News

** Thanks to our committee member Ian Turner, a variation on our Annual Dinner has taken place. Sunday lunch was arranged at No 5 The Beach in Clevedon for members of our association and also some of the members of the Clevedon Twinning group. Clevedon is twinned with four cities, one of which is Ettlingen in south Germany. In contrast to Bristol, the group all work together on events and visits.  The food was first class and of a varied selection.  We needed to walk it off afterwards. We had some lively discussions on various topics of interest to both our organisation, including...

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** A small number of members went to Oxford recently to see ‘Brecht on Love and War’, a multi-media set of musical performances, songs and presentations, with the Bauhaus Band and Singers, Marc Almond and young artistes from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.  The show, presented by Tom Kuhn and John Harle, took place in the Sheldonian Theatre of Oxford University, with its wonderful painted ceiling. John Harle The programme included songs from musicals by Brecht and Kurt Weill, as well as some readings of Brecht’s poems and songs, video art from Oxford art students, and Scenes...

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** Creative and professional writing students from the University of the West of England and members of the Bristol-Hannover exchange have taken part in a sharing memories event at City Hall, coordinated by Local Learning with the Bristol-Hannover Council. The stories spanned the many decades of the special relationship between the two cities. They were stories of long-lasting friendships, youthful exuberance and lives rebuilt after the devastation of war. What shone through all the memories – whatever decade they were from –  was the empathy and connection that the Bristol-Hannover...

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** The latest Bristol Hannover Council film projection was fascinating. It was shot in 1931 and produced in 1932 by Döring-Film-Werke. Although it was a silent film and in black and white it made an impressive impact. It was lost during the Second World War, eventually found in the GDR Film Archives and digitised in 2010-11. The film aimed to show how Hannover had developed and grown over time. The outline maps at the beginning were an effective way of showing how the small settlement on the banks of the Leine spread, gained and lost city walls as it grew and evolved into a thriving early...

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** After a gap of many years since the last rugby exchange between Hannover and Bristol, finally SV Odin made it – and how: with 75 players and partners, including 28 aged between 15 and 16 plus a few players from other clubs. The original exchange, 30 years ago, was organised between Horst Josch of Odin, present on this tour, and his old friend David Perkins of QEH, who sadly died in September 2022 and so did not see the resumption of the exchange which was so dear to him. The SV Odin tour bus Arriving overnight in a double-decker bus on Saturday, March 25 and led by Director of Rugby...

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** An impressive turnout of BHC members gathered at Stoke Lodge on March 29 to hear a fascinating talk by Neil Taylor on the German Democratic Republic. Neil is a well-known travel writer and tour guide. He visited the GDR and other Communist Bloc countries frequently in the 1970s and 1980s. His talk described how the GDR evolved from the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany and was led throughout much of its existence by a group of German Communists who had lived in exile in Moscow and were disciples of Stalin. Neil traced the main developments in GDR history starting with the 1953 uprising....

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** Life in the GDR was the common thread running through this short film season. Politics could have been a heavy and intrusive presence in the telling of these retrospective stories but their very humanity shines through in spite of the inevitable pressures. Good Bye Lenin! was about a woman who, having had a stroke and resulting coma, is allowed, when she wakes up after the Wall comes down, to believe that the ‘normal’ GDR life is still going on, in case the changes cause her to have a relapse. Goodbye Lenin - floating past the window . . . from the film To achieve this, her children...

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** A group of BHIC members travelled up to London on March 25 to see the Royal Academy exhibition of four modernist painters - Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin. The four were women artists, mainly German or living in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. We were fortunate to have a pre-briefing from Colin Evans before the event which helped us all to place modernism in its historical context. The paintings were all interesting and worth seeing. Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Anna Roslund, 1917 Inevitably some artists made more...

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** An enthusiastic group of members and friends met to celebrate Rosenmontag, final celebrations before the privations of Lent, in the old style on February 20 at the Black Swan in Westbury-on-Trym. Wearing funny hats, and in one case a wig, listening to and joining in singing Karnevalsmusik, we all had a very enjoyable time (see pictures). The plus this year was being able to watch the Karneval processions in both Köln and Düsseldorf on satellite TV, which made it all much more real and colourful, and we are grateful to the pub staff for setting it up for us. ###################  

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** England may have been knocked out in the quarter-finals of the FIFA World Cup in December but BHC committee member Jonathan Keir Radnedge came home from Qatar as a winner. He was among a number of veteran sports journalists presented with a replica of the World Cup trophy (picture above)  in acknowledgement of the 15 finals tournaments at which he has reported – ever since England’s triumph over West Germany in 1966. The ceremony in Doha was organised by world football federation FIFA and the international sports press association (AIPS) and the presentations were undertaken by the 2002...

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