Well, actually there are. But in this case I’m not so sure.
The satirical political party “Die Partei” gathered Thursday at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to debut its latest campaign demand: eradicating tourists from the German capital.
The protest is a play on a debate in recent years in Berlin on how mass tourism threatens to transform the Brandenburg Gate, an important historical site in the city, into a a cheap Disneyland-like attraction.
Ob Ost, ob West, nieder mit der Touri-Pest!
Or need to have two, I should say.
Nearly 3 million Germans or over 9 percent of those working full-time are now working part-time as well.
Nope, it’s not because Germans are particularly fleißig (hardworking). This German job wonder that everybody envies so much over here, like everything else in life, comes with a price. The income from many of these wunderjobs is simply no longer enough to get by on. Kein Auskommen mit dem Einkommen (can’t make out with what comes in), or something like that.
Ist es pure Not oder der Wunsch, sich mehr leisten zu können?
Beautiful German weapon sales of the week – past six months, I mean.
Because somebody has to admire them.
When it comes to Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service having forwarded massive amounts of data to the NSA – legally, I mean.
Take the good old SPD, for instance. They’re hollering the loudest at the moment. And this despite the fact that this particularly evil cooperation with US-Amerika is nothing new at all to them. So not new, in fact (an agreement made in the year 2002), that the SPD’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier was the guy wearing the responsibility hat when this agreement was made – the current governing coalition was not even in power.
But hey, you know how it is when a political party is out of power (in more ways than one) and crawling and scratching to get back into the game. In an outrage and all. In a panic, I mean.
“In my view, the opposition has only itself to blame. Pretending to be the firefighter just to be caught as the arsonist – you can’t play both of these roles with any credibility.”
How smart was the Green Party’s election pledge to introduce a weekly vegetarian day? Oh, I dunno. But more than 85 percent of Germans eat meat daily or almost daily. So you do the math.
Massive web surveillance by the US? German voters seem to have lost interest. The euro crisis? Boring. Comprehensive minimum wage? Zzzzzz. It has been a somnolent election season thus far. At least until this week. Suddenly, the German electorate is up in arms, furious with a proposal made by the Green Party which, many fear, could violate one of their most cherished rights: that of eating sausage whenever they want.
If the Greens get their way, I mean.
Although most German works canteens (the place where most working Germans take in their main meal of the day) offer one vegetarian day per week voluntarily already, this is clearly not enough for certain of the more nervous elements pacing the floors at Green Shirt Campaign Headquarters. A federal election is coming up people, so it’s time for a little agitprop sommertime theater already (agitprop Sommerloch theater?).
Once in absolute control – uh, I mean after the coming election in September – the Greens apparantly plan to introduce legislation indroducing “Veggie Day” for the good of all of us, animals included, whether we like our veggies or not (most animals hate them). Like how Organic Bourgeois of them is that?
You see, it’s not like the Greens are into Bevormundung or anything (paternalism, condescension, tutelage, bureaucratic PC dictatorship, etc.). It’s just that they’re into Bevormundung.
One guy from the FDP put it well: “What’s next? Jute Shopping Bag Day? Bike Day? Green Shirt Day?”
“Man muss nicht jeden Tag zwei Burger essen.”
Who would have thought this possible? The German Bundesnachrichtendienst of all intelligence agencies, run by Germans of all people, in Germany of all places, has been systematically providing that evil National Security Agency of US-Amerika with vast amounts of German telecommunications information (meta records).
And the BND has been working closely with the NSA like this for over 50 years now, too. I know that there’s a news item here somewhere, I just haven’t figured out where it is yet.
“The BND has been working with the NSA for over 50 years, especially when it comes to the reconnoitering of situations in crisis areas in order to protect German soldiers stationed there and to protect and rescue abducted German citizens.”
“Der BND arbeitet über 50 Jahren mit der NSA zusammen, insbesondere bei der Aufklärung der Lage in Krisengebieten, zum Schutz der dort stationierten deutschen Soldatinnen und Soldaten und zum Schutz und zur Rettung entführter deutscher Staatsangehöriger.”
Among others. So there, Amerika.
Who cares that these things have either already been closed down for years or no longer serve any practical purpose anymore? The German government is now going to demonstratively cancel a Cold War-era surveillance pact with the United States and Britain following concerns about their alleged electronic eavesdropping in Germany.
And who cares that this is clearly a symbolic gesture and therefore has no practical consequences for intelligence cooperation between these countries? It’s election time.
“This is a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy.”
The details of Anglo-American snooping on German citizens remain unclear and confusing, but many Germans have already bought the “utterly senseless narrative”, as Hans-Peter Friedrich, Germany’s interior minister, lamented this week, that “thousands of Americans are sitting down reading our e-mails and listening to our phone calls”.
Yes, baden gehen can mean to go swimming. But it can also mean to go belly-up or to flop horribly.
And that’s precisely what the German Greens’ top candidate Jürgen Trittin just did while taking part in an election “paddle outing” on the river Werra.
Me? Schadenfroh? Hell yeah. But hey, the federal election here is just 53 days away and you know how it is. Politicians just can’t avoid doing dopey stuff like this at times like this. So give him a break or something. And besides, this guy was all wet to begin with anyway.
The real question here is whether or not this is a portent of things to come. You know, for the Greens? We certainly wouldn’t want them to erleiden (suffer) a Schiffbruch (shipwreck) in the coming election, now would we? Or you wouldn’t, I’m sure.
Trittin, der in Göttingen für den Bundestag kandidiert, war mit Parteifreunden vom nordhessischen Witzenhausen bis ins südniedersächsische Hedemünden auf der Werra gepaddelt, um damit für einen Stopp sämtlicher Salzeinleitungen in den Fluss einzutreten.
If you have ever dreamed of being a startlingly effective secret policeman in a paranoid German Communist dystopia, I mean.
The Stasi fashion collection was extensive. The agency sent thousands of spies into West Germany and had access to vast amounts of cash to buy western goods to equip agents with.
“For me, the banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive.”
