I’m a correspondent covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I’m drawn to culture that reflects the history of the place or people I write about, especially in ways that turn my understanding of them on its head.

Here are five things I’ve been looking at, reading, watching and listening to →

This is a bizarre and rollicking assassin revenge story that is just lots of fun. It really evokes a sense of the heady days of excitement and upheaval after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This exhibit at Munich’s Jewish Museum looks at the history of the Jews who stayed in Germany, or fled there from other parts of Europe, in the wake of World War II. Inside displacement camps, they made soccer teams, Yiddish newspapers and art in the country that had just sought to destroy them. A fascinating chapter of postwar history I knew nothing about.

See more from the exhibit here.

I am in awe of Jenny Erpenbeck’s writing. Like all her works, her latest novel is lyrical, yet sparse. Her stories are as much about what is not said as what lies on the page. This story of a torrid affair is not just the story of two lovers, but of the dying days of former East Germany.

Whenever gray Berlin winters are getting me down, or a German official sniffs some disdainful comment at me, I brush it off by scrolling through this Instagram account devoted to making fun of Berlin, Germans and the foreigners who chose to live among them. Whatever my complaint, it’s guaranteed someone has already made a meme about it that I can laugh at.

See the account.

This duo — a Hamburg-born German and a Syrian immigrant — blends traditional Arab songs and electronic beats with ethereal results. Collaborations like this are compelling to me at a time when hostility toward immigrants in Europe is surging.

Here are some more favorites.

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