Politics and Press

What’s right about Bavaria

My bother and I recently returned from a lengthy stay in Germany’s most engaging city, Munich, and decided it was time to admit that the citizens of Bavaria have made a wise decision. They have decided to go along with the tourist ploy that Berlin is the city to visit if you are going to make a brief sojourn into that nasty country that only one generation ago came close to wiping out European civilization. For European cities that become apples of tourist organizers’ eyes pay a heavy, sometimes fatal, price for paving their streets with the gold left behind by the hordes. For 8 months of the year, Florence and Venice, surely two of the world’s most splendid cities, cease to exist under the conditions that once made them so splendid, as they are overwhelmed with tourists anxious to have their pictures taken in front of nude David or a yodeling gondolier or two. Really big cities, like New York, Paris or London, not to mention gigantic ones like Shanghai or Tokyo, and even somewhat isolated cities like Stockholm, Vancouver and Helsinki, can brush aside the potential carnage by offering more space than the tourists can fill. But middle size cities like Munich, full of the cultural monuments that tourists crave and sitting right on the main road of the grand tour, run the danger of sinking like Venice.

And so Munich and Bavaria, the beautiful “free state” of which it is the capital, have made a deal that convinces the rest of the world to come in once a year for a couple of weeks in late September and early October and spend its money like drunken sailors, in fact spend their weeks like that as well, and then depart deliriously happy having had a time they can hardly remember. The coffers of Munich bulge at the seams, the countryside round about counts up the spillage from the overflow, and the local citizenry returns to going about its business, having limited the damage to the 17 days of the Oktoberfest, which most of them never visit unless it’s on business, while suggesting that Berlin would be a better place to visit the rest of the year. And off they go. Meanwhile we Münchners and our Upper- and Lower-Bavarian relatives and friends spend the splendid spring, summer and autumn evenings in beer gardens and quiet corners that other places can only dream about, quaffing a liter of Augustiner, Spatenbräu or Paulaner that other breweries , content to spend their money on marketing some kind of liquid that one could not give way under the chestnut trees of Bavaria, cannot even begin to try to copy. So pass the word - be sure to visit Europe’s most wonderful city, but be sure to do it during the Oktoberfest and don’t bother visiting the Hirschgarten, Taxisgarten, or even the Hofbräuhausgarten am Wiener Platz - the other one am Platzl you should definitely visit - because all you’ll find there are boring locals.

Playing Doctor in Germany

US-American biologist Ian Baldwin has found out the black comic way that it is not true that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. He made the mistake of responding to German attempts to make their leading research institutes more international by recruiting experts from around the civilized world, which Baldwin undoubtedly assumed included the elite US educational system out of which he came. The German academic selection committee must have considered him to have had an appropriate academic background, since they offered him the plum position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. In fact Dr. (whoops!) Baldwin had a cv and a list of publications that made him just the right kind of internationalist to lend prestige to the faltering reputation of the German academic system on the international stage.

Imagine then his surprise when on January 9 as new Director he received a letter from the criminal inspection division of the Jena Police ordering him to appear before them for an “interrogation as an accused ” (Vornehmung als Beschuldeter), which involved a process which could only have reminded him of his undergraduate reading of Kafka’s The Trial. On Feb. 18 he was informed by the Culture Ministry of Thüringen that he had been accused of the following: “Im Rahmen Ihrer Tätigkeit führten Sie Ihren amerikanischen Hochschulgrad ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in Form der Abkürzung ‘Ph.D’ (”In the framework of your activities you used your American (Presumably they meant US-American) title of ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in its abbreviated form Ph.D.” But only those with Doctorates from EU countries could use such titles, not Americans. (My brother Doug failed to get a response from Thuringian cultural bureaucrats when he asked about Canadian titles.) Thus Mr. Baldwin discovered that if he had gotten his degree from a Latvian, Romanian or Bulgarian university he could call himself Doctor in Germany but not if it was from a university in Massachusetts, even if he was now the director of one of Germany’s premier academic research institutes, a position which of course demanded that he have a doctorate. And they say that you can’t write like Kafka any more. As is turned out, just as in “The Trial”, the process seems to have been initiated by a revengeful foreigner who also had a doctorate from a non-EU country and had been ordered not to use it on the basis of a law passed during Nazi time.

Fortunately for the German academic scene, Dr. Baldwin, after the intervention of German academic elite who were in a position to overrule Thuringian bureaucrats, can now once again use the title “Ph.D.”. And fortunately for them he also must have known that Kafka was also a great comic writer, even if the comedy had the potential of a dark nightmare if ever those bureaucrats came into power again. However, my brother and I still don’t know what happens to Canuck PhDs if their holders follow the lure of the Loreleis of German academia.

Whose war is this, anyway?

Who knows? Maybe Senator McCain will overcome all odds and become the next president of the United States, in which case the war in Iraq, which has become a forlorn US war as the few original allies head for the hills, may not be over. But the war in Afghanistan, supposedly a NATO war with some help from Australian special forces, is anything but over. But for most of the NATO countries, it has never started.

In a scenario that nobody could have imagined even five years ago, Canadian Minister of Defence Peter MacKay knocked on the doors of all of his colleagues at the meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Lithuania this week, and asked a simple question. “Are you willing to order your soldiers to actually fight in Afghanistan, or do you plan to keep them in safe havens under orders to not engage in combat while Canadian, British, and US troops do all the dangerous work, with some limited help from the Netherlands and Denmark?” For the Canadian government has announced that it has had enough of this charade of a NATO army and will pull its 3000 troops out of dangerous Kandahar, where 78 Canadian soldiers have been killed, if other NATO countries don’t contribute at least 1000 actual fighting soldiers by next year. The US Secretary of Defence inadvertently added his salt to this wound by stating that while US soldiers knew how to fight Taliban forces, other NATO soldiers didn’t. Later he admitted he hadn’t meant to include Canada, the UK and the Netherlands in this condemnation, but by then it was too late.

MacKay met with lots of encouragement but little success, though the US promised marines on a temporary basis, and France seemed to vaguely suggest it might send 700 fighters. The real disgrace is that supposed leading powers in NATO like Germany, Italy and Spain have ordered their armies to not engage in combat, while their Canadian, US and British colleagues, all supposedly part of the same army, are suffering heavy casualties. Can such a supposed political union really survive such a breech of loyalty?

A few facts from the Oktoberfest

It rained a bit during the week in Munich so when the sun came out on Saturday morning, the crowds were chomping at their bit to get to the action of the Oktoberfest. There are no records kept for such feats but long-term observers think that the mass spurt to the beer tents reached Olympian heights on this glorious Bavarian morning. At 9:00 the gates were opened and the assembled crowds poured into the Bavarian heaven. At 9:04 the police declared that the Löwenbräu tent, a gigantic piece of canvas occupied by a brass band and thousands of customers, was full and the doors were closed. Police could not explain how so many people could sprint across the open space and pour into the tent in only 4 minutes, aber so war es!.
Otherwise it has been a relatively normal Fest. On Saturday 600,000 people showed up, during the week 200,000 Italian tourist made the journey north, dramatically reversing the usual trend, 3,4 million liters of beer were drunk, 200,000 more than last year, you don’t want to know how many oxen ended up on the barbecue, 3921 patients had to be treated by the Red Cross, and 14 pickpockets were arrested. Mensch, was willst du noch mehr?

Germany’s home-grown explosive experts

Exactly thirty years to the day that a group of young German extreme leftists kidnapped and eventually murdered German business chief Hans-Martin Schleyer, initiating a series of violent attacks on German civilian targets, such as Lufthansa, whose repercussions continue to make Germans nervous, a new batch of home-grown terrorists has made a dramatic entry into the headlines. Like the original RAF members, the Al-Quaida-affiliated group that had six times as much explosive chemicals stored in a garage in a remote village in the Black Forest as did the bombers of the railways in Madrid and London, was dominated by the children of middle- to upper-class German parents. They had received normal German educational training and been rather anonymous teenagers when they converted to Islam, went to training bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan and returned as explosive specialists with the intention of blowing up, apparently, the Frankfurt airport and the US air force base at Ramstein.
Since Germany refused to take part in the Iraq war and has had a rather inconspicuous role in the NATO foray in Afghanistan, preferring to leave the real fighting to middle powers like the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada, your average Fritz Schmidt felt that Germany was an unlikely terrorist goal. But these illusions have now passed as it becomes clear that the real goal of the Al-Quaida mission is the destabilization of the pillars of western society. Their leader stated in his most recent announcement, that the only way the west can be spared is by converting to Islam. It’s a sobering thought for any Judeo-Christian society and for the Germans it becomes even more threatening and disheartening when the explosive experts are named Fritz and Daniel and learned their trade during the ever-more-common coming-of-age trek through once exotic Asia.

The Emperor and the cuckoo bird

Now let’s get this straight. A monumentally thuggish North African political regime, that blew up a British passenger plane not long ago and is trusted by nobody, arrests five completely innocent Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, accuses them of infecting 400 children with Aids, who were actually infected by unhygienic hospital conditions, sentences them to death by getting confessions after medieval torturing, throws them in unspeakable jails for eight years, and finally decides it can use them to blackmail the European Union, which reluctantly negotiates an agreement costing 1 Million Dollars per infected child. These depressing negotiations are undertaken by EU officials over the course of a couple of years, and reach fruition during the presidency of Germany. Thus Angela Merkel is ultimately responsible for negotiating the agreement, which leads to the freeing of the six prisoners.

But who is it who shows up in Libya for the photo-op at the liberation of the prisoners? Why it’s none other than Cecilia Sarkozy, newly-crowned first lady of France, who has flown in on her husband’s private jet to revel in the glory at the liberation. Now she has played no role in all this, and neither has her husband or for that matter, France, other than its supposed membership in the EU. France’s former Minister to the EU, Pierre Moscovici, notes: “Sarkozy has taken on the strategy of the cuckoo, the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.”

Ariane Mnouchkine, France’s leading theatre person and the director of the Théatre de soliel, put it this way as she turned down the position offered to her to become the Chaired Professor of Theatre at the College de France, a call that she had received 8 months before, but which needed the approval of the President of France to become valid. When she received Sarkozy’s document, which made it seem like he had annointed her, she wrote the following:
“Nicolas Sarkozy has turned us into collaborators by attempting to curry favour with anyone played up by the media - artists and others. That is unacceptable. Therefore I must turn down the offer of this position, which had pleased me so much…. The whole world saw what happened with the Bulgarian nurses; they tried to make us believe that it was the President of France who had engineered this agreement when every one knows that the diplomats of the European Union had been working at it for years. It’s high time that Sarkozy stops trying to make us believe that he’s the one who makes things happen.”

Oh yes one more thing. On the day after his wife flew to Libya, the President himself showed up there, shared a brotherly kiss with the Libyan leader, and announced that France would supply Libya with a nuclear reactor to be built by French engineers on the coast near Tripoli. It turns out he does make things happen.

The Catastrophic Near Miss

Italian prime Minister Romano Prodi called the compromise solution to the European Union’s attempt to settle its endless bureaucratic wrangling over national and European-wide powers a step backwards. Europe, he suggested, had fallen into a situation in which some countries put their own national interests first while others presented those of Europe, whatever that now may mean. There is no question about who he meant by the former. Poland had made its intentions to play the spoiler clear for the last couple of months, and Great Britain, with Tony Blair leading it for the last time, once again in the end played an anti-Europe card which left mainland Europe wondering if the island kingdom really ever considered itself part of Europe.

In the end all 27 countries signed onto a compromise (otherwise there would be no rules of order for the EU today) which many, like former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, felt “hardly avoided a total catastrophe.” If there was anyone who came out of this event looking good, it was German Kanzlerin Angela Merkel, who piloted the leaking ship of state with more patience and expertise than most would have imagined not long ago, and managed to sail it into some kind of safe harbour for the time being. Unfortunately for the EU, her term of office as president of the EU runs out on July 1, and her successor will have to have the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon to get that ship back on a stable course.

The Last Polish Joke Show

The European Union, currently celebrating its fiftieth birthday, is about to display its farcical administrative side, and simultaneously demonstrate its inability to function if faced with controversial decisions. There are now 27 members, ranging in size and power from France, Germany and the UK to Malta, Latvia and Cyprus, resulting in a linguistic chaos at its meetings in Brussels as the frantic search goes on to find a Finno-Maltese translator. This is farce, although, it’s an incredibly expensive and cumbersome production, but that is nothing compared to the fact that its constitution demands unanimity for anything to be agreed upon. Every country, no matter how small, has the right to veto.

Now, at this year’s EU summit meeting, it is about to face the music for this anachronistic rule that was passed when there was a small core group. All but one of the 27 nations is in total agreement that something must be done about the way that the number of votes has been assigned to each country. In Nice in 2000, after an all night session, bleary-eyed representatives passed a temporary measure on vote distribution that resulted in the still-prevailing situation in which the largest financial contributor to the EU. Germany, with a population of 85 million, received 29 voting representatives while Poland, the largest recipient of EU funds with a population of 38 million, received 27. Afterwards, the sleep-deprived voters could scarcely remember why they had ever reached such a strange result other than that it was the only way they could get unanimity.

Now the time has finally come to agree to a constitution that distributes the votes more reasonably, and even the UK and Malta agree that a referendum to that effect must be approved at the EU summit. But Poland doesn’t and the Polish Prime Minister, Lech Kaczynski, has ignored personally-delivered lectures by the prime ministers of France, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Germany in the last week and continues to say that he will not compromise but will veto. German analysts speculate this is because Poland does not want Germany to have the honour of solving the vote-distribution problem of the EU during its term as President. Instead Kaczynsky has proposed a reckoning by what he calls “rectangular roots” that has even mathematicians struggling for comprehension.

The Germans have lost their sense of humour on this latest example of odd behaviour by the reigning Polish government. The liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung finished its editorial on the topic as follows: “If Europe should really slide into the greatest crisis imaginable after the failure of its constitutional referendum, then the Germany may be accused of having underestimated the size of Polish ignorance of Europe for months on end. But Poland itself will bear responsibility on its own for everything else. It is going to have to pay a price for that.” This is not the way the German liberal press normally talks about Poland, and it does not bode well for future Polish-German relations.

Horror Show on the Streets

During the soccer world championships a year ago in Germany, there was general euphoria and pride among the Germans that the atmosphere had been so serene and that there was almost no sign of the hooliganism that has plagued - some would say ruined - the European national sport in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The German police made a great and ultimately successful effort to keep the usual British suspect-thugs from entering Germany or at least from getting into the stadiums. But there was one aspect of the law and order campaign that continues to be very disturbing - people of colour, and other obvious outsiders, whether athletes or fans, were advised not to stray far from secure areas in former East German cities like Leipzig, where the only only venue in the former DDR was located. The reason was clear for anyone used to life in West and East Germany - the Neo-Nazis had strongholds in parts of East Germany that were unimaginable in western cities like Munich, where one would be stunned to see Neo-Nazis, outfitted in their military paraphernalia, unless they were surrounded by Munich police who were keeping angry protesters away from them.
That this is not the case in eastern Germany was made grotesquely clear on the weekend in Halberstadt, a small city in Sachsen-Anhalt that is considered to be a centre of Neo-Nazi strength, 100 kilometers northwest of Leipzig. The state theatre there put on a performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday evening. At 3:00 on Saturday morning, 14 members of the ensemble, on their way home from the post-premiere party, were attacked on the main street of the city by a drunken horde of Neo-Nazis. Five musicians, actors and dancers were so badly beaten that, with broken bones and severe bruises, they ended up in the hospital. One actor, who was wearing a Mohawk hair cut because of his theatre role, had his nose broken. According to eyewitness accounts, police did eventually show up at the scene of the crime, but did little to stop it. Eventually one 22-year old with a record of violent assaults and wearing the traditional bomber jacket, was first arrested and then set free.
No motive could be found other than that the theatre group seemed to be having too good a time, and perhaps the mob didn’t like the Mohawk because they felt it mocked them. The scandal was large enough for the premier of Sachsen-Anhalt to join the chorus of critics of the police, and the suspect was arrested again on Sunday evening, admitted his part in the beatings, but wouldn’t identify any colleagues. As it turned out, in April a young lad wearing a bomber jacket had attacked a young girl sitting in a bus on her way home from a music lesson. Well he did not actually attack the girl, but rather her cello, which he proceeded to smash in a thousand pieces. Now that there are virtually no Jews left in this part of Germany, it seems that anybody considered different - Africans, Turks, gays, actors, artists, cellos – can be openly attacked and the police don’t seem to want to do much about it.