German Joys

America -- A Nation of Mongrels?

I've been a bit busy lately, but I thought I would post something quick about an interview published in Die Zeit with Erardo Rautenberg, Attorney General for the German state of Brandenburg (sorry, no link).  During the interview, part of a recent package of articles about far-right forces in Germany, Rautenberg quotes a handout prepared by the NPD to school party operatives on how to respond to questions about the party's opposition to mixed marriages in Germany:

"The logical country of destination for such mongrels (Mischlinge) would be the USA, where there has never been a true folk community or national culture, but rather a thoroughly racialized (durchrasste[!]) nation built only by the will of the state and of individuals, a society of rootless, autonomous individuals, where the ethno-culturally castrated individual grows like a weed, without identity and homeland."

Rautenberg says passages like this clearly show the influence of Nazi racial ideology, and therefore justify banning the NPD.  To see whether he was right about this, I turned to my well-thumbed copy of Mein Kampf (translated by Ralph Mannheim in 1943), and found this, on page 286:

"North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with aborigines on a large scale.  By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture.  The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood."

I'll have more to say about this later, when I get a bit more free time.  Since I don't have time to put it all in context, let me issue a disclaimer to make sure I don't get put on any government watch lists: This is all horribly stupid, delusional nonsense!

Hillary im Bunker

The controversial Austrian statesman's last tirade, brought deathlessly to life by Bruno Ganz, seems to have become one of Web 2.0's most-redubbed scenes.  The latest has a transatlantic flavor, and made me chuckle [h/t Ed Philp]:

Where Not to Go on Holiday

This week, Die Zeit has an interesting map (g) of the ultra-right presence in Germany, sorted by individual German federal states. 

The numbers in the black circles indicate the number of people killed by right-wing groups since 1990; the chairs show the number of elected representatives from far-right parties.  (The bigger the chair, the more important the legislative body.)  The smaller political units (kind of like counties) are shaded according to the percentage of votes far-right parties get there.

Keeping things in perspective, it should be noted that even in the brownest regions, far-right parties are still in the minority.

The German Spring

Screw the German Autumn, all hail the German Spring!  Large parts of the nation are turning into paradise.  All over -- but especially in cities full of beautifully-landscaped parks -- sallow natives pour out of their cramped apartments, beaming innocently.  Children kick soccer balls at passing cars.  Lovers dawdle in the long, fresh grass.  Long chains of bicyclists thread between the trees.  Drunks begin quaffing Beck's (or Oettinger, if they're unlucky) at around 10, working on their summer tans.  Gnats hover crisply in the air in fighter-pilot formations.  Geese go to sleep in the middle of a path, and don't budge.

And everywhere you look, all possible shades of green.  Here are a few pictures I've taken in the past few weeks.  First, from the Roseller Heide:

The grounds of Schloss Kalkum (g):

A meadow in the Eifel:

And finally, the sculpture "Harmony" by Aristide Maillol, erected as part of a monument to Heinrich Heine in the Duesseldorfer Hofgarten:

Paul Hockenos Weighs In Again

American journalist Paul Hockenos weighs in on the "wrenching, introspective" public debate in Germany on the legacy of '68, as it's called here. I'll resist the urge to quote the entire piece, but here's the heart of his argument:

Those who went the way of the revolutionary left were far smaller in number. Some formed their own sectarian Marxist-Leninist parties (the K-Gruppen), while even fewer (among them Joschka Fischer) took the path of anarcho-syndicalism. Just a handful - a tiny minority of a tiny minority - threw in their lot with armed struggle, the most prominent of those urban guerrillas being the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction / RAF).

It is little wonder that commentators like [Goetz] Aly, Gerd Koenen, Stefan Aust, and Wolfgang Kraushaar come to negative and cynical conclusions about the student revolt when they focus so exclusively on the 68ers' most radical bi-products [sic] like the K-Gruppen and the RAF. (It is also not surprising that all these figures had themselves been active members in the most sectarian of the leftist groups.) True, these small groupings had their roots in the student movement and the new left - but, in contrast to the reformists, they were the ones that failed to learn from the movement's dogmatism of attitude and crudity of judgments: evident in its ultra-leftism, its illusions about the working class, its skewed analysis of the Federal Republic as a proto-fascist state, its macho male ethic, and its insensitivity (to put it no higher) to Jewish issues.

...

The current debate in Germany is further disabled by the fact that it completely misses the post-1968 grassroots campaigns that had the greatest impact on the republic: the Bürgerinitiativen that during the 1970s linked up to become the powerful "new social movements": the women's, the environmental, the anti-nuclear energy, and the peace movement. These mass movements, the biggest Germany had ever seen, mobilised millions of ordinary Germans: young and old, urban and rural, men and women - in stark contrast to the middle-class, university-based '68ers and the radical splinter groups of the '70s.

The citizen's initiatives and the new social movements introduced the republic to grassroots activism, anti-authoritarianism as practical experience, participatory democracy, and the complexity of gender relations....

It is astounding how little present this chapter of the Federal Republic is today in Germany's public discourse and memory. While there was extraordinary - and, for me, inexplicable - media hype around the thirtieth anniversary of the "German autumn" (the peak of RAF terror) in 2007, there was barely a word said about 1977 as the year that tens of thousands came together at Kalkar along the Lower Rhein and other nuclear sites to protest against atomic power.

Why are the new social movements so marginalised in Germany's discourses today?

An excellent question, that!  Here's my answer, in three parts:

• Baader, Meinhof, & co. are brands, just like Che Guevara.  They're buy-triggers, and it's the bottom line that counts.
• Editors of German broadsheets form an exclusive, insular clique dominated by middle-class former '68ers.  They all went to university, and most at least flirted with thinking about supporting the RAF.  The mass movements, as Hockenos points out, were broad-based organizations featuring lots of people (the non-university educated, the rural) whose opinions and experiences are, to judge by what I read, unknown and completely irrelevant to editors of upscale German newspapers.
• The RAF story features exciting stuff: Safe houses! French intellectuals!  Shootouts!  Hostage-taking!  Hard to find high points like that in the patient, grass-roots organizing of large-scale protest and direct-democracy movements.

This is not to excuse the German media, of course. It's a gross disservice to public discourse and to Germany's image for the media landscape to be so dominated by the dull, whiny has-beens of the RAF.

An In-Store Display...

...that I made a wide berth around:

This Week's Factoids on Language, Consulting and Computers

• According to a friend of mine who works for a consulting company, one of their gags involves ordering workers to break up into teams, and then perform an exercise which involves each of them writing one or two words from a particular sentence on a index cards, until the entire sentence has been formed.  The sentences they use? "Caring parents are to be admired" and "Loving children are to be admired."
• Possibly the longest debate on German Anglicisms on this or any other Internet can be found in a discussion forum of the online dictionary LEO right here (g).  For an amusing short story composed almost entirely of French imports into English click here.
• Windows Vista has built-in speech recognition capability, which actually works amazingly well, no joke!  Just go to Control Panel, then Speech Recognition.  Why was I not informed of this long before?

What Will McCain v. Obama Look Like?

Well, looks like it'll be McCain v. Obama in 2008.  The Onion News Service has a preview of McCain's two-fisted strategy:

Can't resist pointing out that you heard it here first.

Bouphonia on Hitler's Reading Habits

Since we're on the subject of the controversial Austrian statesman, let's turn to the shamefully underpublicized Bouphonia.  One of Bouphonia's specialties is lively dissections of the flaccid and/or mendacious double-talk excreted by certain kinds of (American-style) conservative ideologues.  Here, Bouphonia's anonymous author examines the notion that there's something suspicious about evolution because "the Nazis did indeed take Darwinian science as inspiration":

Hitler did indeed take certain useful elements of his era's "Darwinian science" as inspiration, when he wasn't being equally inspired by Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Hans Horbiger, Henry Ford, Karl May, Napoleon, occultism, Christianity, mythology, and anything else that appealed to his magpie mind. In Mein Kampf, he sets forth his method quite clearly:

A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing....

What's "generally worth knowing," from the standpoint of a power-hungry ideologue, is precisely that which serves the purpose of gaining and maintaining power. It's immaterial whether Jesus died on the cross or not, so long as you can score political points by blaming the Jews for it.

If he were alive today, Hitler might well embrace Intelligent Design; it's by no means incompatible with pseudoscientific racism, it's vague enough to leave room for Odin as well as YHWH, and it's prone to a type of wishful thinking and paranoia that could easily have resonated with his own (if we weren't intended by some supernatural intelligence to discriminate against the Jews, how come they were designed to look Jewish?).

Current scientific thinking on race wouldn't be any more suited to Hitler's purpose than it is to, say, Charles Murray's; as manufactured anti-elitist causes go, ID would probably have been at least as useful as Horbiger's Welteislehre was in its day. This idle speculation aside, it's clear enough that Hitler had little interest in any scientific theory (or historical account, or philosophy, or religious dogma, or art) that he couldn't use to prop up opinions he'd already formed.

A Spare Head with A Kinder Facial Expression

Don't you wish you had one?  The new Ukrainian Adolf Hitler doll does, according to the Daily Mail [h/t Paul R.]:

An action-man style doll of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler has gone on sale in the Ukraine, with saleswomen comparing the doll to Barbie.

Supermarkets in the capital Kiev are stocking the 40 centimetre high figure of the fuhrer, complete with jackboots, leather trench-coat and swastika armband.

The £100 figure has a spare head "with a kind expression on it," glasses and several changes of clothes.

A few comments:

• First, one-hundred bleedin' pounds?  Isn't this probably 5 times the monthly salary in the Ukraine?
• This reminds me of an passage in Hans Massaquoi's Destined to Witness, an account of his childhood growing up half-black in Nazi Germany.  Turns out one that the main hobby of young boys growing up in the Third Reich was meeting after school to trade dolls of the Nazi Party leadership (literally, "I'll trade you two Goebbels for a Himmler").  The kid who collected the entire set got all the respect.  Massaquoi relates that he was just as passionate a doll-trader as all of his buddies.
• Let me register my irritation at the lazy gits at the Daily Mail, who don't even tell you the name the company that makes the doll.  I thought they taught you to answer the questions "who, what, where, when and why" in Journalism 101.  Why would they omit this basic information?  Are they afraid that thousands of Daily Mail readers will suddenly...oh, wait, I get it.

Elizabeth Warren on 'American Conditions'

You hear a lot about amerikanische Verhaeltnisse in Germany: nobody wants 'em coming across the Atlantic to Europe.  Meanwhile, the German middle class has shrunk (g) from 62% to 54% of the population, and the divide between the rich and poor is projected to grow even further (g) in the coming years if German growth remains anemic.  The problem seems to be that government programs that reduce these class divides are running out of money and will no longer be able to effectively counteract the forces driving wealth concentration and income inequality.

Something similar could happen across the Atlantic, although for different reasons: there, government policy and social transformations have eroded traditional institutions -- such as strong unions and broad health coverage -- that put the brakes on capitalism's innate dynamic of accumulation.  Here's law professor Elizabeth Warren on the "Coming Collapse of the Middle Class."

It's not exactly Lost, but Warren interestingly challenges the conventional wisdom at points.  The long and short of it is that Americans are richer in real terms than they were 40 years ago, but much of this extra wealth is now already "pre-committed" to things like health and housing costs, which have soared in real terms.  The end result is that most of the income middle-class Americans now earn is already spent long before they earn it, leaving them with less and less money for savings or discretionary purchases.  Warren doesn't think the U.S.'s negative savings rate show reckless consumption in middle America.  I'm not sure I agree there -- there seems to be an awful lot of excessive consumption in the U.S.  But there's no doubt, as Warren shows, that American families have much less economic flexibility than they did a few generations ago.  Millions live one illness or job loss away from a steep fall down the social ladder.

To sum up, you could say that the German government may no longer be able to keep its promise to help families stabilize their income; the U.S. government stopped making that promise altogether.