Observing Hermann...

Will got another free train ride the other day against his will. He’s still pretty pissed off about it, too. It made him look bad in front of one of his girlfriends and he seems to be very sensitive about stuff like that.

He was seeing her off at Bahnhof Zoo and wanted to be a gentleman for once. Her train to Amsterdam had just pulled in and he decided to carry her bags on board for her. What a dolt. Everybody knows that stepping into a native train that you’re not planning to be traveling on is gemein gefährlich (exceedingly dangerous) here and should be avoided at all costs. Especially when something like this has happened to you once before… Like it did last year, Will, remember? Hello??

In this country when it says departure time for train X is 10:32 up on that board-thingy, departure time for train X is 10:32. It’s not going to be 10:31 or 10:33 or 10:34. It’s not even going to be 10:32:30. They mean 10:32. He was still on the train at 10:33 and that was his Verhängnis (fate, as in bad luck kind of fate). It could have been worse, though. This train made a quick stop at Wannsee and he was able to jump off before it left town altogether. Its next stop could just have easily been Magdeburg.

The natives like to moan a lot about how punctuality has gone to pot with die Bahn (their train system) and how everything was better in the past blah, blah, blah, but it simply isn’t true. These folks are über-punctual. And it can really be annoying sometimes. 

It doesn’t snow in Berlin . It snow chaos(es) here. Whenever it snows, even if it’s just two or three centimeters like last night, everybody starts running around in circles screaming “Schneechaos!” Cars speed up and everybody tries new, break-neck maneuvers they would never dare to attempt on dry streets. Fathers get up at three in the morning to start clearing their sidewalks. Mothers keep their children home from school. Supermarkets start getting stormed. The national guard gets put on high alert. And they don’t even have a national guard here.

You know, it’s kind of like when Godzilla comes to Tokyo .

And there are other parts of Germany that are actually having real snowfall at the moment. It’s snowed two or three meters worth at some places, power lines breaking and all that. But those folks are all calm, cool (ha, ha) and collected. But not here. The snow here has definitely hit the fan.

I think I’m going to go outside in a few minutes and start a snowball fight with one of those kids who had to stay home from school today. Einfach so. I’m not sure if I can scrape up enough snow together to make a snowball, though.

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Vater Staat und seine Kinder from Ulrike Ackermann), 48 percent of Germany’s budget goes to covering running social expenditures like unemployment payments, retirement payments, health cost subsidies etc. and 14 percent goes to cover the repayment of debt. This doesn’t leave the German government with much room for making needed social reform. And that seems to be precisely what everyone wants. The natives don’t see themselves as being free citizens (in say, the American sense) so much as being privileged members of the German social state. It’s always been that way here, too (since Bismarck ’s time, at least). They value equality and justice more than freedom. And even though everyone goes through this ritual of paying lip service to the desperate need for fundamental social reform these days, they elect a government that mirrors this strange ambivalence: On the one hand, the new government stands for the realization that fundamental change has to finally be made. On the other hand, they stand for the fear of doing just that.

I read an interesting article in Die Zeit the other day (Macht der Moral from Josef Joffe). It was an explanation of why, now get this: “The extension of democracy is the best Realpolitik”. Huh? Since when? Isn’t that what’s being attempted down there in that “catastrophe” Iraq right now? Don’t get me wrong, I like what he writes (he often writes great stuff). But since when does Realpolitik have anything to do with spreading democracy? I couldn’t help but think about a popular saying here: “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral” (we’ll eat first and talk about morality later). That’s pretty much why the natives are always talking about morality here. They’ve already eaten. They’ve over-eaten, as a matter of fact. They even need to lose weight (we’re not the only ones). They also seem to have overlooked the fact that other countries (China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, tell me when to stop…) are still eating (ravenously) and aren’t showing any signs of slowing down, ether. But I guess it’s impolite to watch people while they’re eating or something. And these fine subtleties of etiquette have always been a European specialty anyway. I’m just too enfach gestrickt (knitted too simply) to catch on to this stuff, I guess. But I don’t mind. I’ll gladly leave all the etiquette – and all that Machiavelli, Hobbes, Schroeder-Chirac stuff - to the pros.

Technorati: Berlin

And The Berlin Review is here.

Will and I have had to tone it down a little these days with our eating habits. There’s a big Fleischskandal (meat scandal) going through the media - some crooked meat-packing plant “in the west” somewhere has been selling old, inedible meat repackaged as fresh - and Sonja won’t talk about anything else. Sonja is a vegan now. And what’s worse, she just turned vegan about six weeks ago so she’s still really militant about it. In other words, she’s still hungry all the time and irritable as hell.

Unreliable sources inform me that long-time vegans eventually learn how to stop being hungry and then stop experiencing basic human emotions and then end up levitating out the window one day or something but that’s just something I’ve heard said and I’m not sure if it's really true or not.

Unfortunately, Will and I belong to the Wurstfaktion (sausage supporters) and have to eat something every once in a while. Like right now. Sonja just left to go to the Biobäcker (ecological-type-bread baker) so we figure we’ve got about twenty minutes. It’s Will’s stash this time and he pulls out this gorgeous Prager Schinken and 300 grams of Blutwurst. Talk about a Wurst party. Hey, maybe we should consider starting a political one...

We rip open the windows when we’re done to get the smell out (only took us four minutes, by the way). Will would have liked to have enjoyed that cigarette danach (afterwards), but Sonja also quit smoking last year.


Ever try a Berliner Currywurst?

Most Europeans are still unaware as to where they are going with the European Union. The natives here certainly don’t have a clue, or even care. Although in a recent “Europinion” the eastern Germans (47%) were actually among the groups who feel most informed about the Union, 60% of the western Germans have the impression of being “not very well” or “not at all well” informed about the process.  

The recent vote in France must have made all of this abundantly clear. Even the deepest-sleeping European bureaucrat in Brussels must have seen this one as a wake-up call. Nothing’s happened since then, of course. They’re all still licking their wounds. Or maybe they don’t feel at all well informed, either. 

Yup, according to the "Eurobarometer", stormy times may be approaching. Does anybody I know here give a hoot? Nope. There’s no consensus out there even about what Europe is supposed to be, much less become. 

Hermann doesn’t give Merkel much of a chance. He’s skeptisch (skeptical). Why should he be the only one that isn’t, right? The normal native psychological make-up doesn’t usually allow for this, I said, giving politicians “of another color” a chance, I mean. He disagreed, of course, but then promptly painted himself into a corner. We wrestled with words back and forth for a few minutes and then he eventually had to admit that he didn’t trust her. When I asked him why he didn’t trust her he said that it had to do with her empty phrases. When I asked him what these empty phrases might be he couldn’t tell me. And then he said she claims to want to move the country forward, but that he doesn’t trust her real intentions. He couldn’t tell me what these were, either, of course, and this suddenly reminded me of Iraq. The natives don’t trust our real intentions, regardless of what we say. And then it struck me that it doesn’t really matter what you say or even do if nobody trusts you. And most natives, I believe, have trouble enough trusting their own countrymen, their own elected leaders, much less the intentions of, say, some mythical President in some mythical country far away they really know nothing about – no, not really. And it all gets down to the fact that people in general, but here in particular, have trouble believing that others are capable of doing things that they themselves are incapable of doing.

It rains a lot here. It rains a whole lot here. It rains a whole #*!?$! lot here. It rains, on average, twelve to fourteen feet a year here… I think. It’s raining now, by the way. But that’s only the first part of the story. 

A friend of mine came to visit me last year. He wanted to “do” Europe, as he said, and would be needing a place to stay while visiting Berlin - please. He’s an adult and whatever he “does” in the privacy of his own four walls or his hotel room or at another friend’s house is none of my business really but I did point out to him that he would not be “doing” any Europe while staying at my place thank you. But that’s only the second part of the story. 

The final part of the story has to do with the fact that he can’t speak a word of German. Not one. He’s kind of like Will except Will has been known to occasionally make sounds that at least sound like German. This guy doesn’t even try and certainly doesn’t care. I don’t care, either. Like I said, he’s a friend. 

But… He’s a friend who came in out of the rain. It was raining the day he arrived and it continued raining right up until the day he climbed aboard the train to Munich one week later (this was in the summer, too, by the way). And, being an American, he was always watching TV here, or trying to. He wouldn’t let me shut the damned thing off, either, even though the only stuff he could follow was CNN and BBC. Talk about desperate. 

At any rate, one night I’m watching the national news show here, they call it Die Tagesschau. He’s pacing around the living room (still a bit damp from our excursion that afternoon), breathing down my neck, asking for a translation every two minutes. And at the end of the news, well, they always do the weather. It’s called Wetter here, the weather (pay attention here, folks). 

And that’s when my buddy caught on that it was the weather report (all by himself) and saw the word Wetter. “What?” he cried. “How can it possibly get any wetter here than it is already?” 

And that’s the rest of the story.

What? We’ve got to worry about drinking beer over here now, too? Well, no. Not yet. But I hear a little buzz in the Kneipen (neighbourhood bars) now and then - Hermann himself is an honorary agitator at three of them, by the way - and this discussion comes around regularly in roughly six month waves/intervals, crashing over our heads like frothy Pilsner and leaving us high and dry – but only for a minute or two. Tops. 

We had another discussion about it last night at the Zwiebelfisch. Word is out that the Reinheitsgebot (The Purity Decree) is in danger of being watered down (literally) by the evil global globalization conspirator mongers. And you know who they are, right? The Purity Decree is some goofy law enacted way back in 1516 by King Ludwig der Blaue (I think) somewhere far away in a place called “Bavaria” which stipulates that beer (they call it Bier here, just for your information) can only be made from barley, hops, water and (later) yeast. 

Duh, you might say. What else are you going to brew your beer with? Do not ask this. American beer is allowed to be brewed using over 100 ingredients. Talk about your melting pot. Yuk. 

I am not political. But having just reread these last few sentences I might be prepared to jump over my own shadow for once. I mean, geez, is nothing sacred anymore?

 

By the way, here are a couple Berliner drinking establishments that may be of interest to you.

After yesterday’s big Zapfenstreich (a traditional military farewell) held in his honor in Hannover, nothing more stands in the way of Gerhard Schroeder’s long-awaited exit from public life. Well, I’ve certainly been long-awaiting it. “The Great Modernizer” will be leaving town this coming Tuesday. Yes, after seven eventful years of Alleingänge (single-handed stunts), irreparably soured German-American relations, bizarre political alliances (domestic and foreign) and a demolished SPD, he’s finally gotten the message that maybe it’s time to leave now pretty please if you don’t mind already. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the economy is in a shambles, too. And their social system, as well. Unemployment’s never been higher. But hey, let’s move on and look ahead and march forward and all that. At least his exit strategy was a resounding success. He has (sorry, had) something teflon-like about him. He came out of this smelling like a rose.

Technorati: Germany