labeling images, transcribing text or classifying data. And what better way to make people work for computers than by turning labor into play? Get rich by l...

As most of Europe prepares to set clocks forward an hour on March 29, millions will brace for the biannual ritual of daylight saving time (DST). DST is mostly observed in temperate regions, where the contrast between long summer days and short winter ones makes shifting time seem useful. For newcomers to these parts of the world, DST could be bewildering at first. If you miss a meeting or arrive too early at an event, you may be gently reminded with the mnemonic: "Spring forward, fall back" — denoting clocks being moved forward one hour in spring, and back one hour in autumn. In the Northern Hemisphere, this typically happens in March and October respectively, while Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia, New Zealand and Chile observe it in reverse, with time springing forward in ...

While wars and revolutions have long threatened national cultural heritage sites — most recently in Iran and Ukraine — a new danger has emerged in the form of climate change. UNESCO World Heritage sites from the 4,000 year-old pyramid temples in Iraq to the ancient statues of Easter Island are facing extreme erosion and deterioration as temperatures rise and storms and droughts intensify. A 2025 study showed that 80% of World Heritage sites are facing climate stress as materials such as wood and stone struggle to adapt to a hotter world. Here are a few of the world's most climate-vulnerable UNESCO-listed cultural sites. 'Cradle of civilization': Ziggurat of Ur Thousands of years of history could vanish as rising temperatures drive extreme erosion across Iraq's World Heritage-listed anc...

Now, more than 80 years after the end of the Nazi dictatorship, anyone can click through millions of index cards in the US National Archives without registering, and search for the names of their own grandparents and great-grandparents. The data contains information on 6.6 million Germans who were members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) until 1945, stored on more than 5,000 digitized microfilm reels. But the records are incomplete: According to the German Historical Museum, in 1945 "one in five adult Germans was one of a total of 8.5 million party members" and thus, at least on paper, supported the fascist regime.  A 'Nazi search engine' online "It does indeed seem to be very appealing to a wider public to conduct their own online research," says historian Johann...