German Joys

Six Years for Multiple Cop-Stabbings

A self-described German Salafist stabbed three police officers during a demonstration, injuring two severely. In Court he shows not a trace of remorse, saying he was justified in his actions because the German state allowed right-wing demonstrators to show caricatures of Mohammed.

And now he's just been sentenced to a not-so-whopping six years (g) in prison, which means he may well get out in 3 or 4. You won't often hear this from me, but this sentence strikes me as ludicrously light. A potentially deadly knife attack against three uniformed police officers must be, in anyone's book, an extremely serious crime. Further, according to news reports, the defendant was sober and sane, acted out of ideological conviction, showed no remorse and indicated he would be a future danger, since he considered himself only accountable to Allah for his actions.

I don't know if the tabloids are complaining about this, but if they aren't, they should be.

Hitler's Moustache: Made in America

This I didn't know:

The [toothbrush moustache] was introduced in Germany in the late 19th century by visiting Americans.^[1] Prior to the toothbrush, the most popular style was called the Kaiser moustache, perfumed and turned up at the ends, as worn by the royalty in the German Empire and the German part of Austria.^[1][4] By 1907 enough Germans were wearing the new trimmed down and simple toothbrush moustache to elicit notice by The New York Times under the headline "'TOOTHBRUSH' MUSTACHE; German Women Resent Its Usurpation of the 'Kaiserbart'".

Who Will Pay for Merkel's Greece Visit?

The Euro crisis has laid bare so many psychological undercurrents in German society it's hard to keep track of them all. For one thing, it has unleashed a wave of anti-German sentiment, which is allowing Germans to experience precisely the same kinds of cognitive distortions and biases they themselves exemplified during the Bush Presidency.

Case in point: just a few years ago -- 2006, to be precise -- the German press reported that security for a visit by George W. Bush was going to cost 20 million euro (g). Obediently taking their cue from the press, many Germans complained to me about this outrageous expense, implying that it was all Bush's fault for being such a horribly unpopular man. I hope I responded more with bemusement than irritation. After all, if Germany didn't want to spend that money, they didn't have to invite Bush. Since they did, and since the host country is responsible for the safety of visitors, there seemed to be nothing to complain about. That's life in the big city, people!

Now, Chancellor Merkel is (very properly) visiting Greece, and and the government there has (very properly) called up a whopping 7000 police officers (g) to try to ensure her safety -- in addition to closing off large parts of the government district to protests and shutting down six metro stations (g).

Oddly enough, I have yet to see any hand-wringing articles in the German press about how financially-strapped Greece is going to pay for this.

Circumcision: A Thought Experiment

There have been lots of interesting comments on my circumcision piece here and at the various other places it's been posted, and I'm working on a longer reply.

But for now, I'd like to throw out what you might call a Gedankenexperiment, although I'm no Einstein.

It's as follows:

1. Many German commentators on the circumcision decision call male circumcision 'mutilation' or 'assault' or 'a barbaric custom that permanently deforms'. I hardly have to provide links, do I?
2. Yet, the parents of the Muslim boy in question voluntarily had their own son mutilated and deformed.
3. Any parent who insists on having their own child be deformed and mutilated by means of a criminal assault is incapable of acting in their own child's best interests and should have their parental rights terminated -- right? Imagine a parent who, for instance, encouraged their young child to participate in knife fights, or who threw their child down a hill to 'toughen them up'. At the very least, there should be a thorough investigation into their fitness to raise all of their children.
4. Yet there has been no attempt to track down the parents of this 4-year-old Muslim boy and investigate their fitness as parents. Nor has there been a nationwide policy of questioning the parental fitness of Muslim and Jewish parents who have their male children circumcised.

The Gedankenexperiment is simple: why is this so?

Answer in comments, if you're inclined. My proposed answers are below the fold:

Intercultural Blind Spot: Glenn Beck's German Fans

This is a post about an intercultural blind spot. An IBS exists whenever people who are interested in another culture -- but not extremely well-versed in it -- develop a distorted view of the other culture based on the lack of contextual knowledge (and the hubris not to recognize that lack). This can take many forms:

• You take the spokesman from another culture seriously because (1) you are unable to detect the tells that alert a homegrown listener to the fact that this person is stupid or nuts; and/or (2) you are unaware of that person's history which shows them to be nuts even though what you heard sounded fairly reasonable.
• You assume that one of the spokesmen for the other culture whose work is easily accessible because he speaks your language 'represents' the other culture as a whole, rather than just a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of it (example for English-speakers: Peter Schneider).
• You take a spokesman from the other culture too seriously because he or she is saying what you want to hear and/or confirming reassuring stereotypes (example for German speakers: Michael Moore).
• You assume the spokesman from the other culture must be as popular and influential at home as he is in your country.

Doing some unrelated research, I came across the website Politically Incorrect, which subtitles itself as: 'News against the Mainstream - Pro-American - Pro-Israeli - Against the Islamization of Europe - For the Constitution and Human Rights'. It's a curious mixture -- some of the posts are the sort of heavy-handed sarcasm and name-calling you see on the more tiresomely ranty kinds of political websites. Other posts make halfway-defensible points, and yet others take fairly well-aimed potshots at the indubitably politically-correct German state-run media.

Just when I was tempted to think some of it might be worth taking seriously, though, I ran across this entry (my translation):

After the attacks of 11 September 2001, a document called 'The Project' was discovered during a raid in Switzerland. The information, which has been kept secret by the US Administration, reveal the largest terrorism-financing scheme in US history. This documentary film relentlessly uncovers how the Muslim Brotherhood is infiltrating the US Administration in an attempt to destroy the West from inside.

The film will be shown on Glenn Beck's The Blaze...

Whoa, wait a minute -- Glenn Beck? Katy, bar the door! For those of you lucky enough not to know who he is, Glenn Beck is a tear-prone, soddenly über-patriotic, half-educated conspiracy monger (and former cocaine user and radio shock jock) who had a batshit-crazy show on Fox News in the United States, before even Fox News dumped him. After Fox fired him, he dropped off the radar screen, and all sane Americans breathed a sigh of relief -- except for the late-night comedians, who mourned the passing of the most ludicrously sinister and sinisterly ludicrous media figure since Father Coughlin. He now runs his own media empire, spinning out inane tales for the tinfoil-hat brigade.

Host nation, allow me to proclaim: Glenn Beck is a 24-carat, no-holds barred moron. It's hard to think of a German who occupies an analogous space in the cultural landscape, but perhaps Horst Mahler (g) comes closest, even though Horst Mahler is a million times smarter (and more malevolent) than Glenn Beck. Nevertheless, you get the point. If I were to mention to a German friend: 'You know, I was reading an article by Horst Mahler the other day, and he made some really good points!' there would be a spit-take and howls of laughter. That is also what you will get for taking Glenn Beck seriously.

In the Year 10000, It's all Up for Grabs Again

Over the weekend I visited friends in Cologne and decided to bike back. I took a leisurely tour through the Zonser Grind, a nature reserve in the form of a fat peninsula into the Rhine. It looks like this from the air:

It's even nicer up close: the landscape is made up of a broad pebble beach on the wide, slow-moving Rhine, then come grass-covered dunes and rows of poplars and stump willows (Kopfweiden) in which owls, crows, and orioles flit about. It's pretty hard to reach, not only because it's a peninsula but also because the base of the peninsula is taken up mostly by factories, both working and apparently abandoned. You have to endure a lot of industrial grimness before you enter nature. The result is that, even during fine weather like yesterday's, you'll easily be able to find a meadow all to yourself.

Looking for more information about it, I quickly came across the official government portal for nature reserves in Northern Rhine-Westphalia,which lists the legal details (g) concerning the status of the reserve. From this page, we learn that the "digitalized area" of the reserve is 392.4 hectares, while the "official area" is 328.59. We also learn that the designation as a nature reserve will expire in the year 9999.

So visit the Zonser Grind while you can, since you've only got 2,882,405 days before someone obliterates it with an orgasmatron factory.

Sources of Pus in Vienna, or German Word of the Week: Eitrige

Via Faith is Torment, pictures of charming Vienna sausage stands by Stefan Furtbauer. The series is called Eiterquellen. More below the pictures.

Now, those of you who are German-powered™ will have noticed the strange title to this photo essay: Eiterquellen translates literally as 'sources of pus.'

Yilcch! Why is this? The answer is as simple as it is disgustinglicious. One of the most popular sausages you will find at these stands is my favorite sausage in the world, Käsekrainer (g), a variant of Slovenian Krainer sausage which has been filled with cheese (Käse). When you cut it open, it looks a little bit like this:

Are you beginning to grasp the scabrous secret behind the title of the photo essay? No? Then let me take you by the hand. In Vienna dialect, a Käsekrainer sausage is affectionately known as an Eitrige (the pus-filled one), after the German word for pus, Eiter. If you think this tells you a lot about the Austrian mentality, you are correct, sir.

So, a sausage stand is one place you can get a 'pus-filled one'. Next time you're in Vienna, I'll be the one at the wurst stand with pus dripping down my chin from an Eitrige im Schlafrock ('Eitrige in a sleeping-gown', basically a croissant).

Rules for Cemeteries

No trip to Kassel would be complete without a visit to the Museum für Sepulkralkultur (g), a museum devoted to death and burial. There are coffins from around the globe (including simple boxes for Orthodox Jews and gaily-decorated Ghanaian models), hell money and hell cigarettes, Totentanz sculptures, hearses, monuments, embalming kits, memorial portraits, 'death crowns' for children and young unmarried people, monuments, death masks, and art inspired by death, funerals, rebirth, and reincarnation. Outside, there are innovative grave markers designed by contemporary artists. Of course, there are also programs for kids.

There are also the obligatory information-drenched placards describing the origin and nature of European funeral practices. From these you learn that the practice of burying people in individual, marked graves only became uniform in Europe in the last 200 years -- before that, most poorer citizens were dumped in mass graves. You also learn that modern German cemeteries are facing a space crisis -- they're not running out of it, they often have too much of it, since almost 50% of Germans now choose to be cremated, and those numbers keep growing.

While there, I stocked up on a few back issues of Friedhof und Denkmal: Zeitschrift für Sepulkralkultur (Cemetery and Monument: Journal of Sepulchral Culture). In the 2-2011 issue of this handsome magazine, there is a discussion of the model rules for grave design in Catholic cemeteries that were recently promulgated by the Archbishopric of Cologne:

Basically, the new regulations contain only required dimensions for the grave, as well as bans on some materials that are inappropriate for cemeteries. Completely covered graves are forbidden: the grave-plate can only cover up to one-third of the grave.... [Individual church cemeteries can still] add regulations that servce to express shared religious beliefs. An example is a ban on polished stone, since this prevents natural change in the stone, which itself is an expression of the transitoriness of human life in this world. A ban on snow-white marble and showy (überschwänglich) golden inscriptions serve to prevent excessive ostentation in the religious sense.

The back of the book contains reviews of recent burial-related books, including a 400-page work by Regina Deckers on 'The Testa Velata in Baroque Sculpture' (g) an entire monograph (written at the University of Düsseldorf!) on the motif of figures with veiled heads or faces in funerary sculpture.

Now for some of the odd and delightful things in the museum, hover for info.

Treated Like Cattle in the Gemäldegalerie

No visit to Berlin is complete without a trip to the Gemäldegalerie, one of my favorite museums. On previous visits, I'd never stayed until closing time. This time, I saw what they do there at closing time, and it wasn't pretty. Hence the letter:

Dear Berlin Museums Visitors’ Service,

Recently, I visited the Gemäldegalerie (Painting Gallery) in Berlin. The museum advertised that it was open until 18:00, and I decided to stay until that time to enjoy the collection.

I have always enjoyed my previous visits to this elegant museum, but this time was different. 15 – perhaps even 20 -- minutes before 18:00, my ears were suddenly assaulted by an audio message from blown speakers in the museum’s ceiling. Amid crackles of distortion, the announcement played the melody of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and announced to visitors that the gallery would be closing shortly. The first announcement, in German, was then followed by an equally distorted and almost unrecognizable message in English, then, if I recall correctly, in French.

But that was not all. At the same time, the museum’s docents positioned themselves in all the doorways to the individual rooms, as if they were nightclub bouncers. To actually get into a room at 17:50 and see a painting, you had to convince a docent to let you in. Many of the docents were unfriendly and suspicious, treating visitors who wanted to enjoy a painting at 17:54 as if they were potential criminals. Finally, all the museum’s visitors were herded out of the museum at exactly 18:00, after being pressured to leave.

As I could tell by the visitors’ comments, this unprofessional treatment left a terrible impression that the museum’s visitors will take back to their home countries. When guests pay to enjoy a museum which closes at 18:00, then they should be able to actually enjoy the museum until 18:00.

To improve the visitors’ experience, I suggest that the Gemäldegalerie (1) repair the speakers in the museum ceiling; (2) broadcast only one closing message (everyone will know what it means, even if they don’t understand the language) and do so at, say, 17:57; and (3) give guests 10-15 minutes after the official closing time to leave the museum.

As paying guests in one of the world’s finest collections of Old Masters, they deserve no less.

Sincerely,

Andrew Hammel

German Builds Terrifying Weapons

Jörg Sprave builds massive custom-made slingshots that can propel pencils, arrows, lead balls, and throwing knives at skull-shattering speed. In this video, he puts a bulletproof vest through its paces: