For over two decades, I taught opera appreciation courses at the Volkshochschule Frankfurt (VHS), the city’s adult education center. I started the German-language Opern-Gespräche in 1999, and added the English-language Frankfurt OperaTalk in 2002. Both these courses were still going strong in March 2020, when they were abruptly ended by Read More …
Mehr als zwei Jahrzehnte lang, von Oktober 1999 bis März 2020, habe ich einen Kurs namens Opern-Gespräche an der Volkshochschule Frankfurt geleitet. In diesem Kurs haben wir — nicht nur ich! — uns mit fachkundigen Gästen aus dem Opernbetrieb über das reichhaltige Frankfurter Operngeschehen unterhalten. Die Diskussionen waren fast immer Read More …
The Oldenburg adult education center, the Volkshochschule (VHS), celebrated its seventieth anniversary in 2016. But that didn’t stop it from celebrating its hundredth anniversary just four years later, in 2020. The reason for this discrepancy is that the two anniversaries were counting from different founding dates. The original founding was Read More …
Like every other self-respecting German city, Dresden has a large and active adult education center, called the Volkshochschule (VHS). My lead photo shows their old building at Schilfweg 3, in the Dresden district of Seidnitz. This is where they had their main office and some of their classrooms for many Read More …
The photos in this post are by a professional photographer, Rolf Oeser, who happens to be a long-time participant in one of my English courses at the Frankfurt Adult Education Center (VHS). Rolf’s photos appear nearly every day in the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the city’s three daily newspapers. He Read More …
Recently I counted through and discovered that I have been to at least a hundred and fifty Adult Education Centers in Germany, either to lead workshops or do presentations or to speak with their IT people and have a look at the database system they were using. A hundred and Read More …
Künzelsau is a town of 14,925 people located 92 km northeast of Stuttgart and 123 km west of Nürnberg. The name Künzelsau means Cunzilio’s (Conrad’s) meadow — not his sow, as I used to think before I realized where the syllables should be divided. Actually, I wasn’t the only one who Read More …
Located next to the Liederhalle concert hall, the Literaturhaus is in a listed building (from a bygone century, the 20th) that was once the headquarters of the engineering and technology company Robert Bosch. After renovation, the Literature House was opened in 2001 as a meeting place, especially for those interested Read More …
This half-timbered Old Weighing Station (Alte Waage) was first built in 1553 and went through various phases of use, neglect, re-design and mis-use over the centuries, including a seven-year stint as the headquarters of the “Hitler Youth” from 1937 to 1944, before it was completely destroyed, along with the rest Read More …
Hello, my name’s Don. I’m an American living in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where I teach, ride a bicycle and go to the opera. I became an opera fan at the tender age of fifty-one. That was the year the Frankfurt opera house re-opened, after a long closure due to Read More …