Strolling back home from the Christmas Market last night, we noticed bouncy pop music and an enthusiastic crowd in front of the Old Opera House. As we came closer, we could see the musicians, jamming on electric guitar and synthesiser. As rockers, they were (you will pardon the expression, given what follows) a little unorthodox. Oh, the beards would have gone down well back in the hippy days, and the black clothes were pure goth. But those snappy fedoras?
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Tag Archives: Life
Wideface.
… or maybe ‘black paint’? Acouple of days ago, my sister told me she had a topic I could write about on afoe. It had occured to her that all continental names, except Europe, start with an ‘a’, and she wondered why that might be the case. A quick check at wikipedia revealed that her statement is only correct when using a (although perhaps still the most common?) five-continents classification system and when referring to ‘Oceania’ as ‘Australia’. Moreover, there are a number of naming schemes for continents, which, while always featuring a majority of continent-names starting with an ‘A’, also consist of continents beginning with other letters – eg North, and South A-merica.
Despite the wikipedia-induced realization that any continental naming-scheme conspiracy theory was stillborn, I became interested in the etymology of continents, Europe in particular, only remembering that ‘Europa’ was a Phoenician princess Zeus kidnapped by transforming himself into a bull. But it took only a modest amount of further googling to find out that the left-leaning German newspaper taz had also, quite recently, been interested in the subject.
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45% of Britons unaware of the Holocaust?
In light of the British obsession with all things related to the second world war and, especially, Nazism – the British history curriculum focusing on the NS period of German history has repeatedly been named a prime cause for “Kraut bashing” in the British tabloids – today’s Independent features an interesting article about an opinion poll conducted by the BBC which states that –
[s]ix out of ten people under the age of 35 have never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp that was the scene of the biggest mass murder ever recorded[, and] 45 per cent of British adults did not recognise a name that others might have assumed was synonymous with evil.
Interesting, indeed.
An Orange Solution, Even For Putin.
Some orange in Brussels.About a week ago, I wondered what the chances were for an explosion when hundreds of thousands of people are smoking at a gas station. Unfortunately, now their leaders seem to have begun fooling around with the gas pump handles in truly ‘zoolanderesque’ manner.
More and more commentators seem to be afraid about Russia’s hardline stance and the possible geopolitical fallout of the Orange Revolution, while such a realpolitical approach offends others for the little concern it has for the people freezing for freedom – or, more precisely, a little democracy and approximate rule of law.
As so often, it’s a little both. And to avoid an explosion, both conceptual layers need to be given the appropriate consideration: How to make sure no one, and above all the Ukrainian people, ends up paying the bill for continuing a pointless conflict when the Orange Revolution, this plebiscite on modern governance, is actually opening up a whole range of opportunities for Ukraine, Russia, and the West, and – particularly – the EU.
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Havel: Everyone’s Common Ground
It?s interesting that American conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg are touting the idea of making Vaclav Havel the UN Secretary General. I like the idea ? but for what I suspect are completely different reasons than the Instapundit crowd.
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Cap & Capper. The End.
Oh my, they actually did it.
Last Night, the Speaker of the Commons, Michael Martin, invoked the (1949) Continue reading
A Tangled Skein
1944-45. Nazis arm Soviet POWs who are promising to topple Stalin and who then turn around and liberate Prague from the Nazis, only to be turned over to the Soviets after the war ends. Nothing is as simple as it seems.
Vlasov’s forgotten army
Communists buried legacy of Soviet General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov and his battalion of POWs that helped free Prague from the Nazis
By Stephen Weeks, for The Prague Post
…Between that November [1944] and April of 1945, two divisions of “Vlasov’s Army,” more than 50,000 men, were formed, equipped and trained. Nine officers were Jews, concealed by Vlasov personally. Germany could not afford to equip and provide munitions for more men. This army had its own hospitals, training schools for officers, supply systems and air force. And on April 14, 1945, it was sent not to liberate Russia but to try to halt the Soviet advance across the Oder, only a few hours’ drive from Berlin.
Seeing how hopeless, as well as pointless, the situation was for his force, Vlasov turned his men back and decided to march across Bohemia to get to Pilsen — where he would deliver them as prisoners to the Americans, who were halted there. Stalin had already made it known that if any of Vlasov’s men fell into his hands they would receive long and painful deaths.
Nationalism, regionalism and Spanish football
The Independent has an interesting article today entitled ‘Why will a quarter of Spain be supporting England tonight?’ (for those of you who aren’t aware, there’s an international football friendly tonight between Spain and England in Madrid) which looks at how the Spanish national football team is not supported by many of the people of Spain because of the strong currents of regionalism and nationalism.
In so far as Catalans will be taking an interest in tonight’s Spain v England game in Madrid, they will be – most of them – supporting England. Should England score, the whole city will know about it. It happens every time, just as it does when Bar?a score a goal: in every neighbourhood there will be someone guaranteed to set off a celebratory firework or two.
Now, admittedly, things could get a little complicated this time around. What if Owen or Beckham score for England? The spontaneous reaction will be jubilation, but a moment’s reflection will yield the alarming truth that they play for the most detested enemy of them all, Real Madrid.
At which point the mental systems of Catalan football fans everywhere may dangerously short-circuit. Or not. Love for England may momentarily trump loathing for Spain. Whatever the case, it will yield an interesting new twist on the complex tribal impulses that animate the otherwise sane and impressively civilised Catalan people.
The Catalans are not alone. The Basques are at least as zealous in their desire that the Spanish football team be beaten. And as far as tonight’s game is concerned, because they haven’t got as much of a thing about Real Madrid as the Catalans do, they’ll be cheering on Beckham and Owen with as much abandon as the rest of the England team.
There are other, smaller nationalist enclaves in Spain where they’ll be rooting for England too. A number will in Galicia, in the Celtic-rooted north-west (they play the bagpipes out there, the fields are green and they look Irish); some diehards will in the Valencia region; and the Balearic islanders (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza) will be happy for the most part to see perfidious Espa?a defeated.
Update: Unfortunately, the match was marred by some pretty despicable racist chanting from an element of the Spanish fans – see this discussion on Crooked Timber for more.
Die Wacht am Rhein.
Brad DeLong agrees with Daniel Drezner that, in a time in which the world’s news agenda is once again dominated by hatred and violence, it is important to remember that keeping up the hope for a peaceful future is not necessarily in vain.
Let us give thanks that the most brutal and blood-soaked border in the world is quiet – a border inhabited on both sides by those bloodthirsty peoples who have been numbers one and two in terms of the most effective killers of foreigners for centuries: the Germans and the French.
It is now 59 years and 9 months since an army crossed the Rhine River bearing fire and sword. This is the longest period of peace on the Rhine since the second century B.C.E., before the Cimbri and the Teutones appeared to challenge the armies of the consul Gaius Marius in the Rhone Valley.
I’m not sure about those 59 years being the longest period of peace since the second century B.C.E., but having lived on the Rhine’s left bank, close to the westward-watching “Wacht am Rhein” (the Niederwalddenkmal or “Germania” – a monument erected after the foundation of the German Reich in 1871), for most of my life, those 59 years are clearly the ones that matter to me.
Franco-German FriendshipAnd, in light of the recent transatlantic history, let me add that the photo of a French friend and myself in front of the memorial was taken by an American tourist – we do remember which fire bearing army made the Franco-German approchement possible.
Memories of the Wall
I suspect that I’m in a minority of AFOE’s writers and readers in that I actually saw the Berlin Wall in place pre-1989. We were on a school trip to Germany in 1987 and had actually been given permission to travel to West Berlin, so we naturally went to see the Wall. Strangely, though, it’s not the Wall that sticks in my memory from that trip – like most people my chief mental image of it is it being toppled in 1989 – but the journey between Hanover and Berlin, travelling by coach across East Germany on a long autobahn that had been effectively sealed off from the rest of the country, large embankments to either side of the road making it impossible for us to see any of the GDR – and, indeed, for anyone in the GDR to see any of us. I still have my old passport from that trip, complete with a GDR stamp within it.
Fifteen years after that, I saw some of the Wall again – in Rapid City, South Dakota, all of places, where two sections of it are on permanent display downtown. The one thing I do remember of seeing in West Berlin – the layers of graffiti covering the Western side of the Wall – aren’t really shown by the sections Rapid City acquired but then that’s merely a reminder of just how long it was.