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Halle may be a lot more prosperous than it was 20 years ago, but it's still far from being a happy place. Its population has shrunk dramatically, falling by more than one-quarter to 230,000 since 1990 as young people have left to find jobs elsewhere. Despite the exodus, and a birthrate that has dwindled to almost nothing, the town still has an unemployment rate of about 14%, double that in the old West Germany. And as a new economic crisis strikes - this time a global one - Halle isn't immune. Its economy has crashed in the past...
...roads and railways, but it also has superfluous airports, oversized water-treatment plants and a collection of heavily subsidized industrial white elephants, all built at the taxpayers' expense. "Floodlit sheep meadows," grumbles Reiner Holznagel, managing director of the German Federation of Taxpayers. "In every district you can find projects that make you shake your head." Among the most egregious: the now-bankrupt firm Cargolifter, which tried to build a modern Zeppelin airship with tens of millions of government dollars. (See pictures of the Top 10 scared traders...
...obsolete mammoths off its hands. But welcome as the newcomers were, they quickly shuttered the old plants and hired only a fraction of the workers - about 20% of those who had previously toiled at Buna and Leuna. Unemployment soared as high as 30%. People started to leave Halle to find work elsewhere. Neustadt's population fell from 90,000 in 1990 to about 47,000 in 2007, the last year for which figures are available, and some of those depressing apartment blocks have now been knocked down...
...Sondheim himself. Director Nunn compares the lyricist's poetic gift and humanism to Shakespeare's. Both men, he says, are "fascinated with the contradictions of human beings, with their complexities and ambiguities. As with Shakespeare, there's heightened poetic expression in Sondheim, but when you dig into it, you find it's in touch with something real." The song "Send in the Clowns" contains not just pretty lyrics, but musings perfectly pitched for the character of Desirée, a glamorous actress pushing 40 and facing what may be her last chance for love. "The cadence, the vocabulary, the incidences...
...living in difficult times, but we must avoid seeking scapegoats during the economic crisis. In the end the only thing that will get us out of this mess is to pull together legal and illegal, foreign worker and local. Where do you think these deported immigrants will find jobs back home? In Mexico, perhaps with the drug cartels south of the border. Or why not with outfits like the pirates off the coast of Somalia? Let's not forget that a newly recruited extremist, or a new mercenary serving smugglers and drug lords, is much worse than an honest, hardworking...