Tag Archives: Germany

“Ein ganz normaler Arbeitstag”

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So, Franz Beckenbauer, the president of the organizing comittee of the World Cup, got married yesterday with his long-time partner Heidi Burmester.

Nothing especially interesting here, except for the shocking fact that the Kaiser did not even bother to let his coworkers know beforehand about his wedding. World Cup spokesman Jens Grittner has this amazing reaction to the news:

Heute beginnt für ihn ein ganz normaler Arbeitstag. Er wird sich die beiden Achtelfinalspiele Deutschland gegen Schweden in München und Argentinien gegen Mexiko in Leipzig anschauen.

Loosely and badly translated as : “Today is really a normal working day for him. He will attend the two round-of-16 games between Germany and Sweden in Munich and between Argentina and Mexico in Leipzig.”

I was tempted to say “lucky bastard” but then I realized that Beckenbauer also had to endure the ghastly England-Ecuador game this afternoon.

World Cup Cliche Watch, Pt. 3

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I don’t know if these are also soccer cliches in English, but they are widely repeated bits of wisdom in German.

First, for our friends from Japan: “The game lasts 90 minutes.” Das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. Bayern Munich learned this most famously in 1999, when the game lasted a little bit longer.

Second, for les Bleus and la Suisse: “The round one has to go into the square one.” Das Runde muss ins Eckige. Otherwise, it’s hard to win.

Any other good cliches out there, regardless of language?

(And Brazil looked eminently beatable last night. Who’s looked really good in the games that I’ve seen so far? Croatia, Czech Republic, Argentina. Germany may be better without Ballack, as they then have to spread the offense more evenly. The Ecuadoreans look like surprise overachievers. I didn’t see Mexico, Portugal or Netherlands win, so I can’t say much there.)

World Cup: Furor Yugoslavica

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Yugoslavia used to have a hell of a team. They were regular visitors to the World Cup, advancing to the elimination rounds more often than not. They went to the quarter finals in 1990, and there are plenty of Serbs and Croats who will tell you that they actually came within a whisker of winning it all. They got knocked out by a wildly erratic and penalty-prone Argentine team that went on to lose the final against Germany. If they’d beaten Argentina… well, you have to believe that the Yugoslavs could have gone on to beat both Italy and Germany. This seems unlikely, especially given that Germany had whipped them 4-1 a couple of weeks earlier. But 1990 was a deeply strange year, so who knows.

Yugoslav football was on a rising arc all through the 1980s; rising interest in the sport, plus rigorous state-sponsored training programs, produced a “golden generation” of players starting around 1985. Unfortunately, Yugoslavia imploded just as these guys were reaching their peak. They ended up scattered among half a dozen different countries, with several of the best trapped behind sanction walls and unable to compete in international play. If the country had stayed together, the Yugoslav team would surely have been a serious contender in ’94, ’98, and ’02.

Anyway. Yugoslavia used to be quite something. How are the successor states likely to fare?
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Germany: There’s more than the World Cup

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Assuming that you, gentle readers, are not yet entirely absorbed by your preparations for the upcoming month of watching simple games of 22 men runnung after a ball before, well, Gary Lineker will hopefully be proven right again*, here’s some more interesting information about the country that is now officially run from the FIFA headquarter in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Yesterday, the German statistical office published the 2005 microcensus, which includes some interesting numbers that are the result of a partly changed methodology. First of all, as Die Zeit online explains in more detail (in German), the statisticians finally decided to explain to the public that politicians are indeed prone to using numbers only based on political context, not on their factual one.
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Ursprache is German. And so is Weltschmerz.

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Well, gentle readers, here’s your occasional light Saturday post about transatlantic relations.

Should you or your children ever be interested in winning spelling bees, which, according to the Times Online, have enjoyed a recent explosion of popularity in the United States, choose words from obscure European languages, which, for some reason apparently made it into Webster’s dictionary. German, in particular, seems to be a safe bet –

“[Katharine Close, a] 13-year-old girl won America’s 79th national spelling competition last night, trotting out the letters of “ursprache”- a technical term for language [note by the afoe author – it actually means ‘the original language’ or ‘a very old language’] – in front of millions of viewers on primetime television.
…

The decisive moment … came when [Finola Mei Hwa ] Hackett stumbled over “weltschmerz” (world weariness), erroneously starting with a “v”. “

“Weltschmerz”, of course, is a tough one, certainly for a non-German. Not just as it may well still express the most German of all sentiments, but also because I have a feeling the American pronounciation thereof would have made me wonder about the “vw-question” as well…

A pyrrhic victory for privacy?

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Today, when annulling the Council decision about the transger of European airline passenger name records (PNR) to the US, the European Court of Justice made an important decision, highlighting both the weakness of current privacy protection schemes and essential problems in the European institutional set up. While it is not unlikely that privacy concerns, particularly the increasingly problematic lack of state enforced privacy regulation in the US, have guided the Court’s decision, its legal argument is not based on privacy infringement, but on fact that the EU-US agreement fell outside the scope of the European data protection directive. In fact as statewatch.org explains, the privacy plea by the EP has therefore not been considered at all. Statewatch therefore considers the judgment as a phyrric victory for the EP,

“as the agreement will now be replaced either by national agreements, or by a third pillar agreement with the US. Either way the EP has no power over approval of the treaty/treaties or even the power to bring legal proceedings against them. The press may describe this as a victory for the EP or for privacy but they will be mistaken. Moreover, there is a risk that if an EU treaty or purely national treaties are signed with the US that the standard of privacy protection could actually be worse than in the original PNR deal.”

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