Burkhard Bilger

Feb 10, 2025 | newyorker.com | Burkhard Bilger |Brian Finke

Hell Week had come for the Marching Colonels. It was late July in eastern Kentucky, and a hazy sun hung over Bourbon County High School. In the parking lot behind the band room, the asphalt was hot enough to melt chewing gum. The woodwinds were gathered there in a ragged circle, waiting for the metronome to set the tempo, while the trumpets and trombones stumbled around on the football field below.

May 28, 2024 | rsn.org | Burkhard Bilger

After the Berlin Wall fell, agents of East Germany’s secret police frantically tore apart their records. Archivists have spent the past thirty years trying to restore them. The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in 1961, smiled as if he knew her. He was a “rather handsome gentleman,” she recalls, though he would have been hard to pick out in a crowd.

May 26, 2024 | newyorker.com | Burkhard Bilger

The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in 1961, smiled as if he knew her. He was a “rather handsome gentleman,” she recalls, though he would have been hard to pick out in a crowd. He brought her greetings from East Berlin, from a woman whom Genin had met on a recent visit there—a secretary in one of the Arab embassies. He wondered if Genin would like to join him for coffee the next day.

May 26, 2024 | flipboard.com | Burkhard Bilger

Having failed to find a buyer, Berlin's city council is now offering to give away the former Nazi leader's mansion on the outskirts of the German …

May 18, 2024 | newyorker.com | Burkhard Bilger

George Miller’s film career began with barely averted violence. In 1971, when he was a twenty-six-year-old medical student in Sydney, Australia, he took a job at a construction site while he waited to start an internship at a hospital. One day, he was standing next to another worker when a brick fell from fourteen floors above them and hit the ground between them with a crack. “This was in the days before helmets,” Miller told me recently.