Welcome to the Homepage of the German Consulate in Sydney
Dear visitors,
this website offers you a high range of different topics about Germany. You will find information about our consular services, the German culture and education as well as German-related news, events and links. We are also constantly striving to improve our website. Your ideas and opinions are welcome.
Your Consulate team
The general public in Sydney followed with interest and sympathy the celebrations surrounding the 20th anniversary of the down fall of the Berlin wall. A panel discussion jointly organized by the Consulate General and the Goethe Institut and chaired by renowned Sydney journalist Richard Glover highlighting the European dimension of events 20 years ago, featured inter alia the Honourable John Aquilina, Leader of the House and Head of the NSW Parliament's friends of the EU association and the Challis Prof. of Jurisprudence, Wojciech Sadurski.
More
As a bulwark of concrete and barrier fences the Wall cut through Berlin for a length of over 43 kilometres – dividing the city and the whole of Germany. Now, 20 years after the fall of the wall on 9 November 1989, the symbol of almost three decades of German division will fall again on the same date, but this time it will be purely symbolic.
“Festival of Freedom”
“The Robbers”, “William Tell”, “Mary Stuart”: his powerful plays still live on and have made him one of the internationally best known German thinkers and poets. Alongside Goethe, the most important representative of Classicism and Storm and Stress is also one of the most often performed dramatists in Germany. “Sire, grant us freedom of thought,” he demanded in “Don Carlos”, two years before the French Revolution. And to this day Schiller’s central themes of freedom and oppression continue to fascinate and fire directors and audiences alike.
Friedrich Schiller
Thinker, Poet, Dramatist – Champion of Freedom People regarded him as a “great poetic genius”, a man devoted to “the true, the good and the beautiful”. He saw himself as a “global citizen serving no prince”. On the occasion of Friedrich Schiller’s 250th birthday, a portrait of a man who died at not even 46 years of age.
Friedrich Schiller
Michael Ende, one of Germany’s most popular post-war writers of children’s books, would have turned 80 this year. The son of the Surrealist painter Edgar Ende was born in Garmisch-Patenkirchen on 12 November 1929 and died on 28 August 1995. His books, which include “Die unendliche Geschichte” (The Neverending Story), “Momo” and “Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer” (Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver), have been translated into 45 languages and have sold over 20 million copies worldwide.
More
The German Academy of Natural Scientists “Leopoldina” in Halle an der Saale – named as Germany’s National Academy of Sciences a year ago – is celebrating its first anniversary in 2009. Founded in 1652 by four physicians, the Leopoldina is Europe’s oldest academy of sciences and the oldest still existing scientific academy in the world. It has over 1,300 members worldwide and has counted among them, over the years, 150 Nobel Prize winners, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Marie Curie.
More
When the representatives from over 190 countries meet in December 2009 in Copenhagen at the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15), they will be focusing on the future of our planet. In the Danish capital the delegates will negotiate a new, binding international agreement on climate protection designed to succeed the present Kyoto Protocol in 2013. Many of the data used by the experts come from Bonn.
More
The “Neues Museum” (New Museum) on Berlin’s Museum Island opened its doors again on 17 October 2009. This major work of 19th century art, museum and engineering history was designed by Friedrich August Stüler. Badly damaged during the Second World War, it was elaborately restored and rehabilitated under the auspices of prestigious British architect David Chipperfield. Following a restoration concept based on the Venice Charter, Chipperfield carefully took stock of the building’s varying degrees of preservation, carrying our repairs and improvements where necessary. This approach enabled him to set off the historical beauty of the elements that were preserved, the new elements reflecting - but not imitating - what was lost.
More
Romanian-born Herta Mueller of Germany has won this year's Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday 8 October. The Academy's citation said that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, (she) depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Mueller's parents belonged to the German-speaking minority in Romania. Her mother was deported in 1945, a fate she shared with many others from the same minority group, and spent five years in what is today Ukraine, the Academy said.
Herta Mueller wins 2009 Nobel prize for literature
On 3 October, the Day of German Unity, a very special event cast its spell on Berlin: two five- and ten-metre-tall giant puppets walked through the city, meeting at the Brandenburg Gate on 3 October. The weekend “drama” was watched by a total of some 1.5 million spectators.
More
In August, archaeologists from the German Archaeological Institute made a sensational find: in Waldgirmes, a small town north of Frankfurt am Main, they discovered a more than 2,000-year-old horse’s head from a gold-plated bronze equestrian statue that is believed to have depicted the Emperor Augustus himself.
More
20 Years: Fall of the Wall, 60 Years: Federal Republic of Germany
Germany celebrates two important anniversaries in 2009: the Basic Law was promulgated 60 years ago and the Berlin Wall came down in November 20 years ago. The Deutschland issue about these anniversaries takes readers on a journey through 60 years of history and enables many contemporary witnesses to describe events in their own words: the essayist Klaus Harpprecht writes about the Europeanization of Germany, Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries admits to being a constitutional patriot, actor Jan Josef Liefers reports how he experienced the fall of the Wall in East Berlin and Berlin’s Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit talks about east and west growing together.
![[Logo Auswärtiges Amt]](/images/logo.gif){kind=logo}
11 °
