Berlin is a fun place. Several of my friends and colleagues have visited it during the last weeks and months. And they were not alone. In 2015, a record number of more than 12 million tourists visited Berlin, most of them staying for a few days. Why has the city become so attractive? First of all...
Maastricht, Netherlands is hosting 600 refugees, in a camp that used to be Netherlands first prison built on the basis of the Prisoners Act, focusing on rehabilitation. A grey building, located behind a tall brick wall with steel window frames. Inside the building the atmosphere is tense, the air...
In a time where religious motives seem to form a base for terror, I was deeply touched by the virgil of peace organised by Maastricht University’s student chaplaincy. Several days after the attacks in Paris, Christians, Jews and Muslims gathered here to pray for peace. It formed a stark contrast...
We occasionally receive letters here at Maastricht University telling us we are ruining the Dutch language by only offering education in English. They do not actually have the facts straight: we are a bilingual university with an ‘English unless policy’, which means the language of instruction is...
A while ago, I discussed the requirements that subsidy providers have set regarding intellectual property... This blog is only available in Dutch.
In the past few days, we’ve commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Seventy years! We used to call that a lifetime. While most of us were born after the war, that same war has affected our lives in one way or another, even though we may not realise it.
Knowing what atrocities...
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather. Exactly one hundred years ago, at the age of fourteen, he went to work in a metal factory. There were ten children at home, none with more than a primary school education. For fifty years he worked to the bone, for reasons that included being...
Christmas markets in the region were hard to miss in December. The one in Maastricht, called ‘Magisch Maastricht’, was on my way home from work, so I both literally and figuratively couldn’t miss it. As in previous years, I often heard more German than Dutch voices—an indicator of the popularity of...
‘Everything valuable is vulnerable’, wrote one of the greatest Dutch poets, Lucebert, in 1974. Coincidentally, this was also the year that the first fifty students started the medicine programme in Maastricht, even before the official approval from The Hague (the Rijksuniversiteit Limburg was only...
Do you remember where you were on 9 November 1989? Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—a crucial moment in the German and European history of the twentieth century.
