Secret Swagger Or Bausünde?

I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that but I think I’ll still go with Bausünde here.

Bausünde

Berlin’s post-war high rises were built with practicality, not beauty, in mind. The hulking buildings were designed to house as many families as possible, and though they were once desirable, today they aren’t generally considered great places to live. But photographer Malte Brandenburg casts them in a new light with his series Stacked

The photographer started the project late last year, and shot over a dozen high rises throughout Berlin. He lives in Copenhagen and scouts locations whenever he visits Berlin, seeking out buildings set against an uncluttered skyline. Brandenburg shoots from nearby buildings, parking garages, and other elevated spots so he can capture the towers as directly as possible, using a telephoto lens to help correct the perspective. “I would ring the doorbells of the tower buildings across the street and ask the people to let me in so I could shoot from the stairways,” he says.

German Spy Finally Going To Experience Something Exciting

It’s a little number they call “eight years of prison.”

Spy

According to German authorities, Reichel spied for both the CIA and the Russian secret service because he was bored, frustrated with his workplace environment and wanted to “experience something exciting.”

Just remember: “When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.”

Der 32-Jährige begründete die Spionage zu Prozessbeginn mit Frust, Unzufriedenheit und Unterforderung an seinem Arbeitsplatz. “Im BND hatte ich den Eindruck: Da hat man mir nichts zugetraut”, sagte er. Bei der CIA wäre das anders gewesen. Dort hätte er sich beweisen können.

We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby

Landshut – A desperate mother called the police in Landshut because her seven-year-old daughter refused to go to bed. It had come to a heated argument between the two, the police reported, during which the girl insulted her mother and threw various objects at her. Once the 28-year-old got to the end of her rope she alerted the police. The officers calmed down the flared tempers. After a “tooth brushing under official supervision,” a policewoman brought the girl to bed.

Police

Landshut – Eine verzweifelte Mutter hat in Landshut die Polizei gerufen, weil ihre siebenjährige Tochter nicht ins Bett gehen wollte. Es kam zu einem heftigen Streit zwischen den beiden, wie die Polizei mitteilte. Dabei beleidigte das Mädchen die Mutter und bewarf sie mit verschiedenen Gegenständen. Als sich die 28-Jährige nicht mehr zu helfen wusste, alarmierte sie am Abend die Polizei. Die Beamten beruhigten die erhitzten Gemüter. Eine Polizistin brachte das Mädchen nach «einer Zahnreinigung unter amtlicher Aufsicht» ins Bett.

But What About Datenschutz?

That means data privacy and is way big medicine here in Germany indeed. Just go ask Google, Facebook, the Boy Scouts, whoever.

Names

So like how on earth could German counter-terrorism police be “investigating documents (illegally acquired) said to reveal the identities of a large number of fighters of so-called Islamic State?” Without their expressed written permission, I mean. Do Julian Assange and Edward Snowden know about this?

Don’t these terrorists have the right to keep the German state from snooping into their, uh, Islamic state? Somebody call the nation’s Datenschutzbeauftragter (data protection officer) immediately. This is an outrage or something.

22 000 Namen von Islamisten enthüllt | ISIS-Geheimdienstchef verlor USB-Stick mit Terrordaten

German Of The Day: Heile Welt

Heile Welt

To grasp this trauma (the refugee crisis) it helps to understand the German zeitgeist that developed (mainly in the former West Germany) in the post-war years, and lingered in the reunited country. Germans call it Heile Welt. The term means something like “wholesome world”, and describes an orderly, idyllic state. It may connote the nurturing environment parents create for their children to protect them from life’s ugliness, or a private oasis of peace amid public chaos. It was a state of mind that Germans clung to after the second world war…

Foreigners were allowed into this Heile Welt, but not entirely accepted. To man its assembly lines, Germany invited workers from southern Europe and especially Turkey. The millionth arrived in 1964 and got a motorcycle as a gift. By the time the programme ended in 1973, 4m foreigners lived in West Germany. But they were called “guest workers” rather than immigrants, on the premise that they would ultimately leave again. Unsurprisingly, most stayed. Yet mainstream Germany continued to see itself as ethnically homogenous—a Heile Welt in a tribal sense…

Gnomic wisdom: Some Germans react by fleeing into ever tinier Heile Welten. “We are becoming ever more like our garden gnomes.”

German Of The Day: Durchwinken

That means to wave through.

Merkel

And Angela Merkel HERSELF has just learned, like just today, an entire new German sentence with the word Durchwinken in it: Die Politik des Durchwinkens muß beendet werden. That means: The policy of just waving refugees through from one country to the next must now be stopped.

Like I said, she just learned it. It is quite a mouthful, isn’t it? So it’s certainly easy to understand why it took her this long to learn it.

“A refugee does not have the right to say ‘I want to be granted asylum in a particular country’ in the European Union.”

“Es gibt eben nicht ein Recht, dass ein Flüchtling sagen kann, ich will in einem bestimmten Land der Europäischen Union Asyl bekommen.”

Family Brown

Satire alarm! Please remain calm.

This neo-Nazi dude had a one-night-stand with this Eritrean chick seven years previously who is now being abgeschoben (deported) because of Ausländer raus (foreigners out) and all that so now he has to take care of his daughter who was the result of their short liaison.

Der guckt nicht traurig, der guckt nachdenklich. Er hat sehr viel nachgedacht früher.

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Tank About It

It’s that jolly, merry, drunken Karneval season again, folks.

Tank

And this tank float here got labeled the “Imtaler Asylum Defense.” Uh oh, we’re gonna get letters… Officials are even looking into hate crime charges.

For some reason, however, this float here is perfectly OK. I guess because Angie’s on it. It’s called “Refugee Wave.”

Reugee Wave

Ein Panzer-Motivwagen mit der Aufschrift „Asylabwehr“ hat bei einem Umzug in Bayern für Empörung gesorgt. Die Behörden ermitteln jetzt wegen Verdacht auf Volksverhetzung. Auch die Aktionen anderer Vereine wurden als fremdenfeindlich kritisiert.

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The Little Red Book

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