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The Berlin Spectator is an English-language news and features site about Germany. This publication is being made for expatriates, migrants, people around the world and of course Germans.
In articles, features and video reports, we will cover the most relevant news from Germany, while not forgetting about cultural and social subjects either. The expatriates themselves will be in the center of our attention too. This publication will also introduce German personalities.
Yet another task for The Berlin Spectator is to explain Germany and the Germans to those who have just moved to the country or are planning to do so, and to everyone else interested. On top of all of the above, entertainment will be an important aspect.
We have our very own way of bringing the story across, as you will see. At this stage, we are still in the process of setting up this site and developing it further. Please bear with us.
Imanuel Marcus is the driving force behind this project and the editor-in-chief. He used to be a radio presenter and editor before becoming a correspondent for German and Swiss radio stations in former Yugoslavia and the United States of America.
Some four years ago, he returned to journalism after a long break, by reporting about the unfolding refugee crisis from Croatia and Bulgaria. Also he got into writing for online media in Eastern Europe. Back in Germany, The Berlin Spectator is the project he is jump-starting as we speak.
We thank you for your interest. In order to support us, please keep on following and reading The Berlin Spectator. And please spread articles or features you like by posting them on social media or forwarding them to your friends and family. Thank you very much indeed.
In case you want to support this publication financially as well, please visit our donations page. In the long term, a publication like this one will only be able to thrive and survive with income from advertising and contributions.
Thank you yet again for visiting The Berlin Spectator. Please feel free to contact us with any comments or questions you might have.
Imanuel Marcus, Founder/Editor-in-Chief
Life & Work
Bio:
In 1987, I started my very first job, at a local radio station in southern Germany. Within a few years, I was the head-of-music, an editor, presenter and news editor, sometimes working for up to three radio stations at once. All of this led to me becoming a correspondent within Germany.
Starting in 1992, I was a reporter in former Yugoslavia, covering the war in Bosnia, along with those so-called peace negotiations in Geneva, for virtually all independent radio stations in Germany and some in Switzerland.
In 1996, I moved to Washington D.C. in order to become a correspondent there. I stayed five and a half years, during which I covered basically everything. Most of it was politics. In addition, I dealt with NASA activities, plane crashes, other catastrophes, Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys and a lot more.
Many years later, in September of 2015, the radio department within the German Press Agency (dpa) sent me to Croatia, where I reported about the huge influx of refugees on the Balkans.
Exactly 20 years after the first free elections in Bosnia, which occurred in 1996, I was in Croatia again. This time, the refugees came from war-torn regions, located thousands of miles away. Two decades before, I had covered the plight of refugees at the same spot before. Back then, they were Bosnians fleeing the Serbian Army and paramilitary killer squads, as well as members of the Serbian minority in Croatia, who were trying to flee Eastern Slavonia, before the Croatian Army got there.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).