Graphology , long in the same U.S. doghouse with such pseudosciences as astrology, palmistry, phrenology may not be so phony as scientists have thought it. Last week in Manhattan, quiet, greying, sharp-faced Dr. Walter William Marseille, former Berlin psychologist, described graphology's partial emergence from the doghouse to do a routine job of work: rating customer reliability for Spiegel's, Chicago mail-order house, which sells clothing, furniture and household goods to more than two million installment accounts. Emergence. Marseille studied psychology at ...

For 28 years it had stood as the symbol of the division of Europe and the world, of Communist suppression, of the xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life -- the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then -- poof! -- it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but ...

Star cellists are a lot rarer than piano or violin virtuosos. A brilliant and virtually unknown cellist made an appearance in East Berlin last week that left listeners surprised and breathless. Soviet Russia's Daniel Shafran, 34, turned out to be a sometime prodigy who today may have no equal among the younger generation of cellists.Almost too slight-looking for his muscle-straining art, Shafran handled his instrument as if it were no bigger than a fiddle. In two programs he ranged from the Khachaturian cello concerto to ...

"WHAT is bothering me is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today." So wrote the young Lutheran Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his Berlin prison cell in April 1944, one year before he was executed by the SS for complicity in the plots against Hitler's life. It is a question that today—for more complicated reasons—concerns countless thousands of U.S. churchgoers, who see about them a Christianity in the midst of change, confusion and disarray.For Roman Catholics, the religious revolution set ...

Banned in Berlin on election day this week was the flag of Germany: black, red & gold. When a Prussian Deputy tried to fly his country's flag. Berlin police made him take it down. The Deputy's country—the German Republic—was dying if not dead. Meanwhile out of the ballot box another Germany was being reborn. Its flag— black, white & red—the onetime Imperial Hohenzollern colors, flew in every street, floated majestically from Government buildings and was flaunted everywhere by shouting, ...

It was April 30, 1945, and Berlin, the capital of Adolf Hitler's tottering Third Reich, was a shattered, flaming inferno. Tanks and troops of Soviet General Vasily Chuikov's Eighth Guards army had fought to within a few blocks of the Reich Chancellery. The end was clearly at hand. Some time after lunch that day, Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, retired to their suite in the Fhrer's underground bunker to take their lives. They left instructions that ...

It's not quite World War III, but tension over Greece's debt crisis has ignited a battle of words between Athens and Berlin, reopening old wounds and raising the specter of Nazism. As Greece struggles to avoid default, and Germans debate whether to bail out their spendthrift neighbor, the question of what, if anything, Germany owes Greece for the past has become a topic of bitter debate and angry mutterings in the southern European nation. The row began ...

While NATO foreign ministers ended their meeting in Berlin on Friday with a show of unity in the military campaign against Libya, the two-day summit had exposed further cracks in the alliance — and now questions are being asked about whether NATO's air strikes are being ramped up from protecting civilians to all-out regime change. Russia, which isn't involved in the campaign, is particularly wary of any signs of mission creep and reiterated its calls for a political ...

The five flagpoles that stand in front of the Star Ferry terminal at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula in Hong Kong have long been a popular meeting place. It was at this familiar spot 20 years ago that democracy advocates sold commemorative items to raise money for the victims of the June 4 crackdown at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. I bought one: a four-inch plastic replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue that had been erected at the square. For ...

NUCLEAR PHYSICS The nuclear age dawned in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In 1938, outside Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Nazis paraded in the streets. Inside, German Chemist Otto Hahn patiently probed the secrets of the atom. He repeated an experiment that had been tried by half a dozen researchers, including Enrico Fermi in Rome and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris. With his primitive equipment, he repeatedly bombarded the element uranium with neutrons in an effort to create ...