Worldcrunch: Film Captures "Beautiful" Paradox Of 1945 Berlin Summer

“The summer of 1945 was nature’s gift to us,” said actor Günter Lamprecht, remembering the first few months of peace after the war. “It was beautiful, a perfect summer.”

Lamprecht, who was a 15-year-old student at the time, said he felt that the bright weeks between June and August of 1945 were “heaven’s compensation for what I had gone through, for all the nonsensical deaths of the last few years.

”This mood in Berlin, the capital city of the former Reich, which was almost completely destroyed by Western and Soviet air strikes, is reflected in the film. Producer Konstantin von zur Mühlen, who later discovered the film, digitally remastered it in high definition.

Read the article

Worldcrunch: Catholics And Protestants, Doctrines Clash On Gay Marriage

After heavy debate in 1996, Germany's Evangelical Church, which encompasses most of the country's Protestants, declared itself in support of blessing homosexual couples, as long as there's a clear distinction with marriage. It went even further in 2013, when the first German homosexual couple was married during an Protestant wedding ceremony in Seligenstadt.

Last weekend, the leaders of the Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandendburg and Schlesischen Oberlausitz decided to align the wedding ceremonies for homosexual and heterosexual couples, as the third national church in Germany. The justification: "The Bible knows the wealth of the formation of a relationship between two persons. It reflects the rich and God-given facets of sexuality in love."

The decision was approved by a large majority. Two days later, the synod of the evangelical church in Norway also decided that homosexual couples could marry. Even the Old Catholic Church in Germany, which separated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1870 after the dispute about the pope's infallibility, began allowing wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples in 2014.

read the article