Author Archives: Clare Dunkle
Last night, I watched a German news broadcast about unethical repairmen overcharging their customers. A reporter posing as a housewife had three different repairmen look at her fully functional refrigerator. All three declared that it needed all kinds of work: …
A Monument from a Bygone Age … the 1990s
This enormous bronze equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I towers over the crowds at the Deutsches Eck, the spit of land in downtown Koblenz where the Mosel flows into the Rhine. Standing almost fifty feet high (14 meters) from plumed …
The top dog in Germany isn’t a dog. He’s a stag. He’s der Platzhirsch: the toughest, biggest stag in the meadow. In autumn, he spends a lot of his time rounding up his harem of does and fighting off anybody …
Flowers and Books
What did Joe and I find at the Koblenz National Garden Show? Well, we found flowers, of course. According to the brochures, there were 6,000 square yards of roses alone (5,000 square meters). Everywhere we looked, we saw fabulous combinations …
The other day, I was watching one of the German zoo shows. A woman zookeeper was currycombing what I’m pretty sure was a tapir just as if he were a pony, and I wasn’t surprised because the animals I’ve seen …
Flowers in Downtown Koblenz
This weekend, Joe and I drove to Koblenz to visit the National Garden Show, a traveling event which takes place every two years. For six months, a German city transforms part of itself into a blooming paradise, and millions of …
More whimsical Germany
Speaking of that sense of magical fun and good humor that often emerges in German public art, here is a little charmer who resides two doors down from my apartment. She’s peeping out at the world from underneath the mailbox, …
Whimsical Germany
From an American point of view, German culture often exhibits a streak of whimsy. My introduction to this came before I arrived in Germany, back in 1999. I was paging through a coffee table book on Hanover and encountered the …