Berlin

Berlin Cathedral is the colloquial name for the Evangelical Oberpfarr- und Domkirche in Berlin, Germany. It is the parish church of the... Evangelical congregation Gemeinde der Oberpfarr- und Domkirche zu Berlin, a member of the umbrella organisation Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia. Its present building is located on Museum Island in the Mitte borough. The Berlin Cathedral had never been a cathedral in the actual sense of that term since it has never been the seat of a bishop. The bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg is based in St. Mary's Church, Berlin, and Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. St. Hedwig's Cathedral serves as seat of Berlin's Roman Catholic metropolitan bishop. The history of today's Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church and its community dates back to 1451.
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The Protestant Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is located in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm in the centre of the Breitscheidplatz. The original... church on the site was built in the 1890s. It was badly damaged in a bombing raid in 1943. The present building, which consists of a church with an attached foyer and a separate belfry with an attached chapel, was built between 1959 and 1963. The damaged spire of the old church has been retained and its ground floor has been made into a memorial hall. Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to name the church in honor of his grandfather Kaiser Wilhelm I. The foundation stone was laid on March 22, 1891, which was Wilhelm I's birthday. The competition for the design was won by Franz Schwechten who planned for a large church to be built in neo-romanesque style, including 2,740 square meters of wall mosaic. The spire was 113 meters in stature and the nave seated over 2,000 people. The church was consecrated on September 1, 1895. By this time of the consecration the entrance hall in the lower section had not been completed.
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The Olympiastadion is a sports stadium in Berlin, Germany. There have been two stadiums on the site: the present facility, and one that is called... the Deutsches Stadion which was built for the aborted 1916 Summer Olympics. Both were designed by members of the same family, the first by Otto March and the second by his son Werner March. It is the second biggest stadium in Germany behind Signal Iduna Park. It is the home stadium of the Hertha Berlin football team playing in the German Bundesliga. The current Olympiastadion was originally built for the 1936 Summer Olympics in the southern part of the Reichssportfeld . During World War II, the area suffered little damage. After the war, the British military occupation used the northern part of the Reichssportfeld as its headquarters until 1994. From 1951 to 2005, the Olympischer Platz had a giant antenna transmitting for all the portable radios in Berlin. Aside from its use as an Olympic stadium, the Olympiastadion has a strong footballing tradition. Historically, it is the ground of club Hertha BSC since 1963. It was also used for 3 matches in the 1974 FIFA World Cup.
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Charlottenburg Palace is the largest palace in Berlin, Germany, and the only royal residency in the city dating back to the time of the Hohenzollern... family. It is located in the Charlottenburg district of the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf burough. The palace was built at the end of the 17th century and was greatly expanded during the 18th century. It includes much exotic internal decoration in baroque and rococo styles. A large formal garden surrounded by woodland was added behind the palace, including a belvedere, a mausoleum, a theatre and a pavilion. During the Second World War, the palace was badly damaged but has since been reconstructed. The palace with its gardens are a major tourist attraction. The original palace was commissioned by Sophie Charlotte, the wife of Friedrich III, Elector of Brandenburg in what was then the village of Lietzow. Originally named Lietzenburg, the palace was designed by Johann Arnold Nering in baroque style. It consisted of one wing and was built in 2½ storeys with a central cupola. The façade was decorated with Corinthian pilasters. On the top was a cornice on which were statues.
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The Gemäldegalerie is an art museum in Berlin, Germany. It holds one of the world's leading collections of European art from the 13th to the... 18th centuries. It is located on Kulturforum west of Potsdamer Platz. Its collection includes masterpieces from such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. It was first opened in 1830, and was rebuilt in 1998. The collection was first located in the Royal Museum located near Lustgarten on Unter den Linden, a famous Berlin street. The collection began largely with the collection of Frederick William I, known as the Great Elector and Frederick the Great. It was along the centuries enlarged not only through acquisitions but also by means of war booty and contains many objects looted from Poland. These were paintings obtained from the royal collections in 1656 , in 1740 and in the beginning of the 19th century , as well as from many confiscations after the Partitions of Poland. The gallery's first director was Gustav Friedrich Waagen.
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The Topography of Terror is an outdoor museum in Berlin, the capital of Germany. It is located in Niederkirchnerstrasse, formerly... Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, on the site of buildings which during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS, the principal instruments of repression during the Nazi era. The buildings that housed the Gestapo and SS headquarters were largely destroyed by Allied bombing during early 1945 and the ruins demolished after the war. The boundary between the American and Soviet zones of occupation in Berlin ran along the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, so the street soon became a fortified boundary, and the Berlin Wall ran along the south side of the street, renamed Niederkirchnerstrasse, from 1961 to 1989. The wall here was never demolished. Indeed the section adjacent to the Topography of Terror site is the longest extant segment of the outer wall . The first exhibitions of the site took place in 1987, as part of Berlin's 750th anniversary.
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The Church of St. Nicholas is the oldest church in Berlin, the capital of Germany. The church is located in the eastern part of central Berlin, the... borough of Mitte. The area around the church, bounded by Spandauer Straße, Rathausstraße, the River Spree and Mühlendamm, is known as the Nikolaiviertel 'Nicholas quarter', and is an area of restored mediaeval buildings . The church was built between 1220 and 1230, and is thus, along with the Church of Our Lady at Alexanderplatz not far away, the oldest church in Berlin. Originally a Roman Catholic church, the Church of St. Nicholas became a Lutheran church after the Protestant Reformation in the Electorate of Brandenburg in 1539. In the 17th century, the prominent hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt was the minister of this church, and the composer Johann Crueger was musical director. The prominent Lutheran theologian Provost Philipp Jacob Spener was the minister of Church of St. Nicholas from 1691 to 1705. From 1913 to 1923 the minister at the Church of St. Nicholas was Wilhelm Wessel, whose son Horst Wessel was later a prominent Nazi: the family lived in the nearby Jüdenstraße.
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Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States.... Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm. He was the inventor of the term "organized sound", a phrase meaning that certain timbres and rhythms can be grouped together, sublimating into a whole new definition of music. Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognised as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. His use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music" while Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound". Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was born in Paris, but when he was only a few weeks old, he was sent to be raised by his great-uncle and other relations in the small town of Le Villars in Burgundy region of France. There he developed a very strong attachment to his maternal grandfather, Claude Cortot.
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Marianne Scharwenka was a German violinist and composer. She was married to the German composer Philipp Scharwenka.

Oliver Rohrbeck is a German television actor and voice actor. As a voice artist, Rohrbeck provided his voice for Ben Stiller, Malcolm-Jamal Warner... as Theodore Huxtable on The Cosby Show and many animated characters. Besides this, he is the German Jupiter Jones in the audio drama series "Three Investigators", which was and still is very popular in Germany. In addition, Rohrbeck works as an audio book and dubbing director, e.g. for the German localizations of The Green Mile, Rush Hour, 8 Mile.
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Hans-Jürgen Schatz is a German television actor.

Juliane Rautenberg is a former German television actress. Rautenberg made her first appearance on German television in 1988 in Die Wicherts von... nebenan. She is probably most famous for appearing in five episodes of Derrick which were aired between 1991 and 1994.
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Flake Lorenz is a German musician, notable as the keyboardist for the Neue Deutsche Härte band Rammstein. He is also known for his role in the... band Feeling B. Lorenz was brought up and still lives in the former Prenzlauer Berg area of Berlin , where he still passes his old school building on the way to band rehearsals. Lorenz is known to be an educated pianist. Flake says he chose to play the piano because a childhood friend of his played from the age of three. His parents sent him to a music school. Flake "began by painting the keys on a window ledge" and "practiced one-half year on the window ledge". His parents bought him a piano for one hundred East German marks for his 15th birthday. Flake became "addicted" to rock and roll as a boy. He stopped his lessons in order to play with his father's jazz records. "When I joined my first band", Flake has said, "I noticed that I couldn't play modern music. I still can't!" At the age of sixteen, he apprenticed as a toolmaker, an apparently short-lived career. He has a brother who is four years older.
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Drafi Deutscher was a German singer and composer of Sinti origin. He was born Drafi Franz Richard Deutscher in Berlin. His best known song was the... 1965 Schlager "Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht" which sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. It later featured in the 2006 film Beerfest, during the Oktoberfest scene. Between 1964 and 1966 Deutscher had a lot of hits in Germany, for example Shake Hands , Keep Smiling , Cinderella Baby , Heute male ich dein Bild, Cindy-Lou After his 1965 hit Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht, his career in Germany was in full swing until shaken by a 1967 verdict for public indecency after he had urinated from a balcony while drunk, in plain view of a group of schoolchildren watching him from street level. He also composed several worldwide hits for Boney M, Nino de Angelo and Tony Christie. In the 1980s he achieved success with his duo, Mixed Emotions, together with Oliver Simon.
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Nastassja Kinski is a German-born American-based actress who has appeared in more than 60 films. Her starring roles include her Golden Globe... Award-winning portrayal of the title character in Tess and her roles in two erotic films , as well as parts in Wim Wenders' films The Wrong Move; Paris, Texas; and Faraway, So Close!. Richard Avedon's photo of her, nude with a large python, was marketed as a poster. Born in Berlin as Nastassja Aglaia Nakszyński on 24 January 1961, Kinski is the daughter of the German actor Klaus Kinski from his marriage to actress Ruth Brigitte Tocki - this makes her half sister to Pola Kinski and Nikolai Kinski. Her parents divorced in 1968. Kinski rarely saw her father after the age of 10. Kinski and her mother struggled financially. They eventually lived in a commune in Munich. Kinski's career began in Germany where she started as a model. After this the German New Wave actress Lisa Kreuzer placed her in the role of the dumb Mignon in Wim Wenders' film The Wrong Move.
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Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer. Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself,... professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and provided her a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest paid actresses of the era. Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939, and throughout World War II she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth greatest female star of all time. Dietrich was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich on 27 December 1901 in Schöneberg, a district of Berlin, Germany.
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Frederick II was a King in Prussia and a King of Prussia from the Hohenzollern dynasty. In his role as a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire,... he was also Elector of Brandenburg. He was in personal union the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel. He became known as Frederick the Great and was nicknamed Der Alte Fritz . Interested primarily in music and philosophy and not the arts of war during his youth, Frederick unsuccessfully attempted to flee from his authoritarian father, Frederick William I, with childhood friend Hans Hermann von Katte, whose execution he was forced to watch after they had been captured. Upon ascending to the Prussian throne, he attacked Austria and claimed Silesia during the Silesian Wars, winning military acclaim for himself and Prussia. Near the end of his life, Frederick physically connected most of his realm by conquering Polish territories in the First Partition of Poland. Frederick was a proponent of enlightened absolutism.
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Dora Gerson was a Jewish German cabaret singer and motion picture actress of the silent film era who was murdered with her family at Auschwitz... concentration camp. Born Dorothea Gerson in Berlin, Germany, Gerson began her career as a touring singer and actress in the Holtorf Tournee Truppe alongside actor Mathias Wieman in Germany where she met and married her first husband, film director Veit Harlan. The couple married in 1922 and divorced in 1924. Harlan would eventually direct the highly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß by request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Harlan's niece later married the American Jewish filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. In 1920, Gerson was cast to appear in the successful film adaptation of the Karl May penned novel Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses and later followed that same year in another May adaptation entitled Die Todeskarawane . Both films included Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the cast. Both films are now considered lost films. Gerson continued to perform as a popular cabaret singer throughout the 1920s as well as acting in films.
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Anaid Iplicjian is a German actress. Her family is from Armenia. After studying at the Mozarteum Academy in Salzburg she has been a member of the... Graz , Wiesbaden, the State Theatre Hannover and the Burgtheater companies. A free lance actress since 1970, she has been working on Frankfurt/Main, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Vienna stages. Also appearing many times in German and Austrian television. She was the presenter of the Eurovision Song Contest 1957.
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