Global Warming and No End

Lately, I saw a chart showing that only 41% of Americans believe in a climatic change despite daily pictures of melting glaciers and severe weather situations with strong winds resulting in storm damage and local heavy rainfalls causing flooding.



Even over here in Europe, you meet climate change deniers. The other day I had a discussion with an architect saying that the world has often seen climatic changes and survived. I answered him with a title of a well-known film about ALS: Yes, but not so much so fast, and I forgot to say: This time, no ice bucket challenge will help.

Which are the two states in the US and Germany mostly concerned about climatic change? Yesterday night the US ambassador to Germany, John B. Emerson, answered the question in his Carl Schurz Lecture, Shaping the 21st Century Transatlantic Relationship: California and Baden-Württemberg. 

The reason surely must be viticulture, as Red Baron had learned the day before yesterday in reading two articles in Der Spiegel (No44, Früchte des Zorns not yet online) and the Badische Zeitung.

When I attended a wine-tasting seminar at the Staatliches Weinbauinstitut in Freiburg ten years ago, the experts told us they were working on grape varieties to grow in warmer climates. In his book 1000 Years of Annoying the French, written in 2010, Stephen Clarke hoped for better deals on champagne in England in the future with global warming causing ideal producing conditions shifting north from France towards vineyards with similar soil on the other side of the Channel.

In my youth, wine growers in Germany desperately tried to accumulate as much sugar as possible in their grapes by harvesting late. Praising their Spätlese (late vintage) wines, they still had to add sugar to reach the necessary degrees of Oechsle.

Times and climate have changed. With global warming, the budding and flowering of grapes have shifted in Baden to earlier dates in the year. In addition, grapes are now harvested early when sugar and acid are in ideal equilibrium.

What may still be suitable for the quality of wine in Baden becomes a nightmare for winegrowers in France. As I learned; for them, the increase in temperatures during the day is not the problem, but the warmer nights are. Warmer winters, too, make that those grapevines no longer come to rest. As one vintner said: Grapevines must sleep; otherwise, they are stressed, which directly influences the quality of the wine. 

In the progressively warmer French climate, grapes reach a high sugar content early in the year, with the build-up of tannin and enzymes lagging behind, thus changing the character of a terroir dramatically. Will we still be able to sip at a Medoc, Pomerol, Pauillac, Meursault, Chablis, and Pommard having the same taste ten years from now?

French winegrowers need not see pictures of polar bears on diminishing ice floes or Bangladesh below water. They already know: Le changement climatique, il est là.

What will happen to my favorite Riesling growing on the south side of Freiburg's Schlossberg?

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Netzwerk Geschichtsvereine

On October 11, Red Baron took the train to Lörrach. Lörrach is a small town south of Freiburg on the Swiss border. The Netzwerk Geschichtsvereine (network of history societies) had invited to their annual meeting at the Dreiländermuseum (Museum of three countries). The network encourages the writing of shared history for the upper Rhine region in promoting the collaboration between historical societies in France, Germany, and Switzerland. 

More than 430 local associations are in the three countries dealing with (in particular) regional history. At the meeting, many people stressed that the Trinationale Metropolregion am Oberrhein (Metropolis of three nations on the upper Rhine) is a region with a shared history. At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, this common heritage that had existed over centuries was replaced by national borders. The Rhine river became the dividing line instead of symbolizing common roots in culture and trade.

Presently there are 35 exhibitions in the region commemorating the Great War. The Dreiländermuseum in Lörrach had conceived an appropriate exhibition showing the impact of the war on the people who had lived together crossing the existing borders without showing passports or other documents before 1914. 

When Germany closed its borders shortly after the war outbreak, thousands of Alsatians in the Reichsland* were suddenly cut off from their work in neutral Basel. The border between France and Germany running on the crest of the Vosges mountains that had been loosely patrolled before now became the front line between the two countries. Despite significant efforts and enormous losses on both sides in men and materials, the front did not move until the end of the war.
*the German-speaking part of France that Germany had annexed in 1871 following France's defeat in the War of German Unity

Here are some examples of how the region felt before and during the war:

Warding off the danger of drinking La Menthe-Pastille (©DLM)

The French producer of the liquor had intended to publish an advertising poster on the occasion of the Third Hague Conference of 1914. When the Conference was postponed to 1915 and therefore did not take place, the firm withdrew the poster. On the left, Kaiser Wilhelm II tries to feed the "sick man on the Bosporus" (Turkey) with liquor while the Austrian  Emperor Franz-Joseph dream walks behind the scene. King  George V stands on the right in the back with a glass in one and his navy in the other hand. Tsar Nicholas II caresses Serbia's Premier Nikola Pašic, who tries to bring the smaller Balkan states under Serbian rule while the Belgian King raises a warning finger. Finally, French Prime Minister Aristide Briand proposes a toast on the left.

The free circulation of persons between France, Germany, and Switzerland before 1914
 is demonstrated in the postcard above.
Military personnel poses at the border stone marking the Three Country-Point ...(©DLM)

... that is not located near Basel
 but at Pfetterhausen, deep in the former French Upper-Alsace (©DLM)

Six friends from the three countries met in Porrentruy, Switzerland, in 1910,
posing for a photo wearing their French, German, and Swiss uniforms.
They were no comrades in arms ... (©MP)

... in particular when four years later the Pickelhaube fought the képi ... (©DLM)

... and Swiss soldiers were protecting their border (©DLM)

Nevertheless, wounded soldiers from both camps
were treated in neutral Switzerland in the spirit of the Red Cross (©DLM)

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Elsagne

In a previous blog, I mentioned the territorial restructuring in France, where the government wants to reduce the number of "regions" from 22 to 13. This should, in principle, economize administrative expenditures.

The "classical" 22 regions in France (©Plavius, Wikipedia)

From the beginning, the formation of a greater Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne region was unpopular. Still, the opposition became virulent in neighboring Alsace when Minister-President Valls said, "There are no Alsatian people; there is only a French nation." Once more in history, the Alsatians saw their identity compromised.

Before the French King Louis XIV occupied the Alsace following the Thirty Year's War, the region belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. The inhabitants on the other side of the Rhine river spoke, and some still speak a German dialect, "Do werd noch elsassisch gredd (We still talk Alsatian here)."

Touche pas à l'Alsace (©AFP)

Napoleon could not care less about languages when he recruited some of his best generals (Kellermann, Ney, Scherb, Walther) in Alsace. They were welcome as long as they fenced like the French. 

The situation became stressed when after the annexation of the region by the German Reich in 1871, Germany forced its Germanisation. In freely using their language again, most of the population appreciated the change until the Alsatians noticed that they were treated as second-class Germans. 

In the Great War, the Alsatians fought in the German and French armies against each other. When after the war, the French took over the Alsace again, their policy was forcing the French language and culture. With the reconciliation between France and Germany after the Second World War, the Alsatians started to define their identity as the hinge between the two cultures.

The plan of the Paris administration to throw Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne into one basket, the Alsatians felt as a slap in their face, in particular as the government did not touch the regional borders of Corsica and Brittany. They call le rattachement de l'Alsace à la Lorraine et à la Champagne-Ardenne a forced Anschluss. Would it be better for the Alsace instead of the ménage à trois (love? triangle) to be married to the Lorraine only, or is this combination a reminiscence of the affiliation of the region to the Second Reich?

In the meantime, the Alsatians have abbreviated the name of the new region to Elsagne (Alsagne).

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Where Shall We Store Our Radioactive Waste?

From September 20 to 22, 2014 the Deutsch-Schweizer Fachverband für Strahlenschutz (Swiss-German Radiation Protection Association) held a symposium in Mainz dealing with the topic: Zwischenlager - Dauerlager - Endlager: Wohin mit unserem radioaktiven Abfall? (Intermediate, permanent and final storage: Where shall we store our radioactive waste?)

After fourteen years of absence from the radiation protection scene, Red Baron took the ICE train to Mainz, ordering, as usual, the pot of coffee and the notorious Butterkuchen. While waiting to be served, I opened my iPad to read the latest Badische Zeitung (BZ) edition online. I quickly passed over national and international political news I had already read from other sources and concentrated on Freiburg's locals.

When I opened the page with the letters to the editor, I was shocked reading the title: Sie sollen den radioaktiven Müll in ihre Gärten oder Parkanlagen aufnehmen (They should take the radioactive waste to store it in their gardens and parks). In his letter to the BZ, the writer accused operators, banks, shareholders, and politicians of being the profiteers of atomic energy while downplaying the radioactive waste produced in nuclear power reactors. The author suggested that these people should prove that radioactivity is as harmless as they are propagating. They should be forced to live in atomic ghettos loaded with radioactive waste, where they shall eat their homegrown vegetables. It is not fair that some people have earned a lot of money from electricity produced by nuclear power while we, who have nothing to say, must now take the rap for it.

The word "ghetto" reminded me of Germany's darkest past and drove me nuts. I started drafting an answer immediately. However, considering that anger is a bad counselor, I decided to wait for the outcome of the symposium before writing a letter to the BZ.

In 1962, Germany's first nuclear power plant in Kahl was connected to the grid, and since then, everybody, not only nuclear reactor operators, has profited from the electricity produced. When Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his Atomminister Franz Josef Strauß propagated Atoms for Peace in my country in 1955, they found broad societal support. 

As time went by, more nuclear power stations were built and produced electricity without endangering the population until 2011. In that year, the Federal Government, shocked by the Fukushima catastrophe, decided to phase out nuclear energy in Germany. Now, the installations that have already shut down and those still to be decommissioned must be stripped down. The radioactive material must be safely disposed of. To finance this work, operators of the nuclear power stations had to build up reserves over the years that now amount to several billion euros.

Before the symposium started, the executive board of the Fachverband held a press conference, with Red Baron sitting in the back listening. Currently, spent fuel elements and other radioactive materials are safely kept in intermediate storage near the reactor stations. The radioactivity is cooling down and waiting for the final storage we all need. Even people who have always opposed nuclear power must admit that our generation, having profited from atomic energy, must clean up the radioactivity and not leave the job to our descendants. 

Germany needs a final repository. The next day, a well-balanced article in the Rhein-Main Presse did not refrain from an attention-grabbing headline: Wohin mit dem radioaktiven Gift? (Where to place the radioactive poison?). The author wanted to ensure people read his column but somewhat spoiled the issue.

Indeed, the question is, where can we find places to safely store material that still presents a hazard after more than 100,000 years? Such a choice needs our consent and that of future generations. Germans stoke their Angst and trust their Bauchgefühl (gut feeling), so reaching the same general consent on a repository as in the case of nuclear power entry and exit will be challenging.

The Federal Government has set up a commission of 33 persons to deal with the deposition of highly radioactive waste according to the Standortauswahlgesetz (Law for selecting a site). The German government called scientists, environmental associations, representatives of the Churches!!, economy, trade unions, members of parliament, and state governments into the commission to find a consensus on a site until December 31, 2015. In their initial sessions, the commission members lost their time on points of order, so I wonder if they will meet the deadline set by the government.

I finally composed and sent my letter to the editor. I got a reaction in which the writer nicely ducked the issue of the safe depository. Instead, he started his letter with a general discussion on nuclear energy, mentioning the victims who had died from incorporating radioactivity while mining uranium or reprocessing fuel elements. Further on, he denounced reactor research that is still performed in Germany. He had definitely opened a can of nuclear worms, or shall I say Pandora's Atomic Box?

Remember: I had only asked for national consent on a depository for highly radioactive waste, a safe site to bury our sins (?) of the past.

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What's Brewing

was the title of a beer workshop Freiburg's Carl-Schurz-Haus had organized last week. Red Baron had registered early and was later asked whether he intended to show up. The reason was that the workshop was overbooked, so the director of the Carl-Schurz-Haus eventually decided to organize an additional one.

In earlier blogs, I lamented the dullness of German beer and later described some highly welcome craft beer startups in Germany. To a certain extent, the workshop continued my beer tasting in April 2012 at Toni's place and of a pub crawl in Madison at the beginning of September 2013 when an over-hopped Hopalicious beer had numbed my taste buds for hours.

At the What's Brewing Workshop, our masters of ceremony were two beer experts from Belgium and California. The following graphic shows the fantastic world of beers. Even if you cannot read the names, the diversity of brewing is impressive.



On the menu, our sommeliers had put eight different kinds of beer. Their tasting was accompanied by scientific and historical comments and video clips. In the end, one participant lined up one can and seven bottles for a photo shoot.



Here is a short description of the beers we tasted. We started with a traditional American Blue Ribbon Beer. It reads: This is the original Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. Nature's choicest products provide its prized flavor. Only the finest of hops and grains are used. Selected as America's Best in 1893.

Next came an Anchor Steam Beer from San Francisco, first brewed at the Anchor Brewery in 1896.

We continued with a Liberty Ale, also produced by the Anchor Brewing Company, an Indian pale ale (IPA) first brewed in 1975 commemorating the American Revolution 200 years earlier.

The Post Road Pumpkin Ale was next. It is brewed by the Brooklyn Brewery. The ale was already celebrated in 1643 with the first American folk song: For we can make liquor, to sweeten our lips, of pumpkins, parsnips, and walnut-tree chips.

The Schneider Weisse Tap 5, for me, was a perversity. Wheat beers are typical summer drinks like the Berliner Weiße or the Bavarian Weizenbier. If you do not like alcohol, there are alcohol-free varieties for hikers and bikers who, like Weizenbier, are refreshing isotonic drinks, replenishing lost minerals in your body.

There is a distinct difference in taste between a normal and an alcohol-free wheat beer: alcohol serves as a flavor enhancer. However, when I took a sip of the Schneider Weisse Tap 5, I tasted alcohol only. 

Once, the famous physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi asked the pertinent question: Who ordered that muon? Because that elementary particle is not needed to create the world we live in. Let me add: Who ordered Schneider Weisse Tap 5 with its alcohol content of 8.2%?

Red Baron studying a label (©Carl-Schurz-Haus)

Black Chocolate Stout from 1999, brewed by the Brooklyn Brewery, contains caramel, and as the beer hunter Michael Jackson once stated: The ultimate dessert beer. This stout tastes like Sacher Torte, Vienna's dark chocolate apricot cake.

The next one was an Original Ritterguts Gose. A gose is a top-fermented beer and, in its early form, conforms to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot (purity law) of 1516: To any beer, no more ingredients than barley, hop, and water shall be taken and used. In my blog from 2011, I remarked that they had forgotten the yeast. 

Well, what is common today was not known in the primitive days of beer brewing. The prepared mash tun was left open to the surrounding air until (mostly) lactose bacteria started the fermentation, eventually leading to a beer with a sour taste. Nowadays, a controlled mixture of beer yeast and lactose bacteria is added to the mash resulting in a gose of consistent quality. As you may imagine, a gose tasted a little sour and was particularly appreciated by Wolfgang Goethe when he was a student at Leipzig University.

The word gose comes from the town of Goslar, where the beer was first documented. Gose is not to be confused with the Belgian gueuze, where the name instead refers to carbon dioxide gas.

The highlight of the evening was the Black Sheep IPA 2014, a beer, unlike the rest of the flock. We read on their website the following expertise: Our Black Sheep IPA is what you get when four brewers from three continents collaborate and hit the beer scene in Freiburg. It has an abv of 6.9%, yet it is dangerously smooth. Amarillo and Simcoe hops give our beer an explosion of flowery and citrus aroma, backed by a spicy finish that leaves you longing for another sip. 

The Black Sheep IPA is the first craft beer from Freiburg; it is brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot with color, aroma, and taste all its own. It is massively hopped, unabashedly bold, and uniquely refreshing.

Thanks to our sommeliers, I learned a lot about beers I did not know before. Tomorrow I shall be in Munich, putting my newly acquired knowledge into practice.

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Winterfest

No, this blog is not about a fest in the wintertime.

In recent years it became a custom, or should I instead say an annoying tradition, that "lovers" decorate bridge railings with padlocks. A few months ago, this practice dramatically affected a bridge in the City of Love (where else?) when one railing broke and fell into the Seine river due to the additional load.

Cologne is not Paris. The following photo with the cathedral in the background I took on Hohenzollernbrücke four years ago,

but this is nothing compared to what my son saw in the Netherlands on a bridge over a canal in Amsterdam a week ago.

Freiburg had been spared somewhat. Only recently, a few padlocks appeared on the Luisensteg footbridge spanning the Dreisam river.

When I passed the footbridge yesterday, I was surprised. Lovers had crocheted a sort of wristlet for the handrail. Is it not natural to make the handrails winterfest (winter-proof) with the cold season approaching?

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The Old Hartmann

Beware when you plan to visit the war memorial of the Hartmannsweilerkopf in the south of Alsace. You will only find road signs in French to Le vieil Armand (The old Hartmann).

The day before yesterday, Red Baron went with the Feierabend crowd to visit the site of the Hartmannsweilerkopf, where particularly at the beginning of the Great War, the fight for the strategic height between the French and the Germans took a high death toll. Later the war on the Vosges developed into trench warfare like everywhere on the western front.

The entrance to the war memorial is protected by two guardian angels.

Deep underground, the chapel contains three altars, a Catholic altar in the middle,

Queen of the martyrs, console the afflicted

a Protestant on the left-hand side,

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live,
even though they die (John 11:25).
The swastika was explained as being a Lutheran symbol (?) 

and a Jewish altar on the right.

Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain,
that they may live (Ezekiel 37: 5,9)

Here is a color photo taken of the Hartmannsweilerkopf in 1915 (!) on the German side:

All the trees are annihilated

The soldiers lived in bunkers,

fought in trenches,

and some survived in holes.

Later, Mother Nature covered the graves of those killed with fresh green,

An early color photo

until much later, those corpses identified were reburied and lined up in rows. The unidentified rest (about 15,000  men) was placed in a common grave below the memorial.

View from the memorial into the Rhine valley

Walking up the hill to the memorial

After the Wehrmacht had occupied the Alsace in 1940, Nazi governor Robert Wagner ordered the war memorial to be dynamited. When a mayor from a nearby village informed the Gauleiter that possibly bones of German soldiers reposed in the common grave below the monument, Wagner rushed to the Hartmannsweilerkopf, making it just in time. The sappers had already placed dynamite into the boreholes. Disappointed, the troops found some consolation in destroying the Jewish altar.

Hollande and Gauck on top of the monument (©Merkur)

Last month French president François Hollande and his German counterpart Joachim Gauck met at the Hartmannsweilerkopf. In the past, Gauck had frequently asked for a shared remembrance of both nations, a proposal Hollande had refused because La Grande Guerre is a French affair for him. Eventually, François gave in, and the two presidents laid the cornerstone for a French-German museum commemorating the First World War together.

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Into the Scrap Press

Last Saturday, 400 people demonstrated in Freiburg in favor of the Wagenburglers, i.e., those who like to live in vehicles instead of apartments. As you know by now, they are always looking for space to park their rust buckets within the city boundaries. Red Baron had previously reported about the guerilla war between the Wagenszene (vehicular scene) and the city authorities.

For the vehicles the police confiscated in March, the retention time of six months is running out on October 13, when the city will send those to the scrap press. So members of the group Sand im Getriebe (Sand in the Transmission) marched through the streets shouting Für die Freiheit, für das Leben, Wagenplätze muss es geben (For freedom and living, space for vehicles must be provided) and showing a banner Autoritäre Stadtpolitik in die Schrottpresse! Sand im Getriebe bleiben! (Put the city's authoritarian policy into the scrap press! Sand in the Transmission will remain!).

©Der Sonntag

The fact is that all parties in Freiburg's city council pay lip service to support the living style of the Wagenburglers. Still, when it came to a commitment in the past, the city council offered a mere 400 square meters to Sand im Getriebe, a surface the latter claimed was too small to park their 20 vehicles.

The feud continues with the authorities being amazed, for they counted only 10 vehicles, whereas, in the previous round-table discussions, the participants had even considered 15.

The space problem will possibly be put off until later, for the left-leaning parties in Freiburg's city council have asked Mayor Salomon to postpone the scrapping of the confiscated vehicles by one month. Shall I keep you informed about the development?

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More about Merkel's Rhombus

In an earlier blog, I deliberated on Merkel's rhombus. Her hands form a rhombus whenever Angela addresses a crowd, possibly a sign of concentration.

©AP

The latest gossip suggests that our chancellor is forming the sign for the female reproductive organ. In his blog, Anatol Stefanowitch, professor of linguistics (!) in Berlin, however, shows that the vagina in German Sign Language is not an open rhombus.

In American Sign Language, the sign for the vagina is a rhombus. Still, it is flipped with the index fingers pointed toward the ground, the thumbs toward the sky, and the other fingers tucked under, as presented in the following picture:

©LDCB

Note the difference! Angela is not tucking her fingers under, as Professor Stefanowitch stresses in his blog Merkels versaute Raute (Merkel's filthy or rather screwed up? rhombus).

Swiss Sign Language (©AS)

Michel Obama (©LDCB)

However, in Swiss Sign Language, the vagina is presented by a rhombus, but again the fingers are not tucked under.

In addition, the website Life During the Commercial Break presents a picture of Michelle Obama. She is, as they write, showing us her family values.

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