Milwaukee Ballet Artistic Director Michael Pink has often said that the company's winter and spring programs of contemporary one-act ballets are designed to provide the dancers with exciting challenges. Freed to be themselves...

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For this reason and others, readers continue to seek out books recounting tales from Nazi Germany's mass extermination of Jews, the Romani (gypsies), homosexuals and other groups in Europe in the 1930s and '40s. One of the latest...

The US Women's National Team played a World Cup game today near Heidelberg, Germany. That also happens to be pretty near Rammstein US military base. And it's 4th of July weekend. So after their first goal, the 11 starters stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a line and saluted. It was a nice moment. However, the ESPN photographer apparently missed the picture and ran this one instead.   Did I mention t...

So this is what it’s like to go home for the first time. The patches of woods amid gentle slopes of farmland seem familiar, but the primary crop grows on vines that can extend more than 20 feet skyward.

German Jews were a small but significant minority, contributing greatly to their country’s culture until they were murdered or driven to exile by Hitler. Emil Fackenheim escaped shortly before the outbreak of World War II and became a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and a rabbi serving the local Jewish community . . .

Johann Sebastian Bach was no idle dilettante, penning music here and there when the elusive muse whispered in his ear. As cantor at Leipzig’s Thomas School, he was part of the state-supervised Lutheran Church bureaucracy of 18th-century Germany; his gifts as a composer were given form by the steady regimen of his official responsibilities...

In 1870, immigrants from the Kaszuby region in northwestern Poland and Germany took up residence on a peninsula between the Milwaukee and Kinnickinnic rivers, finding it a suitable substitute for the Hel Peninsula on the Baltic coast. After digging a channel to create an isolated island, they lived for many years on this small patch of land, subsisting on the fishing industry which was not only a food source, but also made up their entire economy. By 1920, however, the city had begun to commandeer Jones Island for use in the development of a more lucrative and industrialized harbor. Considered “squatters,” the Kaszubian and German immigrants were forced to move from the area, their presence and impact on the city largely forgotten.

The munificent title of Tod Wodicka’s debut novel, All Shall Be Well and All Shall Be Well, and All manner of Things Shall Be Well hints at the desperate optimism of it’s wretched protagonist: Burt Hecker, a mead-swilling, tunic-sporting 20th century idler stuck in a medieval past. From his home in Berlin, Germany, Wodicka talks about his new book.

A startup dating service from Massachusetts offers the usual questionnaires about likes and dislikes, but bases compatibility specifically on how one person smells to another. Eric Holzle’s ScientificMatch.com claims to test each person’s “major histocompatibility complex” (MHC) genes...