“The Slow Death Of Europe’s Social Democrats?”

September 22, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: Elections, Europe, German, Germans, Germany, Social Democracy, Socialism, SPD Leave a comment

How ya figure? They’ve been dead for years already, Spiegel Online. Don’t any of you over there ever read the papers?

I would even ALMOST venture to say that it’s ALMOST time for a social democratic walking dead rennaisance. But the key word here is ALMOST. It won’t be anytime soon. They’re going to get annihilated in this election on Sunday. Again.

In 2000, social democrats or socialists were part of the government in 10 out of the 15 countries that made up the European Union at the time. These days, though, the picture is a drastically different one. There is a real chance that German Social Democrats will no longer be part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition following Sunday’s vote and the same could happen in Italy after voters there go to the polls next spring. Were that to happen, center-left parties would only be part of six EU governments out of 28 member states, all of them on the European periphery: Malta, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

If I Had A Vision I’d Go See My Doctor

September 21, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: Angela Merkel, CDU, Elections, German, Germans, Germany, Language, Politics, Refugees 3 Comments

Die Mitte (the middle) is where it’s at, folks. Well it’s certainly where I’m at. And you can’t have visions from here in the middle. I mean, I may not always know what I stand for but I always know where I’m standing..

And that’s what Germans want, the middle. The middle of the middle, even. The middler the better. No meddling with the middle. We’re right in the middle of an election campaign, after all. Did you know that Mittelmaß (literally “the middle measure”) means mediocrity in German?

Sure, there was a little Abweichung (deviation) from the middle with that batshit crazy refugee number of mine. Quite a big deviation, actually. But I apologized. Sort of. And now I’m back home, smack dab in the middle of where you want me to be. Just call me. Mutti. Mutti in the middle.

See you on Sunday!

Perhaps the closest she came to setting out a vision was a year ago, as she presented this year’s budget in parliament. Germany, she said, has seen a lot of change since World War II, and “change isn’t a bad thing.” But she also vowed to defend the status quo in the broadest sense of the term: “Germany will remain Germany, with all that we love and hold dear about it.”

“Whoever has visions should go see a doctor.”
– Helmut Schmidt

399,000 Euros

September 20, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking Tags: ARD, German, Germans, Germany, Public TV, Taxation, TV, ZDF 2 Comments

That’s what one regional director among the “public-sector broadcasters” (state TV) earns here annually – that guy down there. There a dozen or two of these directors out there, by the way.

Why that’s more than the President of the United States makes (not that our current President particularly cares about what he gets paid).

Is TV that good here in Germany, you ask? Why yes, it is. Just ask that regional director. It is in fact so good that all Germans are permitted to finance it with a so-called Abgabe, or contribution. Contribution sounds better than tax. Contribution contributes more to the warm and fuzzy feeling everybody has here about state-run TV. And it also contributes to that guy’s ridiculous salary, too. But quality has its price. And as viewers are told time and time and time again, what they are watching is Quality pur (pure).

Wenn man immer geringere Bezahlung fordere, könnten sich am Ende nur noch Milliardäre leisten, eine öffentlich-rechtliche Anstalt zu leiten.

Speaking Of German Efficiency…

September 19, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts, Helplessness, High Art, Home Cooking Tags: Berlin, German, Germans, Germany, Police, Robberies, Thieves Leave a comment

Sure, border control authorities losing 48 of the 51 illegal migrants (undocumented migrants?) they placed in their detention facilty is certainly a tough act to follow but I live in a place called BLN (that’s how some folks refer to Berlin here) so let’s give it a try.

In Berlin they like to take things a level higher, you see. Take the police, for instance. Please. Berlin has the only big city police department where the robbers break in and nobody seems to care. Thieves broke in to Berlin’s police headquarters near the Airlift Memorial in Tempelhof on Monday night and stole some militaria. The cops tried to keep a lid on it, of course, but the Lügenpresse got their hands on the story someehow.

I don’t care much about this robbery, either, I must say. House break-ins have risen dramatically in Germany these past years but the police have increased their solve rate to around two percent of the cases. So, like, what on earth is there to worry about?

Getting back to German Efficiency; the thieves are the really efficent ones here. But that’s only because they are rarely German.

“Wenn jemand hier einen Anschlag plant, rennt er durch, und keiner der dort Angestellten wäre fähig, es zu verhindern.”

The Case Of The Missing Migrants

September 18, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: Asylum Seekers, Borders, German, Germans, Germany, Human Traffickers, Migrants, Refugees, Smugglers Leave a comment

It’s not all that mysterious, really. And certainly nothing new.

After finding 51 migrants in a Turkish truck at the Polish border on Saturday, 48 of those 51 detained have now disappeared without a trace from the initial reception facility they had been placed in. That’s German efficiency for you, I guess. No wonder this migrant smuggling business is booming here these days. It’s a piece of cake.

Authorities said that the migrants were traveling from Iraq, adding that none of them had passports or other papers.

In einem türkischen Lkw brachten Schleuser 50 Flüchtlinge nach Brandenburg. Jetzt sind 48 von ihnen aus einer Erstaufnahme-Einrichtung verschwunden.

German Of The Day: Nichtwähler

September 17, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Home Cooking Tags: AfD, Die Partei, Elections, German, Germans, Germany, Language, Political Parties, Satire, Voting 2 Comments

That means non-voters.

And who do German non-voters vote for? Die Partei, of course.

Twelve straight years of Angela Merkel have left politics feeling a little dry for young people in Germany. But now a satirical party is experiencing a surge in popularity after it was set up as a joke at the expense of the old system…

In the last few months the party has seen its membership swell to reach more than 25,000, just shy of the 26,000 members of the rising and much-publicised extreme-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), which is expected to enter parliament for the first time this year.

Nichtwähler wählen: Die Partei.

German Of The Day: Certainly Not Here

September 14, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Helplessness, Higher Education, Home Cooking Tags: Editiorial, English, German, Germans, Germany, Language, Newspapers Leave a comment

Not in this English newspaper.

It’s kind of German, I guess. But it’s certainly not very kind to the German language.

Es ist Zeit für die Erwachsenen, Angela Merkel und Emmanuel Macron, die Verhandlungsführer durch den Hals zu ergreifen und Sie zu stoppen verschwenden Zeit mit Punkt-Scoring. Das ist zu wichtig.

A pro-Brexit editorial written in German has a problem: It’s literally gibberish.

The Case Of The Cryptic Cross

September 12, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: Berlin, Christianity, German, Germans, Germany, Islam, Islamists, Religion, Tolerance Leave a comment

Somebody call Sherlock Holmes. Pronto like.

Berlin police and media are clearly puzzled by this unsolvable criminal case. An Afghan wearing a Christian cross was viciously attacked by two young men at S-Bahn station Neukölln after asking him “Why did you become a Christian?”

“We just can’t figure it out,” one investigating officer said later at the scene of the crime. “Why would Germans do such a thing? Sure, Berliners aren’t exactly religious but to just attack some guy because he’s a Christian in a Christian country like this? At least nominally a Christian country, I mean? Too strange.”

“Any ideas who could have done this awful thing?” asked his Partner, Barney. “We’ve asked all the shop owners around here but no one saw a thing. I think we’ll head a few steps down the street to that radical Al-Nur Mosque over there and see if any of those folks know anything. They’re religious at least.”

Laut Experten richtet sich die Aggression von Tätern oft gegen Zuwanderer aus muslimischen Ländern, die sich für den christlichen Glauben entscheiden.

The Anti-War Is Over (If You Want It)

September 10, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helections, Helplessness, Home Cooking Tags: Anti-War Protests, Demonstrations, German, Germans, Germany, Ramstein 1 Comment

I certainly want it. Remember these guys? They travelled here in a DeLorean from the 1980s. A DeLorean station wagen or something.

They materialized again in front of Ramstein Air Base for an anti-war protest rally protest. US-Amerikan warmongering is warmongering again or something. I honestly had no idea. Hey, it’s election time in Germany again but I’m not sure which party is supposed to be getting the votes here. The Marxist-John-Lennonist-68-Internatinal-Front?

Zuletzt hatte die bundesweite Kampagne die Atomkrieg-Drohungen von US-Präsident Donald Trump gegen Nordkorea scharf kritisiert. Sie forderte die Bundesregierung auf, “öffentlich den USA jede Unterstützung für ihre Kriegsvorbereitung zu verweigern”.

German Of The Day: Angst

September 8, 2017 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hysteria Tags: Angst, Fear, German, Germans, Germany, Language, Studies, Surveys 1 Comment

That means angst. And here is the latest German angst check:

Terrorism wins again. But does it really? German Angstforscher (angst scientists – how could they be anywhere else but in Germany, right?) point out that terrorism, for example, is a socially accepted angst that everybody can openly get all angst-like about, without getting any angst about getting any extra angst on top of that. The real close up and personal kinds of individual angst, however, that’s a different matter. People don’t like to talk about that kind of angst because they have too much angst to do so. I have angst, for instance, that these angst studies are creating more angst about angst than they need to. And that frightens me.

“Man weiß, dass es sich bei der Terror-Angst um eine sozial akzeptierte Angst handelt. Die Leute berichten doch nicht gerne einem Menschen in einer Telefonumfrage über ihre ganz individuellen Ängste, die sie sonst allenfalls mit den engsten Freunden und Familienangehörigen teilen.”

Observing Hermann

“Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?”

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