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      What We Know About the Knife Attack in Germany That Killed 3

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      The police have launched a manhunt for the perpetrator, who stabbed people at a city festival before slipping away.German police are hunting for a man who on Friday night attacked nearly a dozen people with a knife, killing three, during a street festival in the western city of Solingen.At a news conference on Saturday afternoon, the authorities said they had not ruled out that it was a terrorist attack because no other explanation for the seemingly random violence made sense.The police said they had detained a 15-year-old boy for questioning whom they believed might have had prior knowledge of the attack. The state attorney is not treating the youth as a suspect.What happened?Shortly after 9:30 p.m., the attacker started stabbing people who had gathered at the festival to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary. The attack occurred during a live music performance, not far from a temporary stage set up for the event, which was billed as a “Festival of Diversity.”The police said it appeared that the attacker chose victims from the crowd at random and that he appeared to target at least one of the victims’ necks.The festival, which was planned to run through Sunday, was immediately canceled as emergency workers tended to the injured and the police tried to get a handle on the situation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Knife Attack in Germany Kills at Least 3 at Solingen Festival

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      The attack took place in Solingen during a celebration of the 650th anniversary of the city’s founding.The attack took place in a central square in Solingen, Germany, during a festival celebrating the town’s 650th anniversary.Andreas Rentz/Getty ImagesA person armed with a knife killed at least three people at a city fair in the western German city of Solingen on Friday night, according to the police. The attacker, who escaped, also severely wounded five others. Officers were looking for a suspect.Local news outlets reported that a lone attacker had turned on the crowds during the fair celebrating the 650th anniversary of the city’s founding.“This evening, we are all in shock, horror and great sadness in Solingen,” Tim Kurzbach, the city’s mayor, said in a post on Facebook. “We all wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured.”So far, the motive for the attack is unclear. More

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      At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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      In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paula Modersohn-Becker: A Trailblazing Artist Who Died Too Young

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      An exultant sense of discovery is the propelling through line of “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me,” a glorious exhibition at the Neue Galerie that is, surprisingly, the German artist’s first in an American museum. (It will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago in October.)During a career cut short by her death in 1907, when she was only 31, little escaped Modersohn-Becker’s scrutiny. A paramount subject of inquiry was her own self. For some of her 60 self-portraits, which are her best-known works, she bared all: She is said to be the first Western female artist to depict herself in the nude. In many others, she holds a flower or a fruit, like a saint or a nobleman in a Renaissance painting. Either way, she looks unmistakably modern.Only a generation separates Modersohn-Becker from Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who shared her predilection for painting mothers and children. But while the Paris-based Impressionists depicted the bourgeois occupants of drawing-rooms, Modersohn-Becker, who visited Paris devotedly, homed in on the primal.Early drawings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, between 1898 and 1899, depicted the residents — particularly women and children — of Worpswede, an artist’s colony in northern Germany. They capture the harsh reality and vulnerability of their sitters, curators said. Annie SchlechterIt was on a visit to the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris in 1906 that she discovered, a year before Picasso, the power of African masks. She was also looking at Courbet, Cézanne and Gauguin. All of these influences converge in such paintings as “Kneeling Mother With Child at Her Breast” from 1906, where a dark-skinned, blocky woman suckles a white infant (might Modersohn-Becker be alluding to the nourishment she derives from African art?), and “Reclining Mother with Child II” from the same year, of a nude woman lying on her side in a fetal position nursing a naked baby.Those were produced near the end of her life. Yet even at the outset, she showed a gift for channeling traditional methods and tropes to suit her sensibility. In 1898 and 1899, while sketching nude models in the way that art students had done for centuries, she also used charcoal to memorialize the farmers, peat diggers and charity cases in Worpswede, the rural village in northern Germany that she inhabited on and off for the rest of her life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Prisoner Swap, Echoes of Putin’s K.G.B. Past

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      A sprawling exchange with the West underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. It also showed his continued interest in making deals.As he sat in a Russian jail for five months, the human rights champion Oleg Orlov sometimes grew wistful: What if he walked free someday as part of a deal between Russia and the West?The chances that President Vladimir V. Putin would make a prisoner swap like that seemed as remote as a “star twinkling far, far, far away on the horizon,” Mr. Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of the relationship between Moscow and the West, and their diverging interests, appeared to rule out the kind of detailed negotiation necessary for such a complicated deal.But last week, it happened, in the most far-reaching prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Mr. Putin and his ally Belarus freed Mr. Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians released by the West. It was a moment when Mr. Orlov saw anew how core Mr. Putin’s past with the K.G.B., the Soviet spy agency, was to the Russian president’s identity — and to the sort of country he’s trying to shape Russia into.The swap happened because “Putin is a K.G.B. man, an F.S.B. man,” Mr. Orlov said in a phone interview four days after two private jets carrying him and other released prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Mr. Orlov knows well, having spent decades studying the crimes of the Soviet secret police as a co-founder of the Memorial human rights group, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.The Russian human rights champion Oleg Orlov, shown in court in Moscow in February, was freed in the exchange last week.Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Putin served as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and ran the F.S.B., its domestic intelligence successor agency, in the 1990s. To the Russian leader, Mr. Orlov said, showing loyalty to the F.S.B. and other Russian intelligence services by winning their agents’ freedom trumped the political risk of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had branded as traitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Long Johns, Forensics and a Bound Russian Killer: Inside the Big Prisoner Swap

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      The complex choreography caught some prisoners being freed in their robes and slippers, unaware of their fates, and required forensic experts to make positive identifications. The private jet that took off from southwest Germany on Thursday afternoon was carrying a group that may have never expected to be confined together: police officers, doctors, intelligence agents, a senior aide to Germany’s chancellor — and a convicted Russian assassin.In the back of the plane, the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, sat with his hands and feet bound and wearing a helmet that covered his face; he was not heard uttering a word on the entire flight.At the same time, a Russian government jet was also headed for Ankara, Turkey’s capital, carrying officers from the F.S.B. intelligence agency and 16 prisoners being released by Russia and Belarus. At one point, one of the F.S.B. escorts made what seemed like a bad joke to the two best-known Russian dissidents on board: “Don’t have too much fun out there, because Krasikov could come back for you.”This account of the tense hours surrounding the exchange — the biggest between Moscow and the West since the Cold War — is based on new details revealed by Western government officials involved in the process, and on early testimony from the Russian political prisoners released as part of the deal. The swap freed Mr. Krasikov, the American journalist Evan Gershkovich and 22 others in a complex seven-country deal that required intricate planning and timing. The successful transfer highlighted the ability of some of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies to cooperate on a distinct operation of shared interest, even as Russia and the West engage in a tense standoff over the war in Ukraine.A photograph released by the Russian state news media showing the convicted killer Vadim Krasikov, center right in hat, at a Moscow airport on Thursday.Mikhail Voskresensky/Sputnik, via ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      First African-Born Member of German Parliament Won’t Seek Re-election

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      Karamba Diaby, whose 2013 victory was considered a win for equality, said he wanted more time with his family. But he has also spoken of the death threats he has received.Germany’s first African-born member of Parliament said this week that he would not seek office again in next year’s general elections. Although he played down racism as a factor, he made the announcement a short time after his staff released the contents of a slew of hate mail and death threats that his office had received.The lawmaker, Karamba Diaby, a 62-year-old Senegal native first elected in 2013, said in a letter written to his colleagues that he wanted to make way for a new generation of politicians and that racism was “not the main reason” for his decision. But he has been outspoken about the abuse he has experienced, which has markedly increased in volume and tenor in recent years.Bullets were fired through the window of his district office in 2020, and the office was a target of arson last year.“I can’t wipe all this away,” Mr. Diaby was reported as saying in an interview, according to the Funke Media Group, a major German newspaper and magazine publisher. “These are not small things.”The election over a decade ago of Mr. Diaby, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and emigrated to East Germany in 1985, was at the time hailed as a major win for equality. Mr. Diaby, who belongs to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats party, cited a desire to spend more time with family as a main reason for his departure.Yet the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD, has been far outpolling his center-left party in his constituency.Mr. Diaby has blamed the rising AfD, whose populist platform won them second place in Germany in the recent European Union elections, for the spike in racism and threats.“In the last few years, I’ve faced several murder threats,” he said in a podcast interview with Politico.eu this week. “This has now overstepped the mark.”“The hatred that the AfD sows every day with its misanthropic narratives is reflected in concrete psychological and physical violence,” he added. “This endangers the cohesion of our society. We cannot simply accept this.”The city of Halle, which Mr. Diaby represents, is in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the eastern states where the nationalist and anti-immigrant AfD dominates.Just last year, Mr. Diaby struck a very different tone against those who had threatened him.“Over 42,000 people in Halle voted for me,” he said in an interview with Der Spiegel newsmagazine. “Quitting would mean giving their votes less weight than those of a hateful minority.”“I would never allow that to happen,” he added.Christopher F. Schuetze More

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      Euro 2024 Tournament Runs Smoothly in Germany, but the Trains Do Not

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      Sweltering train cars, frequent delays and regular cancellations: At the Euro 2024 men’s soccer tournament, Germany’s faltering rail system emerges as a tough opponent.Niclas Füllkrug arrived early at the Adidas campus just outside Herzogenaurach, a picture-postcard town in Bavaria that was to host the German national team before this summer’s European soccer championships. The staff had been told that players would start arriving on a Monday morning, a few days before their opening game. But Füllkrug, one of the team’s forwards, turned up on Sunday night.He had decided to make the 300-mile journey from his home in Hanover by high-speed train on Germany’s national railway carrier, Deutsche Bahn. The company was not just one of the tournament’s sponsors; it was also supposed to be a standard-bearer of the event’s ecological credentials.But years of failure to invest in rolling stock, upgrade railways and digitalize signal boxes have made Deutsche Bahn notorious for delays and cancellations. In a country that has long prided itself on its efficiency and punctuality, Germans — as well as fans — had been warning for months that the problems might mar the tournament.So Füllkrug was hardly surprised when he found himself crammed into a train car packed with high school students on a class trip. He spent the journey fielding their questions about life with the national team.By the time he made it to Herzogenaurach, he had been traveling for several hours longer than expected, hardly ideal preparation for an elite athlete on the eve of a major tournament. Still, the delays had at least vindicated his decision to build in extra time. In Germany, as Füllkrug said, it pays to “have a bit of respect for Deutsche Bahn.”Many of the hundreds of thousands of fans from across Europe — as well as a remarkable number from the United States — who have joined him in Germany will, after an often fraught opening week, doubtless understand what he means.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More