Free Republic

While a global row rages over the controversial background of historical figures immortalized as statues, on Saturday a divisive new monument to Soviet leader Lenin will be unveiled in Germany. More than 30 years after the post-World War II communist experiment on German soil ended, the tiny Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) will install Lenin's likeness in the western city of Gelsenkirchen. The MLPD says it is the first such statue ever to be erected on the territory of the former West Germany, decades after the eastern German Democratic Republic communist state and its deadly Berlin Wall and Stasi secret...

Gelsenkirchen’s administrative court lifted city orders to halt construction, allowing the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) as owner of a city land plot to proceed with erecting its depiction of the Soviet leader who led Russia’s 1917 armed revolution. The city had argued Lenin’s effigy would spoil the heritage value of an adjacent former communal Sparkasse savings bank building in the 260,000-population city otherwise famed for its Schalke football team, perhaps fittingly sponsored by Russian state energy giant Gazprom. But judges said the architectural objection and controversy over Lenin’s historical role were irrelevant because the statue would be placed more...

Eight young men in western Germany were arrested in a school yard on Monday after drawing fake guns on a teacher and claiming to be from terrorist group ISIS. The men stormed the school yard in Gelsenkirchen on Monday afternoon, WAZ newspaper reports, and started threatening people with the fake pistols. When a teacher confronted the men about what they were doing there they started hurling "disgusting insults" at her and one of the gang aimed one of the blank-firing guns at her, according to the school's headmaster, Berti Oberholz. The teacher, who was unable to identify that the pistol...

The German anti-Semite Friedhelm Rikowski is still a member of the Gelsenkirchen town council.Rikowski agitated against the rebuilding of the Gelsenkirchen synagogue which was destroyed by the former Nazi-regime. Gelsenkirchen is one of the cities of the Soccer World Championship 2006. But is it also a real good place for the US and Australian Soccer National Teams to play soccer there ?

An Open Letter from Switzerland