Blog Archives

** A team from BHC competed in the annual BITA quiz at the Black Swan on Monday, April 27. BHC achieved a respectable third place but failed once again to oust Bordeaux from the podium. Janet Carswell's encyclopedic knowledge of the geography of the Middle East certainly came in handy but sadly the team was let down by its lack of knowledge of horror movies! Thanks to Viv and Rob for organising it.                                         IAN TURNER ####  

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The Stradling Gallery on Park Row has a new exhibition showcasing the link between Bauhaus leading artist Marcel Breuer and BHC founding father Crofton Gane, as brought together by Ken Stradling in his unique collection. The Deputy Lord Mayor Cllr. Andrew Varney led the first of two groups of members, who were treated to a fulsome history of the collection related with great enthusiasm by curator Tanya Martin. The Deputy Lord Mayor with Bristol-Hannover Council members viewing Bauhaus artefacts Tanya explained how Marcel Breuer came to Bristol in the 1930s to escape Nazi Germany and became...

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** On Wednesday, April 15 the German Ambassador Her Excellency Susanne Baumann visited Bristol. A busy day included visits to Bristol University and its Max Planck Institute, the Bristol City Council and Airbus. The last event on the itinerary was a talk which Frau Baumann gave at Bristol University. The talk was jointly hosted by the Bristol-Hannover Council and the Bristol Anglo-German Society and ably orchestrated by Mark Bright-Allinson. The audience included members of both societies, as well as invited guests from Anglo-German twinning associations in the region, including representatives...

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** On Thursday, March 19, BHC members took part in an online panel session on the Kindertransport in British Memory arranged by the BGA and the Leo Baeck Institute in London. The focus was on children from Nazi Germany who arrived in this country as refugees in 1938-39. This subject has come to public prominence in recent years through books and films like One Life, which focused on the role of Nicholas Winton and his efforts to rescue Jewish children from occupied Prague. There are now a wide range of sources on Kindertransport in archives like the Wiener Library in London which include...

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** On Wednesday, March 18, BHC members joined BAGS and were treated to an impromptu and informative talk from BAGS chair Mark Bright-Allison on the subject of 'Women in the GDR'. Mark traced the development of thinking on the role of women in East German society to the works of the original socialist theorists like Marx and Engels who believed that the exploitation of women was inherent in the capitalist system and that the real emancipation of women would only come with socialism. Thus the GDR constitution contained explicit statements about the equality of women and laws were passed...

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** A small band of Bristol-Hannover members visited the Werner Bischof exhibition at Lacock Abbey on Saturday, March 8. The exhibition, at the Fox Talbot museum, celebrates the pioneer of colour photography. The gorgeous colour photos on display were some of the first produced in the 1940s on an innovative device called a Devin Tri-Color camera. The images were captured on glass rather than paper and have incredible resolution and beauty. Noteworthy were the photos Bischof took of Germany in 1946 including pictures of a devastated Berlin and Cologne. In addition to the exhibition,...

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** Our now-traditional party celebrating Karneval was a great success again – everyone enjoying the camaraderie, the hats, the food and drinks, not to mention the raffle. We were again able to watch the film of the earlier Karnevalszug through the streets of Cologne, the definitive capital of Karneval on the Rhine. There were the usual Karneval princesses, dancing and standing on shoulders, colourful floats as ever, and here President Trump figured large, unsurprisingly, with floats saying ‘hands off Greenland’ and one with his rear end in view, indicating the obeisance of various world...

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** On February 19 the British-German Association in London hosted a talk between two leading German historians with the title Out of Hitler's Shadow. The subject was the little known London Debt Agreement of 1953, under which most of West Germany's reparations and debt obligations were eradicated or at least postponed indefinitely. Given that West German debts at the time were 10 times the size of its GDP, this was a monumental step in the recovery of West Germany and indeed Western Europe, and one that was to prove as important in its way as the Marshall Plan to economic recovery. Tobias...

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** Congratulations to RISE Youth Dance in achieving a successful application with the Cultural Bridge fund (www.https://www.cultural-bridge.info). RISE has secured funding for Letters From Home, a Bristol–Hannover youth-led dance and storytelling exchange running from April–October 2026. The project focuses on inclusive, community-based activity with young people and local residents in both cities, building on the long-standing Bristol–Hannover relationship. BHC Chair Ian Turner comments: “We are thrilled to get this news. RISE Dance has been one of our real success stories in recent...

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** On Tuesday, January 20, BHC and BAGS held a joint talk about the Bridges of Bristol and the Koenigsberg Problem. The talk was given by Jeff Lucas a local author who has written a book on the subject. Koenigsberg(the present day Russian exclave of Kaliningrad) was a vibrant centre of intellectual study in medieval Germany. The German city was built on two islands created by a river with several crossings between the islands and the surrounding country. It became a diverting pastime for the citizens to see if they could walk across all the bridges but only once. The problem 'went' viral...

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