News

** 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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----We welcome the state visit this week of the President of the Federal Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and his wife Elke Budenbender. This is the first state visit of the German head of state to Britain since 1998. It follows the state visit of King Charles to Germany in 2023, when he famously addressed the Bundestag in German, and the visit earlier this year of the new German chancellor Friedrich Merz when a new bi-lateral agreement of cooperation was signed at Kensington Palace. In October this year in Bristol we celebrated 35 years of German reunification and were able to look back...

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---- This is how our Hannover friends  reflected on their latest visit to Bristol in their latest newsletter: Our trip to Bristol with 13 people from August 6-11 was a complete success. Many thanks to our friends in Bristol for the fantastic preparation! Unfortunately, four other participants had to cancel at short notice due to illness; otherwise, we would have been 17. On Thursday, August 7, we were welcomed by the Lord Mayor, the Lord Lieutenant, and the members of Bristol Hannover Council at Council House. After the welcome at the town hall, the Joint Board Meeting took place, where, in addition...

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