This time last year, I was busy reading through and analyzing the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. This year, I went for something completely different: I looked at Best Jazz Album 2021 compilations put out by different publications. I started with the NYT and Guardian lists and was surprised that there was no overlap at all between these two lists This made me to look further, but the key finding remains. There are relatively few albums that appear on more that one list – jazz critics appear to embrace diversity. I ended up compiling and comparing five lists with a total of 78 entries in one table, while listening to a very wide range of music. Read More
Category: Weekend Pursuits
An Average Legal Career in Weimar: Because They Know What They Are Doing
Recently, I read two biographies of German lawyers in the early 20th century – a real and a fictitious one. In last week end’s post, I wrote about the historic one, Ronen Steinke’s biography of Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor who brought Auschwitz and – indirectly – Adolf Eichmann to trial, which has recently come out in an English translation. I re-read the Fritz Bauer biography alongside Ottwald’s “Because They Know What They Are Doing. A German justice novel” (Denn sie wissen, was sie tun. Ein deutscher Justizroman), first published in 1931 and newly edited in 2018. Read More
Fritz Bauer: The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial
Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) played a key role in the arrest of Adolf Eichmann and the initiation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. I have written about Fritz Bauer before, first about the Jewish Museum’s exhibition in 2014 and then, amongst other posts, about Fritz Bauer as an Unlikely Movie Hero. As these posts are consistently amongst the most read, you might be interested to learn that an English translation of Ronen Steinke’s acclaimed biography has been published by Indiana University Press. This post contains further reading on Steinke’s book, and here is a link to Kai Ambos’ English-language review. Read More
What Else Happened in November
This month, we had three cases of the week: First, we looked at German Brexit-related cases. The second case dealt with the pitfalls that translations can create under the EU Service Regulation and finally, we reported on the U-turn of the Munich Court of Appeals on the right time for the judicial review of arbitrator appointments. And here’s a recap of other recent developments: Read More