Tag Archives: germans

Wir sind doch amusiert

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Living in Germany as I do, I often find that I have hard things to say about the Germans. (Germans should see this not as evidence of their special faultiness but of my misanthropy. Were I living in Tahiti, I would doubtless have a lot of hard things to say about the Tahitians, who I understand from the paintings of M. Gauguin to be a happy, friendly and good-looking lot.) So why don’t I preface this by pointing out some of the nice things about Germans. They have contributed immensely to the world’s wealth of science, literature and philosophy. Everybody concedes that they make good cars and beer. The food is better than you might think it is.

But with the best will in the wortld, Germans are not funny, are they? We’ve all heard the German attempt at The World’s Funniest Joke — ‘der ver zwei peanuts valking down der Strasse, and von vas assaulted … peanut‘ — and even that needed Englishmen to be thought up.

Not a barrel of laughs, then, the Germans. Most of you have probably never seen German comedy, and you are the lucky ones. Those of you familiar with teutonic jesting will have had to suffer through Otto Waalkes, Dieter Hallervorden, Gottschalk & Kr?ger and similar highlights.

But wait. There is a narrow but rich seam of gold running through the dross. Germans might not often be funny, but when they are on song they can hold their own with the best. Here then, in the interest of fostering cross-cultural understanding, are some suggestions for those of you who can read and understand German.

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Leitkulturkampf

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In comments to an earlier post on neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany, I noted that Germany’s mainstream right wing Union parties normally respond to this sort of thing with a rightward lurch of their own. And indeed, they are right on schedule.
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The continuing partition of Berlin

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Reparlez-moi des roses de Gottingen
qui m’accompagnent
dans l’autre Allemagne
? l’heure o? colombes et vautours s’?loignent.
De quel c?t? du mur, la fronti?re vous rassure…

Tell me again about the roses in Gottingen
that come with me
into the other Germany
when the doves and vultures part ways.
From whichever side of the wall, the border comforts you…

– Patricia Kaas, D’Allemagne

Today is the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as Tobias notes, political unification has not created the single, new Germany its authors so fervently hoped for.

Fifteen years ago today, I watched the news from my dorm in Strasbourg, having, only the day before, decided to cancel my planned trip to Berlin that weekend. Otherwise, I would have had a valid train ticket to the street party of the century. By the time the wall came down, it was impossible to get train fare or a room anywhere in the city, and going was simply out of the question.

Damn.
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Opening the Sublime Porte just a crack

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The European Commission won’t release its report on the possibility of opening accesion talks with Turkey until 6 October. But after expansion commissioner G?nter Verheugen’s comments yesterday, the report will not be much of a surprise. ‘There are’, said Verheugen, ‘no further barriers‘ to beginning talks.

(All the links to outside sources in this post, incidentally, are to German-language sites. At the moment there’s nothing about this on the FAZ English-language site, but you might check there later in the day if you can’t read German.)

In the comments to my recent post on the NPD’s electoral gains in Brandenburg, Otto suggests that the German CDU step up its resistance to a possible Turkish entry. Apparently the Union is paying attention to Otto, for party chief Angela Merkel was prompt to announce that she will seek allies elsewhere in Europe to keep the Turks draussen vor der T?r. And taking up most of the front page of the print edition of today’s Die Welt — the reliably right-wing sister paper to the Bild-Zeitung, but unlike Bild intended for those who can read words of more than one syllable — are ‘Ten Reasons Why Turkey Should Not Be Allowed to Join’.

Strangely enough my first reaction to this all-out onslaught by the Union was one of compassion and concern. ‘Bloss keine Panik, Leute!’, I wanted to say, giving their well-coiffed heads a reassuring pat. For you see, Turkey is not about to join the EU after all. All that the Commission has done (and indeed, officially it hasn’t even done that yet) is to say it’s all right to start talking with the Turks about the possibility of an eventual accession. In those talks Europe will, among other things, negotiate with the Turks the conditions and timeline for a possible entry. There is no guarantee that Turkey will accept (or fulfil) the EU’s conditions. And accession, if it comes at all, will not be for many years.
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Reforming Germany. Just A Little Harder.

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On February 6th, just when I thought it was actually possible to escape the ?German reform debate? for only a couple of days, on the way from the slopes to the fireplace, Gerhard Schroeder hit back through the airwaves. A coalition of campaigning regional party establishment and the inevitable loony lefties had apparently won their war of attrition against the Chancellor. Reforming Germany is not just hard. It is harder.
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Sturm, Drang and Laetitia Casta’s breasts – or – Why France bashing is a feminist issue

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[Nota Bene: Due to the deeply inane nature of JavaScript, clicking the “continue reading” link may not display images linked to posts. It doesn’t work for me in Mozilla or IE. If you click on the permalink, you will see all the content.]

Reader Christophe Kotowski sends a link to today’s International Herald-Tribune (a.k.a. The New York Times in Paris), in which New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein offers an solution to my earlier confusion about American policy towards France and Germany:

Meet Mr. Germany and Ms. France

It was on display again last week, that old double standard. On camera, Germany’s chancellor got a muscular handshake from America’s president and a meeting that let bygones be bygones. France’s president got the official cold shoulder and columnists’ heated denunciations.

Yet France and Germany had taken the same position on the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq. Both were offering to help train Iraqi security forces, but not to send soldiers. Both argued that only accelerated Iraqi sovereignty and a larger UN role could secure peace.

Apparently, it sounded different in French. Somehow, to American ears, it always does. At this point in strained trans-Atlantic relations, an obvious explanation comes to mind: In the American imagination, France is a woman, and Germany is just another guy.

The French themselves depict La Belle France as a bare-breasted “Marianne” on the barricades. They export high fashion, cosmetics, fine food – delicacies traditionally linked to a woman’s pleasure. And French has always been Hollywood’s language of love.

Germany, meanwhile, is the Fatherland, its spike helmets retooled into the sleek insignia of cars like the Mercedes and the BMW. It also exports heavy machinery and strong beer – products associated with manliness. Notwithstanding Goethe, Schiller and Franka Potente, German is Hollywood’s language of war, barked to the beat of combat boots in half a century of movies.

Such images simply overpower facts that do not fit the picture – like decades of German pacifism and French militarism since World War II. So what if France was fighting in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere in Africa and deploying a force of 36,000 troops around the world, while Germans held peace vigils and invented Berlin’s Love Parade. For Americans, it seems, World War II permanently inoculated Germans against “the wimp factor” and branded the French indelibly as sissies. […]

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