German Joys

A Lost Weekend in Heidelberg

On Friday, I debated American law professor and death-penalty proponent Robert Blecker in the 'New Auditorium' of Heidelberg University, which was freshly renovated in 2011 to celebrate the 625th birthday of that institution. The room was pretty crowded, and the audience -- almost exclusively students -- asked interesting questions. The Heidelberg Symposium (g) is organized exclusively by a small group of idealistic, hard-working students, and they did a fine job, presenting dozens of interesting speakers (I went to several other presentations myself and was never disappointed) and making guests feel more than welcome. If you want to support this entirely voluntary, student-run, interdisciplinary conference, go here (g). They also welcome Sachspenden (in-kind contributions).

Given all the charming people I was meeting, I did rather a bit more drinking and socializing than I normally do -- in fact, on Friday night, I stayed up until 6 AM, and walked home to the Hotel Tannhäuser.* Many thanks to my readers for the suggestions. Unfortunately, the weather was cool and rainy, so all the Biergärten were closed and no space was left inside, so there was no white asparagus with braised pork knuckles (or whatever they eat in Heidelberg) for me. My drinking companions and I always seemed to end up in the Weinloch ('Winehole'!) in the Untere Straße, which stays open until 3 AM and lives up to its name.

I finally got a chance to see the Prinzhorn Collection of art by patients in a clinic for the mentally ill, collected in the early 20th century by an idealistic psychologist and art historian named Hans Prinzhorn. The classic book he published in 1922, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (g) (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), influenced a generation of modern artists. And I didn't just buy if for the pictures; Prinzhorn's innovation was to treat artworks by mentally ill patients not as curiosities or signs of disease, but rather as serious expressions of the primal human need to understand the world, bring order to sense impressions, decorate one's surroundings, and express states of the soul.

The project was perverted a generation later, when the chairman of the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic, Carl Schneider, permitted works from the collection to be used by the Nazis to 'prove' that modern art was no different from the 'scribblings of mental degenerates'. Prinzhorn himself was prevented from further developing his own fascination with racial ideology (g) by his early death in 1933. Many of the artists whose works appear in the book were later murdered in Grafeneck (g) as part of the T4 program. Prinzhorn's masterpiece has been translated into English and has consistently remained in print in Germany, with the last edition appearing in 2011. The Prinzhorn collection is now housed in a thoroughly-renovated old lecture hall, and is the perfect size.

I have a few other observations about Heidelberg:

• In the early morning, the streets of Heidelberg are full not only of drunken students, but also lots of drunken random citizens speaking a neurologically-impaired version of whatever their native language is. Or their 'school English'. You'll also see a lot of swarthy men showing each other rather intense levels of public affection. There are almost-nightly fights, which the police actually don't do much to prevent: they watch over things and make sure nobody gets seriously hurt. It's all loads of fun until somebody loses an eye, but it's not exactly the academic idyll it is often portrayed as.
• The university's world-famous Egyptian collection is closed, apparently indefinitely, while it's being moved to a new location. Naturally, you won't find this clearly stated anywhere on the University's website or at any signs at the former location of the exhibition.
• The traditional German style of holding a 'Vorlesung' lives on among many of the crusty old professors at Heidelberg (but not only there, of course). The professor stands behind the lectern, reading a prepared text (or simply reading a slightly revised version of their most recent book or commentary) in a monotone. The text is read word-for-word, page for page. Deviation from the text is a cardinal sin, as is the idea of integrating contemporary examples or empirical verification. After having droned on for the required amount of time, the professor gathers his or her papers and leaves the room. Interruptions and questions are not permitted, and the professor simply doesn't care if half the students leave mid-lecture out of sheer boredom. The fact that this 'lecture' style could also be performed by an Amazon Kindle doesn't seem to have inspired thesed professors to change their ways. Fortunately, this style of lecturing is slowly dying out even in German universities, but it's always gob-smacking to see one of these 'old-school' profs displaying such open contempt for the audience.
• Heidelberg 'Student kisses' are the most delicious candies in the world.

UPDATE: The indefatigable Christian Boulanger asks how the debate was. You'll be able to judge soon enough, since it will be posted on YouTube. Until then, my impressions. My job was to defend the 'European model' of criminal punishment, which could be summed up as (1) avoid prison confinement wherever possible; (2) integrate retributivism (as the basis for the length of the sentence) without going overboard; (3) make sure prison does as good a job as possible resocializing inmates; and (4) keep criminal justice out of the hands of the people and in the hands of politically insulated civil servants. Blecker, for his part, is an 'emotive retributivist' who favors capital punishment for the 'worst of the worst' and supports making prison life gradually more restrictive depending on the level of moral culpability of the offender, meaning those who displayed serious depravity of mind would be subject to punitive segregation. His views are more nuanced than some of the video clips circulating on the Internet may make it seem: he believes the death penalty is used too frequently in the United States, agrees that America has a serious over-incarceration problem, and that too little is done to try to rehabilitate prisoners. His focus is on severe punishments for the 'worst of the worst', but on correspondingly less severe punishments for those whose crimes don't demonstrate utter viciousness.

I was preaching to the choir, since I was defending a system that most of the middle-class to upper-class university students tend to see as natural and normal and humane. (This complacency is aggravated by the 'respectable' German media's disinterest in highlighting the many problems plaguing German criminal justice, with the intermittent exception of Der Spiegel (g)). I don't normally like preaching to the choir, so I tried to leaven my endorsement of European mildness with some criticisms. Nevertheless, the students listened to Blecker's point of view respectfully, and Becker earned applause for his frankly, honestly retributive opinions -- such as that he has little use for the abstract notion of 'human dignity', and that he considers the 'human dignity' of people like Magnus Gäfgen as much less worthy of protection than that of the young boy he callously murdered.

Anyway, that's my two cents. The debate was captured on video by a pretty professional camera team, and I've been promised it will be posted on YouTube in the next few weeks. As soon as it shows up, I'll post it here, and you can draw your own conclusions...

And now for a few random pictures from my photostream:

The Wooden Fence, Denazified

Just when you think you knew everything about the Nazis, along comes the German Society for Garden Art and Landscape Culture* with an exhibition on Nazi gardening: Zwischen Jägerzaun und Größenwahn. Freiraumgestaltung in Deutschland 1933–1945. I'll try to translate this directly, so you can get an idea of the turgidity of German gallery-speak: 'Between the Hunters' Fence and Megalomania: Free-space Design in Germany 1933-1945'.

There was apparently even a National Socialist way to design your garden. Take it away, Hans Hasler: 'All culture and thefore all art and its styles -- this truth has now become generally-accepted in Germany -- always emerges and lives from a national and racial essence. The false image of an "international culture", or a "world culture" belongs to the past, at least for us Germans.' (German Garden Art, 1939).

New to me was the controversy swirling around a particular kind of garden fence, the so-called 'Hunters' Fence', made of diagonal wooden slats:

The article assures us that it was long considered the 'essence of Nazi garden design', but apparently the conference has exploded this myth, along with others, such as that Nazis zoos contained mainly 'Germanic' animals, or that Nazi gardens were known for their straight axes and sharp edges. Apparently Germans favored hunters' fences and right angles long before the Nazis, and still do to this day. I'll leave you to work out the implications of this.

Yet Another Reason to Mislike the Controversial Austrian Statesman

He cut off the supply of German nudist magazines to British, err, enthusiasts, as JB Priestley reported in 1937 (courtesy of Obscene Desserts):

'I went into [a wine bar in Southampton]; and it had a surprising succession of Ye Olde panelled rooms, in one of which I drank a shilling glass of moderate sherry and listening  to four citizens talking earnestly about German nudist papers, their supply having recently been cut off by Hitler. Their interest in these papers was genuine but not of a kind to commend itself to the leaders of the nudist movement.'

Silly English perverts! They just didn't know where to look. The Nazis embraced Freikörperkultur, officially legalized nude bathing in 1942, and employed photographers such as Hans Suren to document National Socialist hotness:

More here (g).

San Franzisko?

For an amusing look at the unexpected places this image (from the pro-Nazi era of a German satirical magazine called Kladderadatsch (g)) has been ending up lately, go here.

"Who Knows This Man?"

There's only one publication in Germany that can intentionally make me laugh out loud, and that's Titanic, the monthly satire magazine to which I am a proud subscriber. Its subtitle proclaims it to be "the ultimate satire magazine", and that's true in any number of ways. Among them: nobody in Germany goes further than Titanic. According to occasional contributor Oliver Maria Schmitt, the magazine's motto (g, paywall) is "A resounding 'Yes' to 'No'!". Titanic's doesn't just slaughter the sacred cows, it tortures and mutilates them first. Which brings them endless lawsuits (g), usually based on quaint German laws making it a crime to insult people or otherwise injure their honor or dignity. Naturally, Titanic wears these lawsuits with pride.

The latest Titanic escapade is particularly rich. To understand the joke, we must first review some recent German history. On the 4th of November, an apartment burned down in the East German city of Zwickau. Nearby, in Eisenach, two right-wing extremists shot themselves in a mobile home after a botched bank robbery. During searches of the apartment and the mobile home, police found evidence linking both sites to a team of two men (Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, the ones who killed themselves) and one woman (Beate Zschärpe) who together constituted a right-wing terror cell called the National Socialist Underground (g). Unbeknownst to police, the NSU had, since 1998, been on a nationwide murder and bank-robbery spree (g) killing at least 10 people in targeted assassinations -- mostly immigrants, but also a young policewoman, murdered execution-style. All of the shootings were committed with the same weapon. The group also set off at least one bomb, in 2004 in a crowded street in a heavily-immigrant section of Cologne, injuring 22 people.

In the rubble of the Zwickau apartment in November 2011, the police found a truly astounding 15-minute video in which the group -- using a mash-up of Pink Panther animation clips -- took explicit credit for the mayhem (g) and mocked both victims and police. Even shortly after the discovery, people began asking how a group could go on killing and bombing undistiurbed in an advanced, well-policed nation such as Germany without being detected. But the facts that came out later made the question even more urgent. It turns out all three suspects were known to the police in the 1990s as neo-Nazis. The men had criminal records for violent attacks on foreigners and bomb threats. The three even ran a small bomb workshop in Jena in Zschärpe's garage. They narrowly escaped arrest in 1998 after a tip led to the workshop's detection. Despite the fact that they were all known to the police by name, appearance, and affiliation, they were able to go underground and elude detection for 14 years. When police investigated the immigrants the NSU had murdered, the cops generally discounted the idea that right-wing violence might be behind the killings, and instead suggested that the victims were targeted because of their involvement with drug-smuggling or immigrant mafias.

During the entire neo-Nazi terror spree, the German domestic spy agency (rather pompously called the Verfassungsschutz, or Agency for Protection of the Constitution (APC)) released report after report announcing that there were "no signs of right-wing terror groups" in Germany. The APC had infiltrated dozens of paid snitches into right-wing groups, but still didn't uncover the extensive network of accomplices that made the 14-year murder spree possible. After the vicious 2004 nail-bomb attack in Cologne -- in which a white man can be seen in a surveillance video depositing the bomb -- interior minister Otto Schily denied the very next day that there was any evidence it was a right-wing anti-immigrant attack. All of the murders and bombings, of course, went unsolved. In fact the murder of the policewoman was attributed to a mysterious female super-criminal who, according to DNA traces, had committed an astounding number of varied crimes all over Germans from 1993 until 2009. Until it was found out that the DNA actually all came from a police lab employee who had contaminated (g) crime-scene samples.

The mind, as they say, buggers. The whole sordid episode has sparked a controversy in Germany which has dominated headlines for weeks and shows no signs of abating.

Titanic felt the need to intervene. Here its its current cover:

The caption reads: "The APC Needs Your Help: WHO KNOWS THIS MAN?" Meanwhile, according to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (g) newspaper a citizen in the small Bavarian town of Taufkirchen had reported sightings of a "poster" displaying the markings of an "organization hostile to the constitution" (in this case, a rather large portrait of a controversial Austrian statesman). The police immediately swung into action, confiscating five more copies of the "poster", cunningly hidden among racks of magazines in various retail stores across town. The police surmised that the guilty parties must have come from "right-wing radical circles", and perhaps wanted to taunt the APC.

After further analysis, the police determined that the "right-wing posters" were copies of Titanic. (h/t MW).

Another Reason to Dislike National Socialists

From 1937-1944, the Great German Art Exhibition was held annually in Munich. The art was from regime-approved artists. Most of it was for sale, and pieces were bought by high Nazi functionaries including Goebbels and Hitler himself. Naturally, everything was figurative and pandered to petty-bourgeois tastes.

Subjects included Nordic mythology, German myths and legends, as well as still lives and room after room of athletic female nudes, including Girl with Penguin, below. They knew their audience, these hacks.

To their credit, art historians have scanned in the catalogs for each of these exhibitions and made them all available free, online, here (g). Not very stimulating, I'm afraid. After a painstakingly cursory scan of the entire website, I hereby certify that Girl with Penguin is the most interesting work ever displayed at the Great German Art Exhibition, because WTF - a penguin? Also, why is it so huge?

Eccentrically-Named Nazis

Today's contest is simple: Of all the people who ever served in any of Hitler's cabinets, which one had the most unusual full name?

Seems pretty subjective now, but once you know the answer, you'll see there's really no contest. (h/t Ed Philp, who's ineligible to guess!)

Trojan T-Shirts

Clever:

Music fans who took souvenir T-shirts from a rock festival in Gera, eastern Germany, have discovered they hold a secret message.

The so-called Trojan T-shirts bore a design of a skull and right-wing flags and the words "hardcore rebels".

But, once washed, the design dissolves to reveal a message telling people to break with extremism.

Some 250 T-shirts were donated to organisers, who handed them out at the nationalist rock festival in Gera.

The stunt was organised by a left-wing group called Exit, which seeks to reduce the influence of the right-wing in Germany.

Touching that the Exit people actually assumed neo-Nazis wash their clothes! (h/t RB)

Silicone Comforters With Aryan Characteristics

I have my doubts about this Daily Mail story about the National Socialist sex doll program:

Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazis to develop sex dolls to send to his troops being ravaged by disease after sleeping with French women, it's been revealed.

The synthetic 'comforters' were made from silicone and designed to stop soldiers being laid low with syphilis.

...Author Graeme Donald has uncovered the secretive ‘Borghild Project’ while researching the history of the Barbie doll - which was based on a post-war German sex doll toy.

...'They were made from highly tensile and elastic polymers and the first ones were trialled in Jersey.

‘In the end the idea fizzled out and the place where they were made and all the other dolls are thought to have been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.’

Not that there's anything all that implausible about the idea of Nazi sex dolls, mind you. The Third Reich was capable of far stranger things. I'm just not seeing the level of proof I would need to believe this, especially as the story (1) comes from the Nazi-besotted English tabloid press; and (2) the description of what the dolls were made of isn't very consistent. Can anyone, in the name of Science, point me to a reliable German source for this?

Enslaving Europe, Doggy-Style*

I'm as dismayed as the next civic-minded person by the Anglo-Saxon world's unhealthy Nazi fixation, but it's worthwhile remembering there are some not wholly illegitimate reasons for it. One is how exciting this era was: one of the world's most advanced nations decided to basically wipe the slate clean and force-march itself into a new era of enforced social order and technological mastery. The intellectual framework driving this momentous transformation had room for any number of batty or semi-batty notions: medieval folktales, nudism, anthroposophy, runes, time travel, etc. Anyone with a crazy-yet-völkisch scheme for social progress could get a hearing, and sometimes funding.

Which brings us to the Nazi talking dog school:

In his new book Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities, Cardiff University historian Jan Bondeson mines obscure German periodicals to reveal the Nazis' failed attempt to breed an army of educated dogs that could read, write and talk...

According to the book, scientists envisioned a day when dogs would serve alongside German troops, and perhaps free up SS officers by guarding concentration camps. So to unlock all that canine potential, Hitler set up a Tier-Sprechschule (Animal Talking School) near Hanover and recruited "educated dogs" from throughout the country. Teachers claimed a number of incredible findings. An Airedale terrier named Rolf became a mythic figure of the project after teachers said he could spell by tapping his paw on a board (the number of taps represented the various letters of the alphabet). With that skill in hand, he mused on religion, learned foreign languages and even asked a noblewoman, "Can you wag your tail?" Perhaps most outlandish is the claim by his German masters that he asked to serve in the German army because he disliked the French. Another mutt barked "Mein Fuhrer" [sic] when asked to describe Hitler. And Don, a German pointer, is said to have imitated a human voice to bark, "Hungry! Give me cakes!" in German.

Germany's love of dogs may have blinded the Nazis to the outlandish goals of their project. "Part of the Nazi philosophy was that there was a strong bond between humans and nature. They believed a good Nazi should be an animal friend," Bondeson says. "Indeed, when they started interning Jews, the newspapers were flooded with outraged letters from Germans wondering what had happened to the pets they left behind.

Which brings me, in turn, to my scheme for Instant World Peace™: in the future, all wars must be fought by dogs instead of humans. I confidently predict that just one evening newscast of mutilated, gasping, blood-spattered dogs twitching their last on a battlefield will accomplish what 5000 years of recorded human suffering haven't.

* Appalling title, I know. By the way, 'the' Nazi Dogs exist.