German Joys

Radio Feature on Cultureless, 'Square-Headed' Americans

Last night, WDR5's 'Doc5' series broadcase an interesting and thoroughly-researched feature (g) on anti-Americanism in Germany by Klaus Jürgen Haller. Haller focused, in particular, on the deep historical roots of the idea that Americans are a 'cultureless' or 'rootless' people. Plenty of amusing quotations from Heine, Brecht, Lehnau, Hitler, and many others. The manuscript can be read here (g - .pdf), and I'm hoping they'll post a link to the audio version soon. I'll post a few translations of the more interesting quotes, and my observations on the special, as time permits.

Risen on Hermann

Clay Risen continues his fine series of pieces on modern-day Germany by visiting the Hermannsdenkmal:

As in most countries, there are two types of national anniversaries in Germany: those people would rather remember, and those they’d like to forget. The country has seen both this year. The Federal Republic was founded 60 years ago in May, while the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this November – two dates that mark the country’s slow shedding of its totalitarian past. But 2009 is also the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War. Not surprisingly, the first two dates have been commemorated with speeches and festivals, the latter with a few long-winded newspaper articles and student projects, carried out with a grudging sense of duty, as if by a child forced to eat his vegetables.

The events surrounding Hermann, though, are a weird mix of the two, presenting a revised, sanitised, consumer-friendly warrior, a national hero recast as neither “national” nor a hero. “To me, he is just a garden gnome,” [Klaus] Schafmeister [Detmold's 'Hermann anniversary' coordinator] said during an interview in his office, his desk piled with Hermann chocolate bars and other paraphernalia. The exhibits and plays organised for the anniversary no longer depict Hermann as the founding father of the German peoples: instead he appears as a minor warlord who got lucky, an interesting figure with no relevance to the present. “He is really history,” says Herfried Münkler, a historian at Berlin’s Humboldt University and the author of The Germans and their Myths. “He is no longer relevant to the question of German identity.” It’s a thin line to walk – a year of festivities for a man no one thinks is worth celebrating. “We don’t even call it an anniversary, because that implies a celebration,” said Schafmeister. “It is just a recognition of something that happened from 2,000 years ago.”

The Non-Terrifying Truth

Across the world, there are lots of countries whose histories are marked by (1) shadowy conspiracies for power; and/or (2) cult of personality mass-movements in which the entire population was required to adore the Great Leader, and plenty did so quite voluntarily. 

Here's one of Hammel's Golden Rules of intercultural interaction. People from such countries are likely to get America wrong, because they assume that Americans have a similar history and a similar habitus. We're not talking about garden-variety anti-Americanism here; in fact, many of these people are quite pro-American. They just think that conspiracies and cults of personality are universals of human nature, and see them everywhere. Countless Germans wrung their hands about how Obama, the all-powerful soul-sorcerer, might use his uncanny powers of rhetoric to psychologically enslave Americans, build a cult of personality, and install himself as President-for-Life. I met dozens of these people, many of them quite well-educated. A healthy number of Europeans also has bought into various 9/11 conspiracy theories.

And now comes Orly Taitz, a dentist/lawyer from California-by-way-of-Moldova who has been filing lawsuits claiming that Obama is an 'usurper' and 'impostor' because he wasn't born in the U.S., and is therefore not eligible to be President. This is the woman whose accent and, er, striking appearance led Jon Stewart to dub her the 'lost Gabor sister.' Not that I have anything against Moldovans -- or that American doesn't also produce its own fair share of nutcases -- but I can't help noting that every practically every word Taitz says says confirms my thesis:

 [N]o conversation with Taitz is complete without a reference to the "600" camps that she believes FEMA has constructed to keep dissident citizens corralled. FEMA camps are only one of her anxieties. Communist and totalitarian regimes are another. "It is extremely important to ensure that the people of this country don't lose their freedoms, because if they do, this country will turn into a dictatorship, just like the communist Soviet Union, just like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or Kim Jong Il's North Korea."

...

But repressive regimes are a conversational well into which she keeps dipping. In her early 20s, Taitz, who says she is of Jewish heritage, emigrated to Israel and lived there for several years. The man who would become her husband, visiting from the United States, asked her to marry him on their second date, something that didn't surprise her -- she says, blushing -- because "he wasn't the first one" who had asked. Some observers believe the animating cause of her crusade is an anti-Muslim bias. She disagrees, saying "I have nothing against any religion." But some of her remarks help fuel such criticisms, as when she mentions hearing rumors of a purported video in which "Obama has made statements that were anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and very pro-Palestinian, pro-Arabic." She says she also heard an Internet rumor that the royal family of Saudi Arabia helped support Obama's education. "I'm questioning: Are there any strings attached? I don't know."

Ultimately, her rhetoric is laced with a suspicion that Obama may be an agent for a foreign power, a modern Manchurian candidate. This is why she wants not only his vital records but his academic ones. "Would you be willing to go with me to Obama and ask him . . . [to] release all of the proper records, your school records, your enrollment records from all those college applications, and financial aid records, which would show whether he was enrolled as a foreign exchange student from Indonesia or Kenya?"

And so on, and so on. Of course, she finds plenty of Americans to follow her down this primrose path, including her legal assistant, a disbarred lawyer who calls himself an 'anarchist'.

The Wall Must Remain

Hard to believe that just 20 years ago, so many people had their knickers in a real twist about German reunification, including Margaret Thatcher:

The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

Via.

War Guilt is 'Built into the System'

Anne Appelbaum on Germany's war commemoration:

Everything about modern Germany, for instance, is the way it is because of the war, from its pacifism and its devotion to the European Union to the architecture of its capital city. War guilt is built into the political system and becomes controversial only when it seems some Germans want to abandon it: The new wave of interest in the fate of Germans who fled or were expelled from Central Europe after the war, or the popularity of books about Allied bombings of German cities, worries many in the region. Hence Angela Merkel's presence at Westerplatte. (She was the first to confirm she would attend.) No German chancellor wants any of Germany's neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany's neighbors to fear German aggression today.

Reclamation of A Trade Park

Witzelstr. 55 is the address of a mixed commercial and industrial trade area in the middle of Duesseldorf that was entirely abandoned in mid-2002.

Since then, lots of interesting things have been going on there. I'm working on a more ambitious project, but until then, here is a slideshow of images taken in October 2007, April 2008, and August of 2009. However, I recommend that instead of watching this glorious decay through a little window, you follow the link below to my Picasa photo album, and run a full-screen slideshow.

Witzelstrasse

Daniel Vom und Zum Küblböck

A simple question for you, my sleek, sophisticated readers. I was just reading a review of a new biography (g) of Adam von Trott zu Solz, a member of the Kreisauer Kreis (g) of the German resistance to Adolf Hitler.

As his name indicates, Adam von Trott zu Solz was a member of the German titled nobility. Generally, these people are called 'von' (from) something. Some of them, like Adam, also have a 'zu' (to) in their title. Another example is the Prussian legal reformer Karl vom und zum Stein (g). Now, in Trott zu Solz's case, I can see the 'zu Solz' as a place designation, that is, it could literally mean 'Adam from the town Trott in the region of (or near the city of) Solz'. But Karl's name, literally translated, means "Karl from and to the stone," which evokes an image of a Prussian official repeatedly running away from, and then back to, a large rock.

I have asked several Germans why certain members of the nobility have not only a 'von' but also a 'zu', but have yet to get a clear answer to this question. Can any of you help me? 

Wilkommen in "New Spain" (Formerly Venezuela)

From Strange Maps comes a map, apparently created by British Intelligence, of the Nazis' plans for South America. The German title is: "Air-Transport Network of the United States of South America":

Strange Maps headlines it "Who put the Gau in Gaucho?" 

For my part, it seems as if the Brits left a lot of propaganda value on the table, to use a rather dopey cliche. Granted, the Nazis apparently plan to melt Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and a few other countries into a new entity called "New Spain." I doubt that would go over too well. 

But to the rest of the continent, the message seems to be: "A Nazi dictatorship will bring fast, efficient air transportation!" I wonder why the Brits didn't add some, you know, slave labor camps or monstrance-melting plants.

Perhaps it's their legendary understatement.

If You Want Your Archives...

...you'll have to pry them out of the cold, nicotine-stained hands of our petty bureaucrats.

That, to foreign visitors, seems to be the motto of German government agencies. In her book Stasiland, the Australian journalist Anna Funder visited the "Gauck-Behoerde" -- which was responsible  for piecing together millions of shredded Stasi files -- in the early 2000s. The then-director told her that, given the resources he'd been assigned -- a small staff of functionaries who were trying to piece together shredded documents by hand --  it would take him at least 375 years to reconstruct the archives. Funder was "speechless" that "the resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the lives of its former East German citizens are pitiful, some kind of Sisyphean joke." (269).

To be fair, the director had issued a "silent protest" against this fact by handing Funder a piece of paper with the damning calculation on it. Finally, in 2007, someone in the German government decided that perhaps some of these new-fangled "computers" all the kids are talking about could be somewhat useful in organizing millions of pieces of paper, after all.

And now an American visits the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, which houses something like 50 million Holocaust-related documents, and tells the story of that sad institution:

In the 1960s, ITS puttered along. But eventually the archive began to falter at its only task—tracing victims. Some say the biggest problems began with the arrival of Charles-Claude Biedermann, a Red Cross official appointed to take over ITS in 1985, who ruled the barracks at Arolsen like a fiefdom. He hired only local farm kids—who, for the most part, didn't speak foreign languages—to staff the more than 300 stations inside the archives; they became (and remain) curiously specific experts in parceled areas of research—deportations to the extermination camps, say, or displaced persons. Biedermann encouraged those who worked in "general documents" not to speak to those who worked in "concentration camp archives," the "displaced persons files," or the "TD files"—tracing and documentation—and vice versa. Almost nothing was digitized.

In 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell, hundreds of thousands of new demands for information came pouring in, and a backlog of around 500,000 requests piled up. The wait for information began to stretch out over years; victims were dying before they found the information they sought on themselves—to receive long-overdue restitution payments—or their loved ones. Some survivors had never discovered the fate of siblings, parents, or spouses. Angry families and survivor organizations agitated for the archives to be opened to public scrutiny.

To be fair, Biedermann is Swiss, not German,  and was recently replaced. But he certainly adapted quickly to the mores of the German bureaucratic caste, especially by ordering various departments not to talk to each other. This baffling over-compartmentalization is something you see in every German organization, but especially in government agencies. You get the feeling that all German government bureaucrats think they're running spy agencies. Again, to be fair, the archive has recently been opened to outside researchers, and documents have, at long last, begun to be digitized and shared. But that only happened after massive outside pressure, much of it coming from Americans (g).

A friendly note to the German government and the 11-nation consortium that runs the ITS: I know you're far too busy and important to read all sorts of confusing reports about "computers," with all those strange-sounding words like "operating system" and "terabyte." But take it from me: scanning in millions of historical records -- yes, even old, dusty ones bound into books -- is actually not very hard! In fact, you can hire firms that specialize in just that. And did you know that in Great Britain -- just a few hundred kilometers from where you live, but seemingly an entire world away -- gigantic historical archives have already been completely scanned and made available online? The records of the Old Bailey criminal court and Parliament, for starters. And guess what: after you scan them in and digitize them, anyone can search them, from anywhere in the world. You don't even have to pay a fee or get written permission from some rude, suspicious bureaucrat. Why, anyone with a computer can do it -- even foreigners! Frighteningly reckless!

Admiral Christmas

So I'm browsing through Alibris for books on "prisoner rehabilitation," and what do I come across but yet more christmas cheer:

Single sheet of stout card measuring approx. 4.5 x 7.5 inches (12.0 x 19.0 cms), obverse with gilt edges printed with the insignia of 'Admiral Inspector of the Fleet' in gilt and black and seasonal text in black; reverse blank. The seasonal text, SIGNED BY DONITZ IN BLUE INK, reads 'Grossadmiral Donitz dankt fur die guten Wunsche zum Weihachtsfest und zum neuen jahr und erwidert sie herzlich'. Grossadmiral Karl Donitz (1871-1980), German naval leader and Hitler's successor, commanded the Kriegsmarine during the latter half of WWII and is remembered particularly for his promotion of the U-boat offensive.

I suppose you could call Doenitz a rehabilitated (de-nazified) prisoner (of war). The card is yours for only $929.61!