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: the Dutch, NYT Mag, Trina, Captain America, collectives, cowboys
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?
