I taught Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” yesterday. <3<3<3<3
Imagine a universe in which, when everyone else sees a picture of “an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree,” you see this:
(i.e., I'm sort of restarting my blog!)
Filed under: das vaterland, duh | Tags: box of chocolates, Budestag goss, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, June 2, left-wing terrorists, Stockholm Syndrome, without worry
In September, I saw the sexy German thriller advertised on every Litfaßsäule in town, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. It’s one of those movies meant to encompass and (somewhat self-consciously) idealize a fat stretch of national history, a Forrest Gump or a The Curious Case of a Movie for Simpletons, but with more pistol-whipping and less Southern charm. But it took the rise and disorderliness and fall of the Red Army Faction as its box of chocolates. The RAF is post-war West Germany’s most violent militant left-wing terrorist group. In the 70s and 80s they were a big, bloody deal, holding bell-bottomed Germans at gunpoint and sporting sunglasses and garnering oodles of media attention and generally causing a big mess. Who knew! I recommend an RAF Wiki Tangent Spree. You’ll discover historical ties between Chancellors and RAF terrorists-turned-holocasut-deniers, modern-day politicians who were one-time Stasi informants or simply plucked straight from the Nazi ranks. Good gossip.
The movie begins on June 2, 1967. A procession in the streets, men hoisting pro-Shah signs; young, chiseled-jaw students by the sidelines, screaming protests of one throaty sort or another. Suddely, unprovoked, fighting: confusion in the streets, and confusion among us Americans in the audience. Why? What caused them to do that? Huh? Did that guy just shoot a teenager in the head? The director is not doing a good job of showing character motivation here. Little did we know that this single incident, laughable in cinematic representation for its unwarrented violence, is crucial to German history, this photograph one of its best recognized:
And little did we know that the shooting’s motiviation was so unsettlingly obscure because everyone got the story wrong. A reactionary West German police officer didn’t fire the gun; an East German spy did.
An article in the Spiegel reports that the incident’s textbook story — that the youth (student, father and husband Benno Ohnesorg — whose last name, by the way, means “without worry”) was shot by a reactionary, zealous West German police officer — is, indeed, more complicated.
“New documents discovered in the Stasi archive — the vast collection of files left behind by the East German secret police — reveal that the policeman who shot Ohnesorg, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was in fact a spy for East Germany’s communist regime.”
This is huge. This is huge because this event, the murder of a student, was and still is huge. As in: the incident triggered the RAF’s formation and subsequent decades of violence. The event also convinced the German people that its current regime was far more violent police state than peaceful democracy. The nation has pushed for more progressive politics ever since. And if this information was publicized 40 years ago? Germany today wouldn’t be Germany today.
So, yes, there is a sense that 21st Germany has whitewashed over its history. I’m currently ripping through Tod Wodicka’s spry and fun All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well; as a book about, among other things, history, the narrator puts it well: “despite the castles and churches, and all those townships still adhering to thousand-year-old plans, modern Germany seems a most non-historical kingdom. Safe, well-ordered, tame, all mystery long since burned away in the conflagrations of this last century.” It’s like they just have an overabundance of history and it has all accrued and canceled itself out and now the country is forever pulling out their orderly, efficient clean slate.
But, once again, history reminds us that it can’t be deftly boxed up and buried. Wow.
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, why i oughta | Tags: anaheim, lederhosen, let's dance, those people, wisconsin
J. expressed concern today that he was one of “those people” (i.e., Americans, the only real people) who is really into Germany. You know: grouping their identities around lederhosen fandom due either to a tenuous genealogical bond or a young-adult interest in wizardry. Those people: throwing a Wanderung or a Gemütlichkeit into conversation and griping about how, silly them, they just can’t remember the English word. Those people: the foreVaters of the San Diego German American Society.
Not that people (i.e., Americans) should by any means forswear their ethnic backgrounds. It’s understandable to keep up cultural traditions in an isolated immigrant community, or by 1st/2nd/3rd generation immigrants. Like, if you’re a Waldmann from Wisconsin and irregularize the vowels of your past tense verbs and have had to perform in Schuhplatter competitions since you could walk — OK. But many of the Fulbrighters I’ve met — those people — just had some great-grandfather who would say Gesundheit instead of Bless You.
The weirdness is threefold:( 1.) Yes, many Americans can claim German ancestry, but that largely stems from an exodus 1.5 centuries earlier — their ancestors’ culture is fully assimilated into America’s, and has been through most of the 20th century; (2.) If you are a recent German immigrant, you’d probably celebrate your heritage by wearing angular glasses; and (3.) They are reveling in (and pining for) an ideal of Germany that doesn’t exist and maybe never did. By hoisting up their lederhosen and swallowing pickles whole and yodeling around Southern California, they’re celebrating an Anaheim-level of cartoon simulacrum, a fairy tale.
But, momentarily laying aside the snob: why do people (those people) throw themselves into this (or any) idealized ethnic culture? Is the draw simply a sounder, more stable identity? An interest or emphasized heritage that supposedly signifies individuality? The desire to be a part of something older and different, and therefore greater?
So, J., no: you are not one of those people. But this guy is:
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: bike, i need to stop reading the NYT, urban planning
. . . and kind of great. I think articles about (sub)urban planning and/or Germany is my new black.
Who knew that most zoning laws in the United States still require two parking spaces per residential unit?
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: Captain America, collectives, cowboys, NYT Mag, the Dutch, Trina
Picture me, if you will, as I settle at my desk to begin a Golden Girls episode, and feel free to use the introductory paragraph from this New York Times Magazine article as your template. I mean, I have.
Shorto’s (henceforth known as Shawty) article on the Dutch welfare state jived with the conclusions I’ve drawn while leeching off a Northern European society for eight months. Just add an extra e and s to Dutch and, ta-da, you’ve got a fine piece on Germany society and collectivist culture. Pros: history, bikes, community, bakeries, social safety net. Cons: lack of go-get-’em-ness, “individuality” (I know it’s nit-picky but the scare quotes stay), 24-hour businesses, sun.
But ultimately Shawty prefers the Dutch social system to America’s, concluding that true freedom is security: knowing that becoming a redundancy won’t inspire cardiac arrest which would send you off in an ambulance and, guess what, you don’t have health insurance and now what’s going to happen to your family and the many mouths to feed? Basically, Shawty say the nation that she was with ain’t shit.
Which is a conclusion to which, after a whole winter of thought, I can’t cotton. It’s possible here that Dutch isn’t synonymous with Deutsch, and collectivist Netherlands truly is the promised land. But Germany isn’t. It seems to me that, since the German government in many ways babies you — it sets up your play dates (here, we’ve decided where to place your playground and, here, your community), hands you your allowance, and provides a cheap yet unshameful low-income crib — you can grow up lacking a certain initiative that need or a sense of individual responsibility inspires. A Dutch dude in Shawty’s article agrees: charity, for example, is handled by the governement; individual citizens don’t and wouldn’t give to the poor, because the government already taxes their income to give to the poor. Choice and action is out-sourced to the state.
More discouraging is the pressure to conform in German society (huh, who knew!). Even Shawty comments on the Dutch’s “tendency to become slaves to conformity” and the dwindling ranks of risk-takers. Trust me: this is true. Now this isn’t a cool thing to say, but I do admire (aspects of!) America, and here’s sort of why: those inspiring nut jobs, going out on a limb because that’s where they need to go. Germany’s got no dude in the desert building Salvation Mountain, no man rushing the stage at the Britney concert, no Leona Helmsly and her trust fund dog. The singular nexus of creativity seems to be Berlin, which is like half American at this point. Dull, right? Keep America weird!
Seriously, I think that’s why Europeans are so hung up on Obama: he’s emblematic of a certain type of sea change — a breathtaking turn in national identity — that is obsolete in modern-day Europe. Every element of German society is so durchdacht: well thought out, but maybe to a fault. Like Tyra says, hyper-analysis limits the possibility of movement and creativity. Time will tell if this U.S. fickleness, this malleability, is good or bad — seems to go both ways.
Still, I can’t 100% discredit the European collectivist culture: when you visit LA for a week and see how utterly alone you can be, how utterly alone everyone is in their bars, in their cars, arriving home to a drippy faucet, you return to a collectivist country viewing it as a end-of-the-rainbow sort of land. Do we want a collectivist community or a country of lonely inventors, these solipsistic cowboys of the American West?
Filed under: dithering, thank you | Tags: inspired, john kilduff, multi-tasking, where are we going?
you know that feeling like you’re consuming heaps and expelling heaps, taking and wasting and all without a coherent brass ring? and the ones you try to cast and hammer out for yourself just seem self-serving and insular, and everyone else’s nowadays seem equally trivial? and so you pick at your split-ends and listen to your radiator’s unfailing ambient exhale? here’s a new religion: john kilduff.
you can do it all! we are in the 2000s! this is brilliant on several levels. but i can’t explain them now because i’m brewing ginseng green tea and crafting a pop-up birthday card and doing the downward-facing dog and filling out my tax return. “baby genius” is so 2008; next up is “baby multi-task.”
Filed under: dithering
1986
The only movie (movie?) I’ve ever memorized from first scene (scene?) to last. (Although the 1933 Little Women with Katherine Hepburn is a close second. I am Beth March.) I popped it in the VCR daily during the summer of 1993: orange juice, Eggo waffle, and leg-pureéing aerobic moves. Watching clips on YouTube, I got that uncanny time-warp feeling, a sinus sensation like the strike of a tuning fork. You know, that laughable cultural artifact snuggly tucked into your brain goo; too close, too deep in your history to ignore.
First, drawing you in and setting the tone: the spookily long FBI WARNING. And the beautiful, resonant Karl-Lorimar Home Video logo animation and music.
Jane knew that not all exercises are suitable for everyone — AND knew how essential comic relief is to mothers aiming to lose those thirty pounds after bright-pink baby number three. So, I introduce to you: “the new guy.”
Some background on this wayfarer from Jane-Fonda.net:
‘Peter Sprague “wanders in to the studio during taping.” His foolishness is not to be missed.’
I would disagree. Even my age six self would be happy to miss his foolishness. I.e., it’s far too easy to identify with Peter Sprague. Peter grins idoitically, flung his arms wildly, and emits monkey whoops (prompting the above still). Everyone in the studio hates him. While they’ve all got their spandex onesies and side ponytails and straight teeth, Peter’s a Screech precursor with a Hawaiian blouse. From whence did Peter come? Who are Peter’s friends? What does Peter do on his weekend nights? Why is this guy the saddest man in the universe? But I kept coming back to the tape all summer long — perhaps for the chance that, with the next viewing, I’d leave without feeling like the Peter of my life.
That’s the most tragic part: no one will do the “yeah! great job!” post-workout schmooze with him, and then he gets locked in the studio. What is more terrifying to a six-year-old than being left behind in an institutional space and forgotten about for, say, eternity? This, my friends, is a horror movie.
In conclusion, the fake sax is refreshing, but the ultimate effect bone-chilling. My life goal is to post-workout schmooze with the Peter Spragues of the world. Jane Fonda’s Low Impact Aerobic Workout and falling down teeth-first at a roller skating rink is all I remember about being six years old.
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility
I just read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from front to back in one harrowing train ride through the Rhein region. I mean, the ride itself wasn’t harrowing; it was timely and businesslike and whatever. But the book’s ashen skies and scent of human remains! The dubious, hesitant hope in a world without horizons! You finish the book and look out at the stubble on German fields, and it hits you again: Germany is a very real haunted house. Its past bleeds up and spooks me from time to time, like when reading about this Aribert “Dr. Death” Heim at the Mauthausen concentration camp, injecting gasoline into his victims’ hearts.
Which isn’t to say that American history (present day?) doesn’t have its atrocities and injustices. This is actually my point: that although Germany has this stomach-churning, unimaginable past, it has a national history of directly addressing the events, of public and professed responsibility. You don’t see the blind, ironic waving of country flags here as in the U.S. They know to where that kind of desperate national pride leads.
Which is why this New York Times article about Germany’s lingering relationship with events of seventy years ago alarmed me. Basically, everyone here is sick of its past. A German teacher this weekend explained that many people — especially the youth — basically feel that enough is enough. As Nicholas Kulish explains, Germany used to be “a country so ready not only to embrace its guilt for long-ago crimes, but to discuss it, research it and commemorate it with unusual diligence.” Lately, however, he has “noticed a shift. When the Nazi era comes up in interviews, people plead to me with their eyes to let it drop. There are fewer discussions and more awkward silences.” These latter situations are the ones I’ve experienced in the few instances when conversation veers toward World War II.
The World Cup two years ago was one of the first events in recent memory when Germans rallied under a national flag, felt a semblace of pride that could perhaps stand unquestioned. And why shouldn’t they feel national pride? The French are allowed to, the Brits and the Americans. Hey, I’m proud of Germany — for openly bearing responsibility for its actions, historical and environmental. It’s like the horrific, unforgivable catastrophe launched an accountable and wiser nation (though perhaps still one short on empathy…). It’s an admirable shift that America should graciously learn from — and an aspect of Germany I’d hate to see it lose.
Germans might move on, but they should under no circumstances forget. And if they must wave their flag in pride, it should be for a recent tradition of humility and responsibility. I’ll be curious to see where the country is in twenty years, when the last of the Holocaust reparations are doled out. A sigh of relief and a hasty washing of hands, or a contination of clear-eyed understanding?
i’ve realized that too often i dedicate this blog to making fun of germany — which more than likely betrays my insecurities with being a foreigner here — so, instead, here’s a blow-your-mind video about objectum-sexuals’ love affairs with fences and tourist attractions.
if you’re a frau:
- h&m short leather jacket
- h&m scarves, impossibly draped
- h&m jeans tucked into h&m/gortz boots
- amy winehouse ‘do (assuming you’re from the ruhrgebiet)
- your weight in make-up
- comb-over bangs
- a long-term boyfriend since 7th grade
- a mini-cactus
- a nanu nana bag
if you’re a herr:
- amorphous curves of camper shoes OR adio club foot shoes
- jack wolfskin parka
- face-framing zac efron hair
- black brown black gray brown
- DAKINE backpack with hawaiian floral design
- low-crotched jeans
- gel, bleach streaks, lazy mullet, acid wash stripes jeans with unusual zippers, special patches and doodads, black trucker hat, discount h&m murse, cologne over BO (if you’re a zigeuner)
if you’re an oma:
- basket
- stockings
- lots of time on your hands
if you’re a little mädchen:
- a unicycle
with help from j.ho
