Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar: Paradise Lost blends fact with fantasy. Pablo Escobar, the late, legendary Colombian drug trafficker, is the central figure in the movie, which was screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But virtually everything else in it is a figment of Di Stefano’s fervent imagination. Which is to say that Escobar, […]
Giulio Ricciarelli’s riveting German-language movie, Labyrinth of Lies, ventures bravely into rough terrain — Germany’s historic reckoning with the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it takes a viewer back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when some Germans were trying to suppress or forget Germany’s central […]
Two weeks after freelance journalist James Foley was beheaded by the Sunni jihadist outfit Islamic State, the same gruesome fate befell the reporter Steven Sotloff, also an American. Before he was decapitated by a masked man wielding a knife, Sotloff, a Jew taken hostage in Syria last August, said he was “paying the price” for U.S. […]
Olivier Lubrich, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Berne in Switzerland, has compiled a historically useful anthology of essays and letters, both published and unpublished, describing life in Nazi Germany. Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945 (The University of Chicago Press) presents a chilling portrait of a nation under the thrall […]
Ninety five years have elapsed since world leaders gathered in Paris to create a new international order following the carnage of World War I — the “war to end all wars.” The Paris Peace Conference, a momentous event, is expertly examined by Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919 (Random House). France’s foray into fascism and state […]
It’s a grimy district of four square kilometres in the center of Lodz, a city in central Poland, and it’s tremendously important in the annals of the Holocaust. Filled with a profusion of crumbling prewar tenements, the former Nazi ghetto area is synonymous with the Shoah in Poland. Since a revolt did not break out here, […]
This autumn marks a quarter-century since the demise of the Communist dictatorships in central and eastern Europe. It all began on Sept. 11, 1989, when Hungary, which had opened its border with Austria four months earlier, gave permission for thousands of East Germans who had arrived on “vacations” to leave the country, in order to […]
Syria is the new Afghanistan. Following the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, thousands of foreign volunteers, many of them Muslims from the Arab world, streamed into that country to join American and Saudi-backed fighters battling the Red army. Three decades on, a similar phenomenon is unfolding in Syria as foreigners, mainly […]
Tranquility has belatedly returned to southern Israel and the Gaza Strip now that the Israeli government and Hamas have begun observing an open-ended Egyptian cease fire plan that went into effect on Aug. 26. In other words, we’re back to square one — to the situation that prevailed before the eruption of fullscale war on […]
There are countries that are known to punch above their weight. For better or worse, one of these of late has been the Gulf state of Qatar. A tiny country of 11,571 square kilometers jutting out from the Arabian peninsula into the Persian Gulf, its only land neighbor is Saudi Arabia. Most of its population is […]