Observing German(s)…

That there are giant gaps of knowledge regarding the true nature of the GDR for students all across Germany today is nothing new, but now it appears that the ignorance being mass-produced specifically in the new German states is being done so more systematically than had hitherto been thought possible. Not only are most of the kids unaware of any fundamental difference between the old BRD and GDR states, well, how could they not be? The textbooks they learn from are still sugarcoating good-old Communist East Germany while handling pre-1989 West Germany with the same system-critical censure you could have enjoyed while watching Der schwarze Kanal.

And don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy watching it because you know you did.

This kind of stuff shouldn’t surprise anybody. The Germans, and anybody else who has Dreck am Stecken (skeletons in the closet), do this stuff all the time. They call this kind of thing Verklärung (romanticizing) und Verharmlosung (trivializing) which, hey, come to think of it, that’s the same thing we call it. And even though they know it is bad to do this because it’s, well, politically incorrect, they do it anyway. Live and learn (not).

Hey, maybe that’s why a certain trivializing and romanticizing visitor who recently came to town (I can’t hear the word anymore, remember?) found it so easy to tap into all of this, uh, potential so easily. It’s a systemic kind of thing, this kind of ignorance (blindness?). No wonder seemingly everybody in town goes crazy and jumps on the first flashy band wagon that comes rolling along, they don’t want to be informed. And if they do, but somehow weren’t, then they can always blame it on their textbooks later.

Ein Sozialparadies, keine Diktatur.

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PS: Thanks for the McCain link, Indeterminacy - and nobody out there takes Anne and Rush seriously now anyway, do they?

Unfortunately for the parents who did this, that’s about as verboten as it gets in this country and now they will be spending the next three months in prison. No joke, that’s the way it goes over here. Otherwise openly suspicious of the German state’s motives concerning any other issue you care to think of, everyone seems fine with this court decision. This is because, as several German newspapers have reported, the parents did not send their kids to school “for religious reasons.”

That is a definite no, no over here. Germans are very, very touchy about the religion that used to theirs. Other forms of schooling they can talk about, they are very tolerant about that kind of stuff, but this Christian fundamentalist homeschooling mumbo jumbo has got to get nipped in the bud and pronto. Otherwise, uh, that would undermine everything this country stands for.

Schulverweigerer? Ohne Bewährung.

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Thanks for clearing that up for everybody, Nico.

This really pisses me off, you know. My calculations on the Apophis asteroid had been more like around 1 in 47,000 (how were yours?) so like what the hell does this little dweeb know that I, I mean, you or even we, don’t? The German school system is in a shambles, you know. Just go and ask any German and he or she will tell you so. This isn’t supposed to happen. Just like that deep impact of Apophis somewhere near Las Vegas wasn’t supposed to happen, either. Not until Mr. Schlaumeier (smarty-pants) came along and started recalculating everything, that is.

Well, there is a bright side to all of this, I suppose. Both NASA and Nico have agreed that if Apophis does collide with the Earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridum which will be 320 meters wide and weigh 200 billion tons and that the tsunamis and/or dust clouds it will create will pretty much wipe out pretty much all of the people you may know pretty much, yourself included, which ain’t pretty, but at least their numbers jived on that one. So NASA is back in the ballgame.

“Put your head between your legs and, well, you know the rest.”

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PS: Now the Empire has struck back and says that Nico is like so completely full of it. We may get through this one alive after all, folks.

Many experts who do not wish to be named believe that this miraculous recovery is directly attributable to an increased number of visits by German teachers to Lourdes in recent years but nobody wants to say where they got these numbers or even what these numbers might be. Others believe that German teachers have come to understand that they have an obligation to the society in which they live and that they should give at least the minimum if not more than that which is demanded of them in order to make the world a better and more wonderful place to live, uh, in.

Needless to say, both of these ridiculous theories are being scoffed at by other more expert-type experts who are convinced that they know the real reason why: Ever since the German government decided not to pay out the full retirement benefits for Dienstunfähigkeit retirement, German teachers suddenly and miraculously decided that “hey, disability ain’t so bad after all.”

Disability, datability. You gotta do somethin’, you know?

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PS: Thanks for the Wirtschafswunder, aging and Europaskeptic links, jRm.

Of the 750 10th and 11th grade students surveyed by Berlin’s Freie Universität recently, more than 80 percent admitted to knowing practically nothing about the former East German GDR Brandenburg belonged to for forty long years. Nor were they able to properly explain the difference between such complex concepts as democracy and dictatorship, a relative majority holding the pre-1989 West German BRD for being no better than its GDR counterpart.

But before everybody gets all too hot and bothered about what appears to be some new form of old-fashioned communist plot, keep in mind that students throughout the rest of Germany don’t seem to be doing all that much better. Nearly 8 percent of all students attending Germany’s antiquated Hauptschule (the lowest level of classless Germany’s three-layered and strictly class-oriented education system), for instance, don’t even finish up there.

And this could eventually pose a problem for the rest of those German kids out there, too. For as far as I can tell, the classless Hauptschule kids are supposed to be the ones who start working with 16 (the classless middle layer kids begin working in their early twenties) and pay the way for the classless top level Abitur kids so they can study until they are thirty-five or so and then become the history teachers and other academics who will not know anything about the GDR, either (although they will not know it with class, of course).

But strangely, all of these kids, across all levels of the classless German education system, are incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to negative aspects of or events in American (excuse me, US American) history, real or imaginary. So I guess this means that some things still do get taught at home, thank goodness. Or maybe they just drink this stuff up with mother’s milk.

Honnecker war doch der Typ von VW, oder?

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