august: cleveland county

Happy Neuer! pic.twitter.com/FKyUU4tEeY

— FC Bayern München (@FCBayern) December 31, 2015

The players are slowly but surely falling into place for the 2017 elections. Angela Merkel was already reelected head of her party; now the Greens have followed. The Greens voted Katrin Goering-Eckhardt as their top candidate for the chancellorship with Cem Oezdemir as the second. (Check out this Wikipedia page for an abbreviated explanation of the Realo/Fundi split in the Greens.) Martin Schulz, fresh off a stint as EU President, has been selected as the SPD candidate.

The NSU trial, which has been going on since May 2013, may finally be drawing to a close as Beate Zschaepe is running out of options. This trial started after five members of the National Socialist Underground, a right-wing terrorist organization, were accused of ten murders in Germany.

I'm very sad to see the United States's Ambassador to Germany, John Emerson, leave. I always felt safe in Germany, partly because I knew there was a great diplomatic team keeping things going! Here's an interview with Ambassador Emerson and his family that was on the morning magazine, MoMa.

The fancy new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport is a catastrophe that just won't seem to end. It was announced this month that the airport, originally scheduled to open in 2012, won't be opening this year. This means that the city's two tiny airports must continue to operate until 2018 at the earliest. The Berliner Zeitung ran an editorial called "Who Even Wants the BER Anymore?," which pointed out that the project has known about its problems for years and is a political liability.

The Women's March also took place in Germany on January 21. In Frankfurt, a mixture of Americans and Germans marched for women's rights - this article is in English!

This article about motherhood and feminism in East Germany was very interesting. It talks about the mythical "Ost-Frau" who could quickly return to full-time work after having a child and fully take care of the house as well. Effects of this can still be seen today - 1 in 2 children born in eastern Germany go to a daycare as opposed to only 1 in 3 children in western Germany.

One of my favorite historians, Timothy Garton Ash, won the Aachener Karlspreis for his work against populism and for democracy!

I read Hollywood and Hitler this month - it was so interesting to see how Hollywood reacted to Nazism and inspired me to watch some clips from movies in the '30s. "Inside Nazi Germany" from the March of Time was especially interesting as it was made with Nazi permission, but included some clips stolen when minders weren't paying attention.

In lighter news, I have a podcast recommendation: Ferngespraech, where two best friends talk about living in separate countries.

I just finished reading Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach. Tina Fey suggested that everyone read Riefenstahl's autobiography, but my library system doesn't have a copy of it so I settled for another biography. The TL;DR of Riefenstahl's life is that she made Triumph of the Will among other films for the NSDAP and spent the rest of her life (she died at 101) denying that she knew what the party was up to.

Why you should read it now: Riefenstahl put herself and her career before literally everything. She did whatever it took to get what she wanted, then pretended to be blind to the consequences of her actions. We need to remember that many actions cannot be justified, and history will judge us if we fail to intervene.

This is Paradise: My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang does what it says on the tin. The author recounts his experiences growing up in North Korea before and during the famine in the '90s, which ultimately resulted in his family's escape to South Korea via China. I found the account of North Korean schools especially fascinating and horrifying.

Why you should read it now: The world cannot forget North Korea. People are suffering under a horrible dictatorship which stifles every freedom imaginable. The United States cannot only put itself first while we have the power to influence the rest of the world for good.

The File and The Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash are two of my all-time favorite books. The File is about how the East German security system functioned, while The Magic Lantern depicts the final days of dictatorships in Eastern Europe and shows how the protests were successful.

Why you should read it now: Some people think protesting can't do any good. They forget that peaceful protests in Leipzig and across Eastern Europe in the 1980s helped end a dictatorship. Never let anyone tell you that protests are inconsequential - those people have forgotten their history.
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Still to be read: Prague Winter by Madeleine Albright, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, When the Earth Was Young by David Yeadon, and Without You, There is No Us  by Suki Kim.

Shouts out to my local library, which has handled my many books on hold without annoyance. I kinda want to use the hashtag #ResistanceReading for this project, but I'm on the fence. What other books should I read as part of my 2017 education?