Oh, dear...

91-Year-Old Woman Fills in $89,000 Artwork She Thought Was Crossword Puzzle

An 91-year-old woman is under investigation after filling in the blank spaces on an $89,000 crossword art piece she thought was an actual crossword puzzle.

The art piece at Nuremberg’s Neues Museum, called “Reading-work-piece,” is a work of art that closely resembles a crossword. It was made by avant garde artist Arthur Koepcke and features the phrase “insert words.” The woman told police she thought those words were an invitation to start filling in answers to the clues, Suddeutsche Zeitung reported. She also said that the museum did not put up a notice telling visitors not to write on the crossword.

Good for them!

These Rad Retirees Recreate Their Favorite Movie Scenes For An Epic Calendar

Back in January, there was a retirement community called The Contilia Retirement Group in Essen, Germany that made one of the coolest calendars I had ever seen. The premise? Recreate iconic movie scenes, ranging from Rocky to Titanic.

. You can view several others calendar shots here, and download it if you'd like.

This was the story YKWIA told me about

I remember it was awful, and that we discussed something about what should happen to the people involved, but I tried to block it out of my mind because it was just, well, awful:

German artists under fire for guillotine sheep online poll: Two German artists risk prosecution on animal cruelty charges after constructing a guillotine and asking people to vote online on whether to behead a sheep

German artists spark uproar with sheep execution vote

In a video posted online, the two men - dressed in white overalls - held the terrified sheep behind the killing machine as its deadly blade repeatedly chopped downward.

On the "Die Guillotine" project's website, the public was invited to vote on whether the sheep gets to live or die

If the vote goes against the sheep, they plan to kill it with the guillotine live on the Internet. That's just sick, to taunt the sheep with the guillotine. And I'm sure that many well meaning people have voted against doing this to the sheep (so far they are leading those voting for death), but by voting, they're feeding into this. This is not art. This is animal cruelty, and if they follow through, I think they should definitely prosecute to the full extent of the law. Poor sheep. And while several animal rights groups have expressed doubt that they will carry it out, these two men seem to give no thought to the well-being of the animal. There's no guarantee they wouldn't just go through with it anyway.

I wonder how these two people would feel if the tables were turned and their fate was left to a vote? But that would be a reality show taken too far, right?

PS 5/3/12: What is it about German artists? There was this story just a few days later:

Court stops German artist strangling puppies to death on stage: Scrapped performance at Berlin theatre was said by its creator to be a protest against killing of dogs in Alaska and Spain

Titled Death and Metamorphosis, the performance was to take place this week at a small theatre in Spandau. The artist – who has not been identified – planned to use cable ties to strangle the dogs, followed by a brief meditation accompanied by funeral procession music and a giant gong.

An interesting look at the persistence of anti-Semitism in Germany from the Middle Ages to the Nazi era

The Persistence of Hate: German communities that murdered Jews in the Middle Ages were more likely to support the Nazis 600 years later

Another story out of Germany of a woman doing what she can to confront the past

Nazi family history put to good use by Inge Franken

Inge Franken is a sprightly 70-year-old who lives in an apartment on two floors in Berlin. She has a task, a mission. She tours schools educating children about her - and their - country's dark history.

She shows the class a photograph of two young boys - they can barely be 10 - who pose in Nazi regalia, and she seeks reaction. One has his chest puffed out in pride, the other seems reluctant and shame-faced. It is for today's children to decide which they would rather be.

If the school visit goes well, she says, a child will say that he or she is going home to ask the parents and grandparents what happened in the war in their family. It makes Inge feel that she has set people thinking and asking.

She was spurred to this mission by her own past, a past hidden in a suitcase - and her mother's mind.

Inge Franken, having made a painful discovery about her own father, has confronted the silence many of her generation and those after have had from their parents and grandparents about the war. By doing so, she not only helps bring the truth to light, but also teaches the young how ordinary people got caught up in the Nazi war machine. It can be very painful to discover someone in your family participated in horrific things. On the other hand, it causes people to really think and may prevent something similar from happening again. If only she could send her message worldwide, one on one.

"Freedom of speech ends where hatred and racism begin"

German woman devoted to removing Nazi graffiti

Irmela Mensah-Schramm stopped abruptly at the crudely sprayed swastika on the wall of a pedestrian underpass. Whipping out a can of spray paint from her cotton tote bag, she quickly made short work of it, turning the neo-Nazi symbol into a nondescript black splotch.

For the 65-year-old retiree, it's all in a day's work.

"I scratched off the first sticker in 1986, at a bus stop in front of my house," Mensah-Schramm said as she ambled through the streets armed with her spray paint and metal scraper. It demanded "Freedom for Rudolf Hess" — Adolf Hitler's deputy, who at the time was still alive and in prison in Berlin.

I agree with her statement in the title of this post. I can understand that some property owners might be upset because in covering Nazi symbols, she is defacing property, but her heart is definitely in the right place. Good luck to her.

So much for German engineering

German retiree bricks himself into his cellar: After several days, trapped man knocks down neighbor's wall to escape

Poor guy. This is going to be hard to live down.

A couple of other interesting historical stories from the Times

The thriving Roman town that slipped into oblivion

I find it interesting that they know the structures of the town, right at the heart of Boadicea's Inceni tribe--'by using a high-resolution geophysical survey and a caesium vapour magnetometer, which measures the changes caused by human activity in the magnetic field of the Earth, they can see beneath the soil without having to excavate.' That's astounding.

Then there's this:

Did Unity Mitford have Adolf Hitler’s love child?

It's mostly a retelling of some rumours that would be difficult to prove, since most everyone who could verify it is dead at this point. But it is an intriguing thought. What would you do if you'd let a quiet life and when you were elderly discovered you were Hitler's son or daughter? It would be stunning. And of course, there's no reason to believe that a child of Hitler's would be evil incarnate, although it would be interesting to see what genetic proclivities might be seen.

The Mitfords themselves were varied in their tastes. Two (including Unity) were connected to fascism. One was a proponent of communism who married Winston Churchill's nephew. One married a man who later became a duke. Another was related to John F Kennedy by marriage. They definitely come across as having strong intellectual passions. Unity Mitford was so overwrought by word of her homeland declaring war on Hitler that she shot herself in the head (she survived as an invalid).