Best Of MetaFilter

Pages from one of Lindgrens' notebooks. Photo credit: Andrea Davis Kronlund / Kungliga Biblioteket via spiegel.de

It's a small world. This man's granddaughter - whose wartime letter was read by Astrid Lindgren and copied in secret - teaches my daughter violin.

Three blind mice comments in the Astrid Lindgren wartime diaries thread on his friendship with the son of the letter-writer whose missive to his brother led Lindgren to write: "Hitler apparently intends to transform all of Poland into a ghetto, where the poor Jews will die of hunger and filth..."

Expressionistische Tanzstudie Tanzbertchen der Tänzerin Lavinia Schulz

Knowledge of their astonishingly bizarre and tragic art is obscure and largely based on the rediscovery in 1986 of artifacts deposited in a Hamburg museum back in 1925.

The strange story of the 1920s German expressionist mask dancers Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt in Dying for their Art.

Kozyndan Nakano In Spring detail

Recently on Mefi, people and places around the world, enchanting, mysterious and magnetic:

The Banjo Bands of Malawi is a video clip featuring three different performances of a certain strain of folk music from the small African nation.
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From the 1920s to the 1960s, German people loved to pose with actors dressed as polar bears.
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LA-based art duo kozyndan posted an immersive "VR" experience of their 2009 Miyazaki-esque piece "Nakano In Spring".

198.365 a box full of letters addressed to me, #363 in explore by ashley rose, (cc by-nc-nd)

On a sunny January morning at the Burggymnasium Altena, Herr Hohage instructed us to close the blinds on our floor to ceiling windows. The day before, we had asked him how people could be taken in by [Hitler]. He intended to demonstrate.

In the Hitler practice photos thread, MissySedai recalls her time as a young exchange student in Germany, a shattering classroom lesson on the persuasive power of Adolf Hitler, and the letters home that processed the pain.