Football crazy
by TinKan
This town is football crazy and does have one of the better teams in Germany. Some day they will beat Munich… Go and see a game if the team is playing when you visit and you will see some very proud fans and will be entertained with good football by great sportsmen.
Opera in K-Town
by Nemorino
Kaiserslautern, better known to my fellow Americans as K-Town, is a city of nearly a hundred thousand people -- not counting the fifty thousand American and other NATO military personnel who are stationed nearby.
Thanks to the new InterCityExpress rail connection, Kaiserslautern is now less than two and a half hours from Paris. In the other direction it is thirty-nine minutes from Mannheim and eighty-one minutes from Frankfurt am Main.
Since Kaiserslautern is in the Pfalz region of Germany, a region which in English is officially referred to as "the Palatinate", the theater is called the Pfalztheater or "Palatinate Theatre".
It was inaugurated in 1995 and is currently the second newest theater building in Germany -- the newest being the new opera house in Erfurt from the year 2003.
The opera I saw recently in Kaiserslautern was Jonny spielt auf by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). This is a comic opera from the year 1926 that was hugely popular in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
When the Nazis came into power in 1933 they immediately banned all of Krenek's music on the grounds that it was "decadent". The Nazis particularly disliked Jonny spielt auf because the hero was an Afro-American and the music included some jazz influences.
In 1938 Krenek went into exile in the United States, where he continued composing and also taught at various universities. He became an American citizen in 1945.
The place it all started
by TinKan
I spent 3 years of my military career here and it was the start of my overseas living.
Once I get some of my old pics out I will build some pages here.
Oh and BTW.... K-Town has the best football team no matter what the folks from Munich think. (haha)
World Cup Fever
by fisherbray
"World Cup FanFest Kaiserslautern"
I was lucky enough to be able to get ahold of a single ticket to the 2006 World Cup match between Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago. I took the day off from work and headed into the Walkplatz area of Kaiserslautern to take part in the FanFest party before the match. I have been to a lot of American football and baseball games and I have never seen anything like this. The energy and passion that every single person had was amazing and they managed to maintain that energy till long after the game was over which was around midnight. This is one thing that you should do before you die. Schedule your vacation for a World Cup location and have the time of your life. I know I did!
"Paraguay vs. Trinidad and Tobago"