The Case of the Missing Bruderkuss

Funny, they don’t look like brothers to me.

But when it comes to “brotherly kisses”, nobody can beat the famous Brezhnev and Honecker Schmatzer (smacker) on the famous East Side Gallery wall in Berlin. Especially now, because it’s not there anymore. As reported earlier, the gallery is getting renovated and thorough Berlin bureaucrats, being thorough Berlin bureaucrats, have had the mural removed.

And they don’t understand the artist’s excitement about the incident, either, being thorough Berlin bureaucrats, like I said. Once the wall has been renovated, they say, all he has to do is paint a new Bruderkuss mural.

Sounds reasonable enough to me. Do you think Michelangelo would have gotten all hot and bothered about somebody removing his Bruderkuss mural from the Sistine Chapel, had there been one? I didn’t think so.

„Der Mann soll das Bild einfach neu malen.“

All the news that’s not fit to print

What? Reprinting actual Nazi newspapers from the 1930’s and allowing German Menschen (people) in the year 2009 to actually, gulp, read them? Why that’s, why that’s… That’s history!

Das Unheil (calamity) always comes from somewhere else, you see (Hitler was an Austrian, for instance). Now it’s coming from England (even Germans get tired of reading about US-Amerika all the time). Some British terrorist journalist type has somehow managed to manipulate a Bavarian court that just ruled he can continue to publish his annotated “Witness Reports” series down there.

This is bad or something I guess because Germans are more susceptible to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s than others are I suppose and like with hypnosis I assume they are pre-programmed or even genetically predetermined to start foaming at the mouth and marching into Poland whenever things like this get published I guess, again (funny how you can’t get them to march into southern Afghanistan though).

Alles ist verboten was nicht ausdrücklich erlaubt ist.

John Lennon High still giving peace a chance

March 25, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Peace Leave a comment

Continuing to show solidarity for John and Yoko’s heroic efforts to end that dirty war over there in Vietnam, students at Berlin’s John-Lennon-Gymnasium will be honoring this forty-year-old battle for peace by voluntarily coming to school an hour later next year.

Students have voted to begin instruction next semester at nine o’clock instead of eight o’clock in the morning, effectively increasing Lennon’s “Bed-in” action by some 35,000 man/woman/student hours per year.

“Da sind wir Vorreiter für Deutschland.”

Geschichtsklitterung

March 24, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Communism 1 Comment

Or “piecing together history” as it suits you, if you prefer. Sure you can find something good to say about good old, bad old East Germany (that yucky communist one, remember?) if you want to. The thing that interests me is why on earth anyone would ever want to. Some young and dynamic SPD (East) politician did it again the other day, though (that’s SPD, not SED). He warned everyone not to always be putting everything that had to do with the GDR in a bad light because, well, gee… That wouldn’t be nice or something, I guess.

But as an older colleague of his noted in response, once you start arguing like that you could quickly find yourself defending the so-called good side of the Nazis – building the autobahn, putting people to work, stuff like that. And that, of course, wouldn’t be nice, either.

So why not just let dead dogs lie? After all, they have all their lying long behind them.

„Wer wie Sellering argumentiert, kommt schnell zu den vermeintlich guten Seiten der Nazis, dem Autobahnbau oder der Arbeitsbeschaffung.“

Attack is the best defense

February 12, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Communism 1 Comment

Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung, they say, especially when your position is indefensible. And that definitely goes for Egon Krenz, the GDR’s last boss (or undertaker on duty when it happened), who has now been let out of prison and will soon be publishing his tell-all book about how it really and truly was, “Prison Notes.”

In classic German Opfer (victim) style, Krenz will have written, under the most dreadful conditions in a, gulp, German correctional facility, his shocking (not) revelation (not) from an ex-communist (not) who still wants to play the martyr (yup). And he’ll succeed mit links (win hands down – with the left hand down, I guess).

Prison für Krenz was of course a living hell because they served dinner at three-thirty in the afternoon and he couldn’t identify the salad they served him, the margine was runny and somebody had even vomited in his sink once, he thinks (that was in the article I read, I swear). And worst of all, the guards would regularly take turns looking at him through that peep hole thingy in his cell door. Like how rude is that?

And what had he been sentenced for in the first place? A few measly dozen killings on the Berlin Wall, and he didn’t even pull the trigger (the big guys never do). He got six and a half years and actually had to sit out four (4) of them because he was being persecuted by capitalism or something. But thank goodness an expert evaluated him as having a “favorable social prognosis” (some expert always does) so he’s out now after all.

Yup, it’s autograph time at the editorial department of Neues Deutschland where he’s started his book selling tour. Of course the tour probably ends here, too, but still. His fans are all over him, hundreds showed up. Rumor is that one guy even got off with his prison pillow cases and has already auctioned them off on eBay.

Sure, he’ll probably make a lot of money with this book, but it’s not about money with Krenz, comrades. Or it’s not just about money, I should say. It’s about the snivelling, too. And the denial. And the victimization (his, of course). Lest we ever forget or something.

And besides, everybody loves a good horror story now and then.

“Jeder hat das Recht, sich so an die DDR zu erinnern, wie er sich erinnern will.”

Joe not home alone

January 28, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Biden 2 Comments

Biden the Basher, that formidable tongue-lashing Mother of All Foreign Policy Experts has officially been let off the leash to come to next month’s 45^th annual Conference on Security Policy in Munich and let his European friends know (and heaven knows he’s got a lot of them) that Mr. Cleanup Himself (or at least one of them) has come to redress the wrongs that have been wronged for so long so, uh, right.

Last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been allowed to stay on for a bit, criticized Germany and other usual suspect types of wanting to turn the NATO intervention in Afghanistan into a “two tier” alliance of countries willing to fight and others less so.

Like I said, Gates has been allowed to stay on so it might be interesting to see what Joe has to say about the matter, here in Germany, among all his friends. But, then again, practically everything Joe has to say is of interest. If you’ve got the patience to stick it out until he’s finally finished talking, that is.

But if you don’t, and many of us don’t, you can just turn down the volume and look at the pictures. I mean, just look at these here. How can you not love watching that guy speak?

“Wir haben eine Menge Schaden zu beheben”, sagte sie (Hillary Clinton) am Dienstag in Washington.

Archaeologist discovers untouched 20-year-old GDR apartment

January 27, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Archaeology 3 Comments

OK, so it was an architect, but still. Talk about living in a time warp. Or not living in one, I should say.

While renovating a building in Leipzig, an architect stumbled on to what might just be the last traces of what appears to have been a crude form of late communist civilization which existed some 20 million years before our time. OK, so it was only twenty years, but still.

Dusty bottles of untouched “Hit-Cola” were left standing on the kitchen table. Proof, I guess, because nobody touched them back then, either.

Hmmm, what a strange, ironic and almost hard to believe coincidence that such an apartment should or even could be discovered in the year 2009, exactly twenty years after the fall of THE WALL itself. But like I said, still.

PS: Speaking of lost traces, check out these Berlin ones here (thanks for the link, Joe).

„Nach Ansicht von Wohnungsmarktexperten ist ein solcher Fund zwar in der Tat selten, aber bei den vielen leerstehenden Altbauwohnungen in Leipzig durchaus möglich.“

City-West gets the best?

January 24, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Waldorf-Astoria 5 Comments

They’re going to build a Waldorf Astoria here in Berlin? Sure, why not? But right across from Bahnhof Zoo? Is nothing sacred anymore?

That’s still a thriving low-life ecological niche kind of place, you know. Although it isn’t like it used to be, of course. Where are those folks supposed to go (the ones that never board the trains)? Are they going to take them from Bahnhof Zoo and put them in the real Zoo over there across the parking lot?

And I thought that all the way cool new stuff is only supposed to get built in City-Ost. Are we having a revolution yet or something? Isn’t this going to deepen the lack-of-cultural divide already dividing our beloved city all the more than it already is already so give me a break already?

And worst of all, I’m really going to miss this cool Baustelle (construction site). It’s one of my personal favorites, and has been, for years.

Es soll nicht nur ein weiteres Berliner Luxushotel werden, sondern „das beste Haus der Stadt.“

Don’t read this, you might not get it

January 23, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: 1933 2 Comments

No, not this, you’re bound to get this. I mean this here:

Apparently worried that the reprinting of an annotated Nazi newspaper might be taken the wrong way and that the unsuspecting Germans reading it might start goose-stepping uncontrollably all over themselves again, Bavarian authorities are dutifully doing their Vorsorge (prevention) and Bevormundung (paternalism) thing and tying to get the injurious and destructive not to mention nasty little peace of politically incorrect history removed from the newsstands ASAP.

Admittedly, 1933 wasn’t the best of years in Germany and the Reichstag fire wasn’t one of the most cheerful turning points in German history, but we are living now in the year of our Operation Walküre 2009 for crying out loud, people. You can handle it, honest. Alles wird gut (everything will be OK), OK?

“The paper – the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), dated March 1 1933 – is the second of a series of Nazi-era newspapers republished in annotated facsimiles by British publisher Peter McGee, who intends to reprint papers up until 1945.”

I had no idea we’d already left

January 10, 2009 By Hermann Observer in History Tags: Francis Fukuyama Leave a comment

America, I mean. Well I had, technically. US-Amerika, that is. But I still am a real American, or “Amurikin” if you prefer, albeit a virtual one here. Anyways… German journalists of the smarter kind over at Die Zeit, concerned about what will become of us (as in US) (as in them) now that we’re going, going, gone, have asked Mr. End of History Francis Fukuyama himself like, what’s the deal? In other words, give us some appropriate inappropriate negative energy flow, pronto.

Here’s MY translation of an interview entitled “What comes after America?”

ZEIT: What DISTURBS you the most about the coming year?

Fuku-san: Duh. The financial crisis.

ZEIT: Will OBAMA save the world or is America TOAST?

Fuku-san: Toast? Don’t think so. Germany was toast once, so I understand where you’re coming from. But it’s not that the US has gotten weaker, it’s that other nations have become stronger.

ZEIT: First the Iraq DISASTER, now the Wall Street MELTDOWN. One might have hoped that America would have at least had its economy under control. Won’t this lead to a massive LOSS OF CONFIDENCE?

Fuku-san: We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, blah, blah, blah. But being that you’ve never had any confidence in us anyway, like, who cares?

ZEIT: Strange how just yesterday state intervention was THE WORK OF THE DEVIL, now the government is supposed to save the economy. Has Amerika become UN-IDEOLOGICAL?

Fuku-san: There’s an ideology out there for any and every direction you take. But I don’t think I’d have the time to explain it to you.

ZEIT: But don’t THE REPUBLICANS want to return to the REAGAN YEARS of LOWER TAXES and LESS STATE CONTROL?

Fuku-san: Those were the days, weren’t they? Unfortunately, less state intervention is not the answer in this situation.

ZEIT: Do YOU have an answer?

Fuku-san: No.

ZEIT: Is the world drifting LEFT?

Fuku-san: Yes.

ZEIT: Could governments OVERTAX themselves with this deficit spending?

Fuku-san: Yes. Human beings tend toward extremes. We will now over-spend and over-regulate everything.

ZEIT: Is REAGAN’S SAYING that government is part of the problem and not part of the solution still valid?

Fuku-san: Yes. We’re not Social Democrats, after all.

ZEIT: Is AMERICAN CAPITALISM in a CRISIS?

Fuku-san: No.

ZEIT: That’s a rather sober attitude considering THE MILLIONS OF UNEMPLOYED.

Fuku-san: I’m a very sober person.

ZEIT: But even sober observers think that CAPITALISM finds itself in a MORAL CRISIS.

Fuku-san: I don’t see how. And should you be referring to the so-called bailout plans, these are aimed at saving the little guy, not the big fat cat. No finance, mucho problemo for them, and for all of us. Get it?

ZEIT: Does AMERICA’S CRISIS also have a cultural dimension?

Fuku-san: Yes, in that we have to return to our Puritan roots and stop living on credit. But you don’t do Puritan roots over here, if I recall, and I was of the understanding that you believed we never had any culture to begin with.

ZEIT: So Amerika became dependent upon China (for money), you say, that sounds like THE END OF THE AMERICAN AGE and the rise of Asia.

Fuku-san: Hard to say. A nation’s real strength comes to light in times of adversity, not during times of general growth. And as for China, something tells me they’re not ten feet tall after all.

ZEIT: Do you still believe in AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM?

Fuku-san: Yes.

ZEIT: Once as NEOCON you supported THE IRAQ WAR, then you distanced yourself from the policy. How will history judge BUSH here?

Fuku-san: Impossible to say. Perhaps, in twenty years, historians will write that because of the US policy there, Iraq became a shining democracy for the entire Arab world.

ZEIT: Do you really believe THAT? Couldn’t you be mistaken?

Fuku-san: Yes, I could be mistaken. How about you?

ZEIT: Perhaps history will take A DIFFERENT TURN.

Fuku-san: If you’re referring to my book, I don’t think so. I believe I was right.

ZEIT: Can a REPENTANT NEOCON like yourself BELIEVE in BARACK OBAMA, too?

Fuku-san: Obama will go in the right direction, but he’ll only be following the road that Bush has already taken.

„Ich glaube nicht, dass die Franzosen einen Algerier oder die Deutschen einen Türken zum Kanzler wählen würden. Auch wenn Amerika von Zeit zu Zeit fatale Fehler begeht, hat es die Kraft, sich immer wieder neu zu erfinden. Das lässt hoffen.”

Observing Hermann

“Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?”

Category Archives: History