Annoying the French?

While Simon Winder takes on the Germans, Stephen Clarke digs into the tribulations of the Entente Cordiale between France and Great Britain. In his book 1000 Years of Annoying the French, he picks to pieces the relationship between the two countries, starting with William the Conqueror in 1066 and ending with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010.

One critic wrote: If the book is funny for English readers, it becomes downright hilarious for non-English readers; however, I personally find some of Clarke's jokes embarrassingly far-fetched, e.g., when he states: At the start of the 100 years' war France was like a widow on a Caribbean cruise: rich, available and convenient, but Edward III didn't raise enough funds for the invasion and had to shuffle home "like an English pensioner hit by the rising euro."

Otherwise, I learned many exciting details, such as Dom Pérignon suffered from excorkulation when the CO₂ pressure in the champagne bottles built up. There were explosions, too. Thanks to the Brits who made the first rigid bottles in Newcastle, the champagne bottled in France could safely be shipped across the Channel. 

Dom Pérignon initially had to calculate a considerable margin with all those lost bottles. This must be why champagne is so expensive, or have you ever seen a raised price decrease? In the future, Clarke hopes for better deals in England with the onset of global warming causing ideal champagne-producing conditions shifting north from France towards vineyards with similar soil on the other side of the Channel.

British humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse once wrote: There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called guillotine. All wrong, says Clarke: The earliest type of what we mistakenly call the guillotine was probably* invented in Halifax, northern England, a town whose only other claim to innovation is that it was home to confectioner Violet Mackintosh, the woman who invented Rolos and Quality Street toffees. So, to be historically accurate, the guillotine should be called le Halifax, which would actually have been quite fun because 200-odd years later, the Académie française would probably still be debating whether to allow the verb halifaxer.
*There are also records of guillotine machines in Ireland in 1307 and Scotland in 1564.

In 1914, when the first British troops disembarked in France to help the Frogs against the Kaiser, His Majesty's government had carefully chosen Scottish Highlanders playing the Marseillaise on their bagpipes. This reminded the French of their all-time favorite Brit, Mary, Queen of Scots, rather than offending their ego with their old enemy England, invading them again. 

However, the Entente did not last long when more important contingents of those snobbish British soldiers accustomed to treating their inferiors in a colonial way arrived in France. As they extended this practice to the primarily rural population, the French took revenge on the rosbifs regarding them as welcome meal tickets. Their vehicles were the local estaminets (pubs), where, for a high price, they sold muddy water as beer, a red wine made from vinegar and red ink, and white wine made from vinegar, leaving out the red ink.

At the beginning of the war, when the Germans following the Schlieffen Plan blitzed through Belgium, the Tommies soon came under pressure: In retreat, the Brits resorted to their old pillaging tactics, emptying orchards, helping themselves to chickens, eggs, and milk, and stealing coal or ripping down whole farm buildings for firewood. It was the Hundred Years' War all over again.

Reading this, I remembered a passage in Paul von Hindenburg's memoirs that I had heretofore regarded as wishful thinking. Did the old man (78) correctly recall what happened at the Western Front in 1918?: Ballten sich doch Fäuste französischer Soldaten vor unseren Augen unter Schimpfworten gegen den englischen Bundesgenossen. Riefen doch französische Stimmen zu uns herüber: „Heute mit England gegen Euch, morgen mit Euch gegen England!“ (Before our very eyes French soldiers shook their fists at their English allies while calling them names. French voices shouted in our direction: "Today with England against you, tomorrow together with you against England").

I have encountered my share of anti-British sentiment, too. Once conversing with a French friend, we came close to the delicate topic of German atrocities committed against la resistance in France during the last war. He probably wanted to comfort me when he said: Manfred, you well know who our arch-enemy is. His remark did not console me at all. On the contrary, I felt deeply embarrassed and had no reply.

A brotherly hug

Besides Petit Napoleon, Clarke's favorite French target is the tall General, although one originated from Corsica and the other from Lorraine. Churchill had his opinion about De Gaulle as being fascist-minded, opportunistic, unscrupulous, and ambitious to the last degree, while Mon General asserted England, like Germany, is our hereditary enemy.

As far as Germany is concerned, De Gaulle must have changed his mind soon after the war. I remember standing at Munich's Odeonsplatz in the crowd that hailed the General in 1964 when he shouted in his guttural German: Für Ihr großes deutsches Volk, jawohl! 

The General's emphatic yes resulted in ecstatic cheers from the crowd. After all those humiliations in the past, the German people did not notice that they were being manipulated. Did those present really think they were suddenly recognized or even loved?

An earlier crowd at the Odeonsplatz.
It is August 1, 1914, the beginning of the First World War,
with an unemployed Austrian immigrant standing there, all delighted. 

France and Germany have finally grasped that violence is no solution should problems arise. Is it already love when De Gaulle embraces Adenauer in Reims, Kohl and Mitterrand are holding hands* in Verdun, and Sarkozy kisses Merkel in Paris and Berlin?

*Keen observers noticed:
Mitterrand clenched Kohl's hand, assuring that his came on top. 

Not only do my French friends know that I am a Francophile. Let me add here: in all my encounters with French men and women, I have never sensed even the slightest anti-German sentiment.
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Deutscher Wald

Ah, those Germans and their woods! Yesterday, I read an article in our local Badische Zeitung (BZ) about the German woods without a word about Waldsterben. As the mystical and historical aspects of our woods were only briefly touched upon, allow me to enlarge a little bit on this, mentioning only those woods that come to my mind right away:

The Teutoburg Woods, where Arminius beat the Romans, thus depriving our ancestors of Latin culture. 

The Western Woods have cold winds constantly blowing. 

The Vienna Woods, where Crown Prince Rudolph killed his mistress and himself. 

The Saxon Woods with old Bismarck grumbling about our last and least Kaiser Wilhelm II. 

The Ardennes Woods and the Third Reich's final offensive on the western front before Germany was cut into pieces.

Deep in the woods, lost and hungry: Hänsel and Gretel
approach the witch's house made of gingerbread. 

Not to forget the Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tale Woods, vast and dark, where people are always lost, are eaten by bears and wolves, or meet friendly dwarfs or wicked witches. 

You must remember this: A kiss is still a kiss, but also, It's the same old story, A fight for love and glory when a poor but clever guy liberates a beautiful princess in a haunted castle hidden deep in the woods and wants to marry her. Father King dislikes the idea and stresses the young man with three usually unsolvable problems. Using witchcraft or other tricks, the nobody eventually succeeds and becomes heir to the throne. The young people live happily thereafter until they die; if they did not, they still live on today.

Enough of those atavistic reflections. Instead, let me dig into the BZ article: The Trees and We. I learned that German attachment to their woods dates back to the Middle Ages when arable farmland was scarce and generally insufficient to feed families with many children, given the poor agricultural yield. There was no room for pastureland; thus, farmers drove horses, cows, and pigs into the woods to look for their food. Those pigs were particularly happy. They ate acorns and beechnuts for lunch, dug for cockchafer grubs for dinner, and closed their meals with truffles.

The woods generally belonged to the nobles who charged the farmers rental for their use. While only a few Pfennigs sufficed initially, in later years, the owner asked for more so that the expression Schweinegeld (pigs' money) was coined, and today, it still means that something is costly.

The noble class took good care of their woods as hunting grounds. A good example is the Prussian king's deer garden that once stretched in Berlin from the Brandenburg Gate to Charlottenburg Palace. The Tiergarten became public when, during the 1848 Revolution, people got the right to smoke there in public. Were the authorities at that time more liberal than today?

Most of our woods were spared in the 19th century as contrary to England, the Industrial Revolution in Germany came later, and coal from the Ruhr satisfied the need for heat. A notable exception is the Black Forest, where glasswork and smelting demanded enormous amounts of wood. However, the Baden people were clever and soon started an afforestation program.

Another vital use of wood was and still is housing. Although building in stone diminishes the fire risk, only those people who were steinreich (stone rich) could afford to build stone houses in the past. 

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Germania

In my free time - of which, as a retired person, I do not have much, or should I instead say much left - I read quite a lot. When visiting a foreign country, roaming the bookshops is a must. I am always looking for the odd reading stuff you cannot easily find in Germany.

Recently at Füssli's in Zürich, two witty books by two Brits attracted my attention. I like British humor, although I probably understand only half of it. In the following, I shall concentrate on Simon Winder's book Germania in which, as the title correctly suggests, the author criticizes my country. 

Mind you, most of his observations are not negative. Winder keeps claiming to be in love with this country throughout the book and has his favorite German characters and places. Alexander von Humboldt is his God, and he admires the prince-bishop's Würzburg Residence in Baroque style with ceiling paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo. 

How can it be that Winder, who has traveled all over Germany and visited so many places, mentions several times that he does not speak a word of German? As a British subject, is he proud of it, or is it just an understatement?

Throughout the book, Winder fights stereotypes like the one about German food. It indeed generally is heavy although varied because cooking in Germany is regional. In fact, Sauerkraut is the specialty in Alsace, but that is no German territory.

He rightly points out Germany's obsession with the Middle Ages when the world still was in order. You find places like Quedlinburg, with its neat timber-framed houses at the foot of the Harz Mountains. The Abbey Church holds the grave of Emperor Heinrich the Fowler. He was reburied there in 1930 by another Heinrich (Himmler), who at the same time desecrated the church, turning it into an SS shrine of which the counter clerk only hesitantly shows a blurred black and white photo on demand.

Beautiful Marburg is another city with a broken history. Saint Elisabeth of Hungary married Ludwig of Thuringia and lived at the Wartburg until the count perished in the 1227 crusade. She was badly treated by her husband's kinfolk, so she moved to Marburg, where she died in 1231 as a widow aged only 24. She was buried there in a Church the Teutonic Order built for her. Later in 1410, the Poles crushed the Knights in the Battle of Tannenberg and stopped Germanic expansion into the East. The church in Marburg also became the final resting place for Paul von Hindenburg, the victor of the second Battle of Tannenberg fought in the First World War against the Czar's army. As Reichspräsident of the Weimar Republic, he eventually made Hitler Chancellor in 1933, only to die a little later, not seeing what disaster his decision led to.

While reading the pages dealing with old history generally is fun, Winder's entry into the beginning of the 20th century is gloomy. Here I quote what he writes about the end of the First World War: In 1919 ... many among the Allies saw it as an amazing opportunity that so formidable a competitor had been knocked out, apparently forever. This was reflected in the Treaty of Versailles, which among many other things, saddled Germany with dizzying 'reparations,' a hugely inflated version of what the Germans had done to France in 1871. The justification was based around German' war guilt' — a disastrous piece of victor's justice which both absolved the Allies for all responsibility for 1914 and which rang completely untrue within Germany, thereby fermenting further a sense of almost overwhelming grievance across an alarming cross-section of society. This is undoubtedly one reason why Germany followed the Pied Piper of Braunau. Still, there was more in the pipe that Winder simplifies in just one phrase: This layer upon layer of catastrophe - the war, the Versailles Treaty, hyper-inflation, the Depression - provided so many individual German families with reasons to have collective nervous breakdowns that there is no point in hunting for deeper roots.

In his conclusion, Winder starts to harp on Nazi Munich, but he must admit that all temples of the Third Reich in the city are long gone except for the Hofbräuhaus. Sitting there over his, as he thought, last stone of beer, he observed a Japanese businessman or tourist paying the oompah band for the right to conduct it for one piece of music. To pay the band for conducting is current practice in Bavaria. But the Japanese man was a genius, as he asked them to play Shostakovich's Waltz Number 2, known from the movie Eyes Wide Shut. Winder must have kept his Eyes Wide Open when he concludes: Here, in one of the birthplaces of Nazism, a traditional Bavarian band was playing an American jazz-inflected piece by a Soviet composer, made famous by a Jewish-American (Stanley Kubrick) adaptation of a Jewish-Austrian (Arthur Schnitzler) novella, the film's stars being a tiny Scientologist (Tom Cruise) and a lovely Australian (Nicole Kidman). It would be trivial to say that this music buried the past even for a second, but it was enjoyable to tot up the number of ways in which the famous pre-war frequenters of the Hofbräuhaus would have been struck dumb with rage by such a piece. Suddenly I felt aware of how much Germans had themselves put layer upon layer of work, culture, and thought on top of their terrible past and that it was possible to sit in the chaos of the early twenty-first Century and feel that actions are being taken every day - even by an oompah band and its drunken Japanese maestro - to build a replenished world in which Munich can be more than just the cradle of Nazism. But the band was now playing 'The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond,' and it was time to take the ill-judged decision to have another drink.

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Sad Dogs

The other day I was passing by a grocery store when I noticed two cute sausage dogs — one straight, the other curly-haired — sitting in a bicycle trailer parked outside. They were deeply depressed by their mistress's absence, continuously staring toward the store entrance. Their sad looks reminded me of a Disney film I once watched where a father dog gave his puppies the most essential advice in a dog's life: To manipulate human beings, your eyes must show the most sorrowful expression.

The two dogs in the trailer apparently learned their lesson so well that I started to suffer with them. I stopped and took a couple of photos.

Eventually, they ignored me. Was it their mistress approaching from behind? No, it was their master turning up.

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A hot weekend in Cologne

Whenever Elisabeth has her class reunion in Köln (Cologne), I accompany her, although the girls always want to meet without men. I enjoy the city on the Rhine alone for a couple of hours.

This year the girls had chosen the first weekend in July, possibly not thinking that in addition to the open-air television (Germans wrongly call “public viewing”) of the soccer game between Argentina and Germany on July 3, the city hosted Germany’s Christopher Street Parade on July 4. And it was not just warm; it was hot: 38 Centigrades (100 Fahrenheit).

The Christopher Street Parade used to take place in Berlin, Germany's gay capital. Still, with all the dirt he had to clean up from Unter den Linden - once the gay people had passed - the city’s Lord Mayor Klaus Wowereit eventually decided against his own camp. Did he think that Berlin had enough “cultural” highlights and could be deprived of the Love Parade, or did he dislike opening the yearly event reminding the public periodically of his known sexual preference? 

So the Christopher Street disciples moved into the gay stronghold on the Rhine, into the Hillige Köln. For the city's commerce, the event nearly presents a second Carnival.

Regarding the soccer game, the young German team beat the lame Argentinean gauchos 4:0, which the local brewery Gaffel had wrongly commented on a coaster: It is better to drink 0.2, i.e., liters than to lose 0:2.

The local Cologne top-fermented beer is called Kölsch. You should know it is served in high but thin glasses of 0.2 liters only, not enough for soccer aficionados. Hence the waiters (called Köbes in the local dialect) hardly wait until such a "test tube" is downed. In passing by with a crate of full glasses, they replace any empty glass immediately. Admire the male party on the left sitting around an upright barrel used as a table enjoying glasses of Früh, the Kölsch from another local brewery.

The mile where the gay people were supposed to parade on Sunday was already crowded on Saturday and, above all, lined with booths offering colored cloths, fancy medals, beauty articles, and open-air tattooing but also food and drinks. 

When I am in Köln, one of the objects of my desire is Rivkochen or in high German: Reibekuchen, in Bavaria: Reiberdatschi, in Hamburg Kartoffelpuffer. When I discovered the advertising at a certain distance ahead, I moved ahead.

Those crusty deep-fried fritters made from freshly grated potatoes, don't they look delicious in their golden color? They did not only look, but they were too!!

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Densification

With the space for housing in Freiburg becoming increasingly scanty - many persons want to move into the Green City - there is one trick to increase the number of inhabitants per square meter: densification.

People who happened to have a nice view looking from their balcony into a neighbor's garden wake up one morning staring into a deeply dug hole for underground parking. 

This is followed by a year of noise and dust. Walls are thrown up, and one morning, they look unto their new neighbor's balcony and table when this is all over. Soon they know whether he/she takes müsli or croissants for breakfast. I have not heard about handshakes between neighbors across balconies so far.

The problem of handshakes definitely does not exist at the Westfriedhof (west cemetery) in Cologne, where Elisabeth and I usually visit my parents-in-law's gravesite. This time we could not readily find the site. The environment where trees and shrubs had guided us in the past had changed entirely. Soon the reason became clear: densification. I took the photo with my parents-in-law's tombstone in the foreground, showing a plot of land in the back in preparation for packing corpses into a higher surface density.

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My iPad

I was brought up with mainframe computers and punched cards and later was a proud user of an IBM PC operating under MS-DOS loaded from two floppy disk units. My heart, however, always belonged to the small stuff.

I was fascinated by the HP35 and its Reversed Polish Notation. Later I went the whole way through programming the HP41CX synthetically and even contributed to HP's program library. The HP100LX fascinated me for years. Eventually, my pocket computers amalgamated with my cellular phone, so I carried around rather sophisticated Pocket PCs containing all my personal information. A positive side effect was that the PPC could also place phone calls. However, the text input facilities of these machines were rather cumbersome, with micro keyboards not helping when taking notes, e.g., in libraries. So I settled for an HP200, changing it later to the HP720 model for my external text work.

Me and my Jornada 720 (©Wikipedia)

The problem with all these small devices was synchronization. ActiveSync, offered by Microsoft for transferring data between my mini stuff and the desktop computer, always was a pain in the neck. I often spent hours determining why the machines did not want to mate. Should I have instead bought a netbook for my text processing needs and used USB sticks for data transfer?

Enter the iPhone: Regarding my personal data, Apple initially didn't facilitate synchronization between the phone and the desktop. While addresses are always synced fairly via iTunes, my agenda in Pocket Informant only recently worked reasonably well with MS Outlook following some real nightmares. For my other data (i.e., frequently needed alphanumerical information), PhatNotes issued their version for the iPhone just in time, so all my other data stay safely synchronized in a shared database.

But what about text files and all the other stuff? Enter the Cloud and the iPad: Apple offers MobileMe with an iDisk in a cloud where you can store all the files you are currently working on. No hassle anymore about which of the two files on your small machine or desktop PC is the most recent. You only work on the one and only version on your iPad and your desktop. Apple sells Pages for the iPad as a text processor, but strangely, this software doesn't presently give access to the MobileMe Cloud. Hence, for the time being, I use Quickoffice on the iPad. It supports MS data formats and fulfills all my external text processing needs, even when working on longer documents.

Do I have to open the word processor for small notes and odd information on the road? Enters the best application so far for iPhone and iPad: Evernote. You open Evernote on one of the iMachines or your desktop and enter text snippets or pictures. These entries instantaneously are available on all platforms, provided you are connected to the Internet.

The iPad is the ideal machine for Red Baron when away from the desktop. E-mail, news, and Wikipedia on the Internet are all in my hands. I have no time to watch films or play games, but other people seem to find their fill with the iPad.
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