Excellence Regained

In 2012, Red Baron wrote a blog post titled Excellence Lost, vandalizing the title of Milton's well-known poem and referring to Freiburg University's loss of its status of excellence that year.

In his first poem, Milton addresses the fall of Adam and Eve. The poet's second, shorter poem frames the recovery of what Adam lost.

Accordingly, Red Baron frames how the University of Freiburg regained its status as a University of Excellence on October 2:

Already in 2019, the Alberto-Ludoviciana tried to regain its status of excellence but failed.

The bid succeeded this year because of a convincing combination of outstanding research, a coherent long-term strategy, and the university's ability to show how its research could benefit society.

Freiburg met the fundamental requirement of two research clusters:

1. CIBSS - Center for Integrative Biological Signaling Studies

2. Future Forests - Adapting Complex Social-Ecological Forest Systems to Global Change

In 2025, Red Baron attended a presentation on how forests can adapt to climate change while preserving their ecosystems and the services they provide. Urban environments in particular benefit from trees that resist the effects of climate change.

The second decisive element was the new vision University Rector Kerstin Krieglstein presented:

"The Future Research University: Sparking Change That Matters."

Under its long-term development program, the University of Freiburg will:

- foster interdisciplinary research: bringing different scientific disciplines together rather than
  allowing them to work in isolation.

- prepare students with excellent teaching to think critically and help shape the future.

- transfer knowledge by translating scientific discoveries into practical benefits
  for society, industry and politics.

Freiburg submitted its application in November 2025, and an international panel of experts visited the university in June 2026. The evaluators examined both the quality of its research and the coherence of its overall development strategy. 

The long-awaited message of relief came on October 2:

The audience explodes, Lord Mayor Martin Horn (in the middle) applauds Rector Krieglstein
while former Rector Hans-Jochen Schiewer (holding the banner) still looks on in disbelief
©Maximo-Hans Musielik/BZ

Out of eleven applications from individual universities and university consortia, only five were selected for new and additional funding of €10–15 million per year.

Kerstin swirls her champagne glass (©Maximo-Hans Musielik/BZ)

The international panel of experts did not simply rank individual research results; Freiburg's application rather showed how scientific excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and practical impact reinforce one another.

**

Gent

After our morning visit to Brugge, we boarded the bus full of anticipation because, as stated in the itinerary:

In the afternoon, we'll continue to Ghent, once one of Europe's most important cloth-making cities and, in the Middle Ages, one of the continent's richest and largest metropolises. The city impresses with its well-preserved historic center, lively squares, and magnificent buildings that reflect its rich cultural heritage. Both cities [Bruges and Ghent] offer a wealth of picturesque nooks and crannies that your tour guide will show you today. Enjoy the special atmosphere that fascinatingly blends history and modernity.

So much for that. A married couple simply couldn't find their way back to the bus, so the rest of the tour group was held hostage for 90 minutes until our driver, after consulting with the supreme Tour Guide in faraway Germany, got the green light to continue. The couple reportedly complained that the bus hadn't waited any longer and that they had to take the train from Brugge to Antwerpen.

Be that as it may. Time was irretrievably lost, the visit to Gent was compromised, and it turned into a quick city tour.

The Flemish name Gent derives from the Celtic word ganda (French Gand), meaning confluence. In Gent, the Leie and the Scheldt rivers converge.

Gent, with its guttural Flemish sound, has nothing to do with English gent, so Anglophones write the city as Ghent. With a population of 270.000 it is Belgium's second-largest city after Antwerpen and is the capital of the province of East Flanders.

Most impressive is the Belfried (Belfry), Gent's 95 m bell tower. It was erected around 1370 as a symbol of civic power, including in opposition to that of the Church. It served as a watchtower to spot town fires and approaching enemies and was a place to proclaim public announcements. A bell rang the time, signaled the opening and closing of the town gates, and marked the start and end of working hours.

The steeple of Saint Bavo's Cathedral is 6 meters shorter than the Belfried.

There are more towers in Gent. The late-medieval noble residence Rijhove, built in Flemish Gothic and Renaissance styles, features a round white limestone tower. Today, the complex houses the Miry Concertzaal.

In Gent too, the eagle, this time on an obelisk and sphere, caught Red Baron's attention. My intuition was true. It is l'Aigle Imperial. When Napoleon integrated Flanders into the French Empire, he made Gand the capital of the Département d'Escaut (Scheldt).

Mule Jenny met Lieven Bauwens in het Museum voor Industriële Archeologie en Textiel (©Lalieka/Wikipedia)

During the Napoleonic Blockade (1806-1814), which cut England's trade with the Continent, Gent's textile production boomed, especially after Lieven Bauwens smuggled a spinning jenny into Flanders and became the city's leading capitalist, tied to the Napoleonic regime's favor toward industry.

From 1811 to 1814, in the last years of the French period, Bauwens served as mayor of Gent. After British competition returned, he became bankrupt.

Approaching Saint Bavo.

The Cathedral's interior.

The Stadshal from 2012. Its roof rests on a few massive concrete cores and resembles a giant, sloping gable prism. Beneath lies a covered, open space that serves as a plaza for markets, concerts, festivals, etc. Initially, the hall was controversial because the modern building stands right next to the medieval Belfried. 

On our way to the banks of the Leie River, we passed the Oud Postgebouw, the former post office building, which bears witness to Gent's former great wealth. The clock tower is part of the building.

The Leie suffers from climate change and overfertilization. The "warm" water promotes excessive duckweed growth.

Once wealthy trading houses on Leie Quay have been transformed into expensive gourmet temples.

Our group rushed back to the bus through Werregarenstraat, better known as Graffitistraat. The narrow, completely spray-painted alley is designated as a legal space, so graffiti artists are free to use it at any time. As a result, the artwork is constantly changing. The street is both a tourist attraction and a gathering place for the local scene.

It's not finished yet. Stay tuned for the Maastricht picture gallery.

**

Bruges

Cover Design for "Bruges-la-Morte" (©Wikipedia/collection Van Maele)

The third morning of our trip was devoted to Brugge, or, as the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach described the city in his short symbolist novel of 1892, Bruges-la-Morte (The Dead Bruges).

  

Rather Bruges-la-Reflètende.

Our bus parked at Kanaaleland in the south. 

We walked over the red bridge, crossed the Minnewaterbrug, and strolled along Minnewater to the Begijnhof.

View of the Beguine courtyard from 1886, with its Begijnhofkerk. In the background is the steeple of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk.

Sisters crossing the inner square of their convent on their way to the Begijnhofkerk for a church service in 1974.

"A Beguine is a courageous, revolutionary woman."

Since 1240, the Beguines had been a thorn in the Church's side. In 1312, Pope Clement V banned this early emancipatory movement of widowed or unmarried women, and there were many.  

Between 1240 and 1565, 298 Beguine courts flourished in Flanders, including eight in Bruges alone.

A glimpse into a Beguine's little garden.

Born on June 4, 1822, lace maker Sofie Linseele keeps the Bruges tradition of handmade lace alive at the Beguinenhof at the age of 78.

You note horse-drawn carriages in the distance.

We continued, joined Katelijnestraat via Wijngaardstraat, and headed north to Bruges' Grote Markt.

Mariastraat jetty. The brick architecture of the buildings
is referred to as Vlaamse primitieven (Flemish Primitives).

Not just horse-drawn carriages, but also little boats invite visitors to take a sightseeing tour along Bruges' grachten (canals).

We passed Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk and stopped in front of the Gruuthusemuseum. It is housed in Lodewijk van Gruuthuse's palace. Lodewijk was not only rich but also a trusted councilor to Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy.

After the duke's death on the battlefield at the gates of Nancy, he also cared for Charles' daughter, Mary of Burgundy. Grateful for his support in the difficult times after her father's death, she appointed him chamberlain to her young son Philip.

Red Baron thought the horseman above the entrance honors Mary's husband,  Maximilian I, who took any effort to look after his gedechtnus (memory), but it is Lodewijk. The inscription reads Plus est en vous (There is more in you than you realize).

Bruges, too, would not be complete without the patron saint of bridges, St. Nepomuk.

The buildings lining the small passage to the Grote Markt date from 1614 and 1608; that is, they were built during the Tachtigjarige Oorlog (Eighty Years' War) between the Netherlands and Spain, which began in 1568 and ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, recognizing the independence of the Dutch Republic.

We skipped the Grote Markt and went back to Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk to admire Michelangelo's De Heilig Maagd en het Kind,

When we entered the church, Barend van Orley's 1534 Triptych of the Passion over the high altar caught our attention.

Nearby are the sarcophagi of Charles the Bold and his daughter Mary, who died in a riding accident at the age of 24.

Then we entered the cappella sacra created in the 18th-century Baroque style. 

It enshrines the most celebrated art treasure of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk: a white marble sculpture of the Madonna and Child created by Michelangelo around 1504.

It was time for a rest. Sitting outside, over a quick lunch, we observed the horse-drawn carriages fly by.

 

**

Angst

Angst is no longer just a German phenomenon: A specter is haunting the world – the specter of angst*.
*A play on words based on the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto

People are suffering from Weltstress (global stress) and feel they are losing control of their lives. They are at the mercy of climate change; as a consequence of senseless wars, they suffer from high prices caused by resource shortages; they hear AI predicting their imminent demise; and they feel lonely despite an oversupply of friend requests on social media.

Many people are overwhelmed by the fast-paced present and lament, “Everything used to be better in the past.”

They see decline on all fronts. Germans no longer trust the established parties to get their country‘s problems under control. Anger mingles with citizens’ angst for their future: “Those who govern us are incompetent; they can’t get things under control.”

Former East Germany is AfD land,
while in the West the Christian Democrats are still (?) dominant (©Deutsche Telekom).

People are looking for ways out of this threatening trend and seeking alternatives. Hoping to restore a predictable outlook to their lives, they vote for politicians or parties that cater to this longing.

Indeed, these parties offer simple solutions with slogans like socialization, expropriation, Tax the Rich, remigration, Dexit*, back to our national roots, and the DM. These catchwords will surely make life cheaper and foreign influence more bearable.
*coined after Brexit

Who will bear the costs? Tariffs*, the rich, and big tech.
*or another country: Mexico will pay for the wall

©Deutsche Telekom

Meanwhile, in Germany, a shrinking centrist bloc is fighting to keep its government afloat amid dwindling revenues. Social benefits, personnel costs, and subsidies rise; public spending on these items will climb to 52.0% of gross domestic product this year, and the trend is upward. Germany is not yet the European champion, with Finland (58.9%) taking the gold medal and France (57.4%) the silver.

Because the ruling parties are suffering one election defeat and one poll shock after another, they shower people with favors, even though there is nothing left to give. An economic expert called the second German fuel rebate - costing 2.5 billion euros - an “expression of political desperation.”

On Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced a lowering of the electricity tax to the European minimum for everyone, making German energy-hungry industry internationally competitive and easing the financial burden on private households. According to Merz, the government will use financial leeway in the budget to achieve this, but in reality these subsidies are paid for by increasing our national debt.

For decades, citizens should have realized that the state pension is no longer sufficient to maintain their standard of living when retired. Nevertheless, few did make provisions for the future. Only 48 percent of West Germans have a private supplemental retirement plan; in the East, the figure is a mere 27 percent.

When Merz plainly said in April that the statutory pension would serve only as a basic safety net in the future, there was an outcry. Citizens expect the state to rescue them.

Germany still enjoys a high standard of living. We remain the world’s third-largest economy. But the German economic model has limited long-term sustainability. The welfare state is severely overstretched, non-wage labor costs are high, and bureaucracy is enormous. If we do not address these problems, Germany’s economic performance will decline.

©NTV

89% of our citizens recognize the need for reforms, which will inevitably lead to sacrifices, but only 32% are willing to make them.

Germany is incapable of reform, and people’s angst will grow.
**

Ice-Cold Neutrinos

This blog reveals a connection between the Freiburg-Madison-Gesellschaft and CERN, and its personal too.

©THE CAP TIMES

Francis Halzen, a Belgian-born physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, from 1969 to 1971, a colleague at CERN*, won this year’s Nobel Prize for his neutrino research. He learned about it while sitting in a hotel room in Italy: “I got the call at around 11 o’clock. … If I had been in Madison, they would have woken me up. I slept very well last night.”

*I joined CERN in 1968 and never met him

While writing a research proposal for a committee meeting with his peers, the newborn primus inter pares said, “I hope I don’t disturb the peace there too much.”

He told Madison’s THE CAP TIMES: “This project was challenging enough that it ending up with the Nobel Prize was so unlikely that until we started to finally achieve some results recently in the last 10 years, I certainly … never thought about this, and this certainly was not a motivation.”

“I was lucky enough that the right people showed up at the right time with the right talents to overcome the challenges the project faced. Some were overcome with pure luck, but that's science,” Halzen chuckled. “It's a combination of perseverance and talent and luck.”

Neutrino research was a field in high-energy physics where CERN led when Red Baron worked there.

And CERN continued its neutrino research beyond my retirement. In 2011, experimental results caused an outcry in physics when physicists measured neutrinos produced at CERN in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso buried deep below the mountains that were “speedier” than the speed of light.

Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (©Alastair Philip Wiper)

The OPERA* experiment, designed to study the transformation (oscillation) of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos during their 730 km journey from CERN to the Gran Sasso detector, observed a light-travel time of 2.4381723 ms while the expected time was 2.4382323 ms. This meant neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light arrived 60 ns too early.

*Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus

Did we have to rewrite Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? I can reassure you, no.

In May 2012, OPERA repeated its measurement with a new, short-pulse neutrino beam. The final conclusion was that the CERN-to-Gran Sasso neutrino flight time matched the speed of light. The physicists concluded that a faulty fiber-optic timing element caused the original OPERA result.

The team compensated for the experimental blunder. In 2018, OPERA produced the long-desired result, observing 10 tau-neutrino candidates. The researchers confirmed that muon neutrinos produced at CERN can transform into tau neutrinos while traveling 730 km.

Back from “speedy” to ice-cold neutrinos.

To put it right away, the neutrinos aren't cold; Francis Halzen’s detector is. Instead of building an enormous artificial detector, he turned Antarctic ice into a gigantic neutrino telescope with thousands of photomultipliers watching for the tiny flashes of blue Cherenkov light produced when a neutrino interacts. Francis proposed the basic idea of an IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the late 1980s, and the detector now covers about one cubic kilometer of ice with more than 5,000 light sensors.

The important results are:

IceCube established that extremely high-energy astrophysical neutrino fluxes in the 100 TeV* to PeV range are coming from outside our Solar System.
*CERN’s LHC has a maximum collision energy of 13.6 TeV

Its findings opened a new form of neutrino astronomy. Light is absorbed or deflected, and magnetic fields bend charged cosmic rays. Neutrinos interact extremely weakly and travel directly from their birthplaces to Earth.

As a result, IceCube has identified individual cosmic sources. A particularly important source is NGC 1068 (Messier 77), an active galaxy about 47 million light-years away. Over the past decade, IceCube has detected about 80 (!) high-energy neutrino events.

With IceCube's results, scientists can now locate neutrino sources, i.e., cosmic-ray accelerators. Extremely high-energy neutrinos point back to these active galaxies containing supermassive black holes.

In short, Francis Halzen created a new astronomical instrument that began identifying the cosmic engines producing the most energetic particles known.

While neutrino oscillation experiments essentially asked: “What are neutrinos telling us about particle physics and stars?” Francis’s IceCube tells us something fundamentally new about the universe: “What can neutrinos tell us about the most violent objects in the universe?”

As Red Baron wrote before: Astrophysics is the new spearhead of physics.

**

The Other Look

Red Baron reads the New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and the local newspaper, the Badische Zeitung, all online. Lately, I’ve added the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and I’m becoming increasingly impressed by the unique perspective Der andere Blick offers on German politics.

The editors tell it like it is and don’t beat around the bush. They give me new insights into my homeland - which is so in need of reforms - and shed new light on old issues from surprising angles.

Last week’s topic in Der andere Blick: The Decline of the Mainstream Parties - An Opportunity for Democracy. The decline is obvious in Germany today, but across Europe as a whole, it is no new phenomenon. It’s just that, once again, Germany is a latecomer.

Suddenly, the Christian Democrats (CDU) are in a steep nosedive, while the Social Democrats have been crumbling away for quite some time. Populist and nationalist parties are filling the vacuum created by the evaporation of the established mainstream parties.

Why didn’t we see this trend sooner and take countermeasures earlier, before Jean-Marie LePen's France and Silvio Berlusconi's Italy drifted to the right? By now, Marine Le Pen’s Front National, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, and AliceWeidel’s Alternative für Deutschland have become political forces to be reckoned with.

In the NZZ article, Eric Gujer calls Chancellor Angela Merkel the gravedigger of Germany's old party system. She committed the fatal sin of allowing the ideological differences between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats to disappear and of declaring their policies alternativlos, to be without alternative.

Now Angela’s successor, Friedrich Merz, must govern with a Christian-socialist unity coalition that is incapable of implementing major reforms, making only cosmetic adjustments to Germany's excesses of social welfare and bureaucracy.

Who can blame voters for looking for alternatives (!) and seeking salvation in new parties? The AfD and The Left make frivolous promises to voters, whether it’s “Make Germany Great Again” or “Tax the Rich.”

©NZZ

So, like many other countries, Germany is becoming increasingly politicized and polarized. The former is evident in rising voter turnout. Whatever reforms our centrist, Christian Social Democratic government attempts amid dwindling resources are, in the eyes of many citizens, insufficient and so merely play into the hands of populists. 

No matter how you turn it, the AfD is currently the only true people’s party in Germany.

**

Antwerpen

After a short break, our group headed to Antwerp for an afternoon visit. The bus found a parking space in a deserted hall of the once florishing port along the Scheldt River.

Red Baron felt as if he were at the Hamburg Landungsbrücken, though the Antwerp pier had no visitors or large ships. In the background on the right, you see the castle, Het Steen.

The Margraviate of Antwerp, established around 974, was a border march between the Holy Roman Empire and, on the opposite bank of the Scheldt, the County of Flanders, subject to the French king as its feudal lord.

Around 1200, Het Steen (the stone) was part of the city's fortifications, protecting access to the city from the western Scheldt. Most of the castle was demolished in the 19th century. Only the gatehouse remained of a larger complex belonging to the Dukes of Brabant. It is thus considered the oldest surviving building in the city of Antwerp.

Heading toward the Grote Markt, we passed the Vleeshuis (meat house) built by the butchers' guild in the late Gothic style around 1500. The red-and-white masonry was deliberately made to resemble speklagen (bacon layers). The towers, stepped gable, and the enormous hall were designed to give the rich butchers an imposing presence in the city.

Then we walked through narrow alleys lined with brick buildings.

The richly decorated guild halls on the Grote Markt bear witness to the city's former wealth.

A building with the inscription Bonaparte caught Red Baron's attention. In 1800, Antwerp belonged to France. Napoleon first visited Antwerp in 1803 and called the city "a pistol aimed at the heart of England." He loaded the pistol with two harbor basins, the Bonaparte and Willem docks, which were and still are the core of Antwerp’s modern port. 

The city became one of the Empire's most important naval ports and shipbuilding centers, where warships were built to support the Continental Blockade Napoleon announced in Berlin after his victory over Prussia. Cut off from global trade, the city was booming thanks to the arms industry.

And yet, the golden eagle on Antwerp's Renaissance city hall built in 1561-1565 is not l'Aigle Imperial, but the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. It faces toward Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), the center of the HRE.

The Brabo Fountain (Brabofontein), right in the middle of the Grote Markt in front of the city halll, and the severed hand hold the key to explaining the name Antwerpen.

According to legend, a giant named Druon Antigoon lived on the Scheldt. He controlled shipping and demanded a high toll from every ship. Anyone who could not or would not pay had to suffer a cruel punishment: Antigoon would cut off their hand and throw it into the Scheldt.

When the Roman soldier Silvius Brabo passed by, he defeated and killed the giant, cut off Antigoon's hand, and threw it into the Scheldt. The figure at the top of the fountain depicts this moment when Brabo threw the hand. This throwing (werfen in German) gave rise to the popular explanation of the city's name: hand werpen → Antwerpen.

.

The legend of the hand lives on to this day: Antwerp's famous Antwerpse Handjes - a pastry or praline shaped like a hand - draw inspiration from this very legend.

The Antwerp Coat of Arms shows a castle or fortified gate (Het Steen) in the center and two hands traditionally associated with the Brabo legend. In fact, the Brabo-Antigoon drama features two hands: the giant's hand and the hand Brabo severed.

For the city, the hand is a heraldic symbol, part of the founding legend, and a play on words with Antwerp's name.

On our way to the cathedral, we passed the restaurant Het Elfde Gebot (The Eleventh Commandment) that reads: "Thou shalt drink your beer with respect." Onze Lieve Vrouwe placed on a pedestal welcomes the guests. The interior of this old residential building resembles a church or an antique museum rather than an ordinary pub. Walls, ceilings, and open spaces are densely packed with historic wooden and plaster statues of saints, angels, Mary, and Jesus. Old pulpits, stained-glass windows, crucifixes, and altar fragments complete the decoration.

And there it was: the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal in all its splendor.

The richly decorated main entrance was locked, so we entered through a side door and were confronted with a paygate: Adults €12. Red Baron qualified for the 60+ at €10. Even that seemed too much for a quick glance, with the rest of the group impatiently waiting outside in the warm September sun.

A screen displaying changing images of the cathedral's interior enticed those standing in front of it to visit.

Suddenly, the statue of De Buildrager (The Dockworker), bearing the inscription Arbeid Vrijheid (Labor Freedom), confronted us Germans with our past. Initially a symbol of the working class becoming conscious of itself, it also came to stand for regained freedom after WWII. The statue became the memorial for the dockers who kept working under the German V-bomb terror.

When we discovered these Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) in Antwerp's Jewish quarter during an evening walk, our consciences were deeply troubled.

**