Intoxicating and thrilling, Wagner's romantic comedy revival mixes the scent of elder blossom with priapic mayhem

Hamelin, the German provincial town famous for its 16th-century Pied Piper, was at the centre of an embarrassing row yesterday after one of its premier hotels admitted holding mock "prison parties" for guests in cellars once used by the Nazis to torture and murder their opponents.

Some pieces you just have to trust and trust implicitly. When a text is as good as Wagner’s Die Meistersinger it’s a wise director who takes a step back and let the words, the characters, the bountiful score go forth and prosper.

We know the problems facing cellists when they fly with their precious instruments: to avoid damage in the hold, they buy a second seat. But things are even worse for players of the now-fashionable theorbo lute which, at over six-feet long, requires a case like a coffin on wheels. Theorbo players travel by road or rail, as flying is out.

Jean Améry had always wanted to be someone extraordinary. Yet when he became just that, lauded by post-war writers, from Heinrich Böll to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ernst Bloch to Günter Grass, Alfred Andersch to Ingeborg Bachmann, he still felt he had not achieved enough. He was the darling of the German media. Prizes and honours were raining down: from Switzerland, which had provided him with a living, working relentlessly hard, as a journalist and critic after his survival of the concentration camps; from Germany, the land not only of thinkers and high culture, but also of perpetrators, where he had not set foot during the intervening years; and even from Austria, from which he had been hunted "like a hare" in 1938, but where he returned to take his own life in 1978.

Act natural

The easy view to adopt would be that we're back to normal, and Americans are just mental. Because the people leading the hatred of Obama are characters such as Glenn Beck, spokesman for the Tea Party. Beck hosts a TV show in which during the last 18 months he's likened Obama to Hitler 349 times.

Benjamin Kaplan was one of the principal architects of the international trial at Nuremberg of leading Nazi government, military and party officials at the end of the Second World War in 1945. With the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel Kaplan was working in procurement at the Pentagon when in May 1945 he was ordered to join Justice Robert H Jackson's staff in preparing the trial.

A spokesman for Pink's concerts in Germany says the singer fell off the stage after a stunt went wrong and she underwent a checkup at a hospital.

Susanne von Paczensky was a journalist and women's rights activist. Trained by the US and British authorities, she was one of very few women journalists accredited to report on the Nuremberg trials. Aged 22, she was also the youngest.