German Joys

The Lost 'Metropolis'

Bioscope, citing Die Zeit, reports that a version of Metropolis has been found in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that includes scenes thought to be forever lost.

The Broadway Pension in Budapest

I just got back from a trip to Budapest, and I'm in love.  An elegant, reserved city which has largely been spared the sort of shrill touristy excrescences that have cheapened many other Central European cities.  I saw a performance of Haydn's "Creation" at the devilishly ornate Art Nouveau Franz Liszt Music Academy, wandered through many peculiar neighborhoods, saw an organ recital in which teenage students at Hungary's National Organ School (located in the St. Matthew Church on Castle Hill in Pest) tossed off difficult pieces by Liszt and Durufle with perfect aplomb, visited the 'Terror House' commemorating Hungary's miserably eventful 20th century, hiked through the cool, leafy Buda Hills, spent hours inside cavernous world-class museums (the Museum of Fine Arts boasts 7 El Grecos, including the late-period Annunciation and Disrobing of Christ), toured Bela Bartok's home, and ate delectable pastries and Hungarian food.  In Hungary, meat is a condiment, and few organs or animals are off-limits.  This is no country for vegetarians.

I also wondered at Hungarian, technically part of the Finno-Ugric family but which, to an untrained observer, resembles a sort of lavishly-beumlauted national idioglossia.  Whenever I land in a new place, I study the language carefully, and try to get to a point at which I can make an educated guess what word -- or sort of word -- will come next after having read the first 4-5 words in a sentence.  But no matter how hard I tried, the next word in any Hungarian sentence was completely unpredictable.  In fact, the next letter in any given Hungarian word was unpredictable.

But now to an actual piece of practical travel advice.  After performing my official duties in a dull luxury hotel right next to the (shudder) pedestrian zone, I moved to a much cheaper digs, the Broadway Pension on  Nagymezo street.  Budapest has a problem: inside the city, there are hostels and luxury hotels, but cheap hotels are hard to find, unless you want to stay several km outside of the city center.  I happened upon the Broadway Pension randomly, while strolling through neighborhoods near Nagymezo street, and was pleasantly surprised.  It's called Broadway because it's located on a wide, leafy avenue which hosts 5 or 6 theaters.  The room air-conditioning units work majestically, once you figure out how to use the remote control.  This is important, given Budapest's hot, moist summers.  The rooms, located on the 3rd floor of a building which is actively being renovated, are large and clean.  There's no accursed minibar to tempt you, just a refrigerator, and plenty of shops and supermarkets nearby to buy beer, water, and whatever else you might need.

Most importantly, the location is perfect -- there's no better place you could possibly stick a hotel.  The Broadway is right next to the Music Academy and several theaters, and boasts cheap eateries, funky student bars, used book and poster shops, and coffehouses and museums galore. In 3 minutes' walk from the pension's front door, you're at a subway or a tram station that will get you anywhere you want in Budapest in half an hour, at ridiculously cheap fares.  Budapest's mass-transit is a wonder to behold.  Buy the Cartografia map of Budapest (3 euros) at any bookstore, and then get a package of 10 orange subway/tram tickets, and you're ready to go.  Don't forget to validate the tickets, because there are inspectors at every station.  Hordes of them, just hanging around in their blue shirts.  They don't actually seem to be doing very much, so I suspect this might be one of those job-creation wheezes that are designed to help ease the long, painful transition from socialism.

As for the pension, there's no office as such -- the hotel is run out of a dental-implant office with which it's mysteriously connected.  One dental-office employee, Attila Nagy ("Attila the Great") speaks very good English and is friendly and helpful.  He'll protect you from the "jackals" in Budapest's notoriously corrupt taxicab racket, and issue your breakfast tickets, which get you a simple meal at the nearby Ket Szerecsen (roughly, "Little Darky" -- look at the logo) cafe, a place frequented exclusively by locals outside the main tourist season.  The 'gypsy toast' with sour cream is worth a try.

The only drawback to the pension (depending on what you consider a drawback) is the 24-hour doorman service.  This is provided by a rotating series of ancient, hunchbacked men who look like retired coal-miners and who smoke incessantly in a tiny office just inside the building's main door.  If you come back after 10-ish, you have to ring the bell, and whichever senior citizen is on duty hoists himself laboriously from the grimy cot in the office and lumbers to the front entrance door where, with much groaning and wheezing, he reaches down to the floor-level lock and unlocks the door.  You may feel guilty about this, but the doorman seems to take it all in stride. Especially if you tip him.

There you have your travel tip for the day (no, I'm not getting paid for this).  Visit Budapest, by all means, and stay at the Broadway Pension.  And bring plenty of tip money.  Pictures to come.

Back in a Budapest Minute

Well, I had to move out of the luxury conference hotel with the wireless Internet (paid for by the German Government while I was on Official Academic Business) into a cheap pension that shares space with a tooth implant company (which is all I can afford otherwise). 

So, no more Internet access for 3 days.  I leave you with one picture that pretty much says it all about the research I'll be doing during that time:

Yes, you guessed it, those are rare North American Bactrinesca Apollodorensis sycamores in that picture, which have developed some fascinating resistance strategies to European basketworm larvae attacks!

Back to regular posting over the weekend, I promise.  In the meantime, keep it healthy, safe and clean.

Pictures from Budapest

As an acquaintance I met at the conference put it, Budapest seems to have preserved its dignity in a way many other Central European capitals haven't.  There's a whimsical, wedding-cakey "National Style" building every few blocks, and the natives are handsome-looking and friendly.  Here's a female traffic cop overlooking Heroes' Square:

Here's the rally she was monitoring, held at a giant square built in 1896 to commemmorate Hungary's millenium anniversary:

In this reliquary shrine, draped with strips of bejeweled cloth, you see the 1000-year-old mummified right hand of St. Stephen, Hungary's patron saint and founder:

The Hungarian Parliament building, also erected in the millennium building spree:

Some amusing German from the entrance kiosk to a funicular railway:

A reception in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts:

The entrance hall of the Gresham Palace, a massive Art Nouveau confection built by an English insurance company in 1905 and recently renovated and turned into a Four Seasons Hotel:

That's all for now.  Will post more later as official duties die down.

Hold Tight to Avoid Beer Spillage

I'm in Hungary right now, so I won't be watching the Turkey-Germany match.  I pass on a State Department warning to Americans living in Germany, as an email entitled "Hold Tight to Avoid Beer Spillage."  The pedant in me couldn't help noting the misspelling of a certain Berlin public monument:

On Wednesday evening, June 25, Germany and Turkey will meet in the semifinal round of the 2008 European Football Championship in Basel, Switzerland. Various cities in Germany have set up viewing areas for the public to watch the live broadcast of this game. The "Fan Mile" in front of the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin is expected to draw up to 500,000 German and Turkish fans, Frankfurt am Main will host a public viewing area at the Rossmarkt, and Munich is setting up a large public viewing area at the Olympic Stadium where 30,000 fans are anticipated. Similar events are planned in other cities and spontaneous celebrations or demonstrations related to the match may occur throughout Germany.

Because of the high fan interest in this prestigious semi-final elimination game between Germany and Turkey, there exists the possibility that disturbances, including violent disturbances may occur before, during or after the match, which begins at 20:45. At a minimum, post-game celebrations will likely result in traffic congestion in larger cities. Crowds celebrating previous German and/or Turkish victories have blocked streets and rocked vehicles attempting to pass through them.

I'll be pretty busy the next few days, but my hotel has Internet access, so I'll try to post a picture or two.  I can tell you one thing about Hungarian already -- it out-umlauts German by 8 to 1!

Another Blog Pause

It's that time again -- time for another blogging pause here at German Joys, whlie I go off to the International Institute of Sociology conference in Budapest and present a paper.  (Doing all the work to prepare for this has made posting a big sporadic lately, thanks for your understanding.)  Then it's a short stop-over in Slovenia to visit a friend.

I'll try to post a few pictures and impressions from Hungary, but no guarantees.  Regular posting will resume after July 4th.  In the meantime, here's Nona:

German Word of the Week: Bauernfängerei

The CDU/CSU has just released a White Paper, "Preserving Creation," that argues for quitting the current plan to quit nuclear energy (Ausstieg aus dem Aussteig, in German).  We just can't do without it, says the CDU, since it's still the cheapest CO2-free way to create energy. 

During a call-in debate on the paper this morning, each side accused the other of Bauernfängerei: simplistic demagogic argument.  "You can't tell people this horrible energy source is compatible with Christianity! That's Bauernfängerei!"  "The idea that energy costs will stay the same if we shut down out reactors is Bauernfängerei!"

Literally translated, it means "farmer-catching" or "peasant-catching."  You can see some in the following video of the North Minehead by-election starting at about 4:30:

What Boumediene Does and Does Not Do

Law Professor Richard Epstein clarifies the Supreme Court's recent decision on Guantanamo detainees:

Enemy prisoners of war are never granted [habeas corpus, roughly a Haftpruefungsantrag], either in the United States or abroad.

What matters is whether a prisoner is or is not an enemy combatant.... The six plaintiffs in Boumediene, accused of plotting an attack on the American Embassy in Bosnia, claim they are not. They should be entitled to challenge both the government’s definition of an enemy combatant and the factual basis of their arrest. And they should be able to do so, as the court stressed, under standard habeas corpus procedures that allow them to present evidence and confront witnesses, and not under the paltry procedures outlined by the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

If found to be enemy combatants, they can be held for the duration of the war and interrogated, if desired, as any other detainees. If not, they must be tried for some particular offense or released.

This is an important decision that has gotten almost completely lost in most coverage of this issue in the German media (understandable, since it's a tricky subject).  Boumediene does there has to be a court hearing, but the purpose of that court hearing is simply to see whether the detainees actually are prisoners of war -- whatever that might mean in this context. If they do fit this definition, they can be held until the end of hostilities without a formal trial, just as regular prisoners of war would be.

Boumediene is important because it's unclear what, if anything, many of these detainees actually did.  If the prisoners had been uniformed enemy troops captured in battle, there would be no real dispute about the United States' right to continue detaining them, although they would surely be entitled to Geneva Conventions protections, and the question of when the "hostilities" could be declared over.  Boumediene's importance lies more in the fact that it focuses attention on the prisoners' cases and, for the first time, will force the government to have to justify its detention in some sort of meaningful court procedure.

Factoids on Hope and the Brothers Grimm

• If you're not visitin Bouphonia's glorious Friday Hope Blogging, you should start now.  Bouphonia also has something for the sea-slug fans out there.
• Also, the Brothers Grimm German dictionary can be found online here.  It starts with a hymn of praise to the letter A as the "noblest and most fundamental of all sounds, sounding fully from the throat and breast, and which the child learns first."
• Jonathan Rutherford and Zygmunt Bauman have essays on the culture of capitalism and privatization which can be downloaded from Soundings here.

For Those About to Nap...

...the Boston Globe explains how to do it best, while citing a study by some German university:

Relish the benefits of a sharper mind, improved accuracy and perception, quicker motor skills, keener coordination, and enhanced mood and memory. Getting even the briefest nap is better than nothing. A 2008 study at the University of Düsseldorf showed that the mere onset of sleep may trigger active memory processes that remain effective even if sleep is limited to only a few minutes. And last year, a British study suggested that just knowing a nap was coming was enough to lower blood pressure.

I'm a firm believer in naps.  In fact, I've been known to take them all day long.

The Irish-Plumber Vote

Via Washington Monthly, Kevin O'Rourke speculates why working-class Irish voted against the Lisbon treaty:

There are at least two ways of interpreting such patterns. The first would hold that well educated voters are more politically sophisticated and better able to understand the issues involved in a complex amendment to the institutional underpinnings of the European Union. The second interpretation is that, on the contrary, both rich and poor are capable of correctly discerning where their economic interests lie, and vote accordingly. The argument would be that globalisation generally, and European integration more narrowly, has overwhelmingly favoured skilled workers, at least in affluent countries such as France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Unskilled workers, by contrast, feel under threat from Romanian (or Asian) competition, or immigration from Eastern Europe and further afield. And while those of us who are more fortunate might regret it, it is hardly surprising that — in accordance with Heckscher-Ohlin logic — they vote accordingly....My bet is that the gap between middle-class and working-class voting patterns has a lot more to do with different interests, real or perceived, than with supposed differences in political sophistication.