TTIP-Angst

Angst haunts Germany, the angst of TTIP. Yesterday there were demonstrations against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership all over Germany. Red Baron was on Freiburg's Rathausplatz and took a few photos.

Multinationals will profit; TTIP CETA TISA; people will lose

TTIP or Democracy, don't hand over Europe to multinational companies.
Full of German obedience, they took the banner off Freiburg's town hall just when I arrived.
The police had told them that it was not allowed to decorate official buildings with protest banners.

This morning Freiburg's Sunday paper Der Sonntag printed another picture taken in front of Freiburg's townhall with EU's Jean-Claude Juncker claiming that European jobs will not be affected, Germany's Angela Merkel raising her new leitmotif that TTIP is alternativlos (without alternative), and the young man in the foreground proudly proclaims that TTIP will assure him profits.

©Der Sonntag/Rothermel

This time German angst is somehow justified, for few people understand what TTIP is all about. We do not know what the American and European delegations deliberate so secretly. Angst always develops when things and situations are not well understood. A good example is the reappearance of a few timid wolves in Germany; however, the dire wolves making angst are so "well known" from our reading of Brother Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen (fairy tales).

Apparently, the two TTIP parties' clever (?) idea was to keep the negotiations secret to not excite the people concerned about any tiny detail the US and Europe may and certainly will quarrel about. This way of non-communicating backfired with the result of a general excitement among the people developing lots of conspiracy theories. Here the famous American Chlorhühnchen (a chicken bathed in a chlorine solution to kill the germs) traded against the European chicken full of antibiotics and hormones only presents the tip of the TTIP iceberg.

People develop conspiracy scenarios with the streetcars coming under American control, even in Freiburg. Although one of the future tram stops is already named Madisonallee, more may come. Will the Kaiser-Josef-Straße, in the Middle Ages, called Große Gass (Big Alley), become Broadway, and the Hauptbahnhof be renamed Main Station?

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The City that Never Sleeps

Red Baron likes to wake up in the city that never sleeps. Last Saturday, when I awoke in my son's apartment in Manhattan—too early—I looked out of the window and admired the new World Trade Center building and, in particular, Miss Liberty and Ellis Island in the distance. It was there that some of the Höferts had entered the States at the end of the 19th century.

Yes, I still remember my first trip to the States in 1957 when my father made contact with a cousin living on Long Island. He came to Manhattan one evening, and we met in a restaurant. His cousin only spoke rudimentary German, whereas my father had never learned English. So I tried hard to get a conversation going, stretching my school English. But that is history.

I forget about blogging when I am with my son. I like to profit from his wisdom and knowledge. Our conversations are usually intense, both of us knowing that we cannot solve the problems of this world. Two dates are permanently fixed during my visits to New York: dinner at the Redeye Grill and an evening of Jazz. On our way to the restaurant (it was already dark), my son took a photo of me manspreading "on" the Bad Men Monument.

I had my usual lobster at the Redeye Grill, which was exceptionally big this time*. Red Baron forgot about his cholesterol and the green sauce served with the lobster, dipping the delicious bites in liquid butter while my son enjoyed his usual tuna. On a previous occasion, we had good memories of a bottle of Holy Cow from Washington State, but the wine was no longer on the list. This time, we downed our meals with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the Cakebread Cellars.
*I read that there is an overproduction of lobster on the Atlantic coast, but I did not notice a price slump on the bill.

While I know the "official" New York so well, my son always likes to show me the "non-tourist" places he has discovered in New York.

On Saturday, we went to East Village, formerly known as Little Germany. On our way, we had a drink at one of the oldest pubs in Manhattan, McSorley's Old Ale House:

There we were in good company:

Then, we passed houses built at the end of the 19th century,

the Exhibition of the American Gangster,

paid tribute to the great Charlie Parker at his former residence,

commemorated in Tompkins Square Park the disaster of Passenger Steamboat General Slocum on the East River on June 15, 1904,  where more than 1000 passengers from Little Germany on their way to a Lutheran church picnic perished,

and eventually had lunch at a Bavarian-style restaurant, Zum Schneider, on Avenue C, E 7 Street.

The restaurant was overcrowded. We just found two seats at a table packed with Americans who already had a couple of beers. My son and I ordered Radi and Reibekuchen:

We were impressed when a lady at our table not only ordered a Schweinshaxn but dug into the fatty food with a healthy (?)  appetite:

At Zum Schneider, the selection of German beers on tap is impressive. I immediately sent an e-mail to my friend Kendall Schneider to make him aware of the place belonging to his clan?


On Saturday evening, we listened (no photos allowed) to a jazz performance of the Heath Brothers at the Village Vanguard with 88-year-old Jimmy Heath (tenor and soprano saxophone), his brother Albert "Tootie" Heath, about my age (drums), Michael Weiss (piano), and David Wong (bass). Jimmy is a former jazz professor at the City University of New York and a composer. He started the session by saying he was eight years older than the Village Vanguard. Red Baron admired those old hands still having fun with their instruments and the public.


Another highlight of my stay was Sunday's visit to the Black Forest Brooklyn. I had blogged about the start-up of the restaurant in January and went there to try the Black Forest cake, where Ayana and Tobias Holler had so many problems finding the right cherries in the States.

The cake smelled so good that I forgot to take a photo until I had eaten half of it. But the necessary cherry is still there.

At the Black Forest Brooklyn, they serve the famous Monkey 47 Dry Gin from the Black Forest and the 77 Whiskey from Breuckelen (the former Dutch name for Brooklyn):

What a difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Here are those canyons of steel; there, you have broad streets lined with trees and three to four-story buildings. In Manhattan, there is a hectic life, even on Sundays with all those tourists, while in downtown Brooklyn, there is a stress-free, friendly, and spacious neighborhood. Enjoy the picture gallery:

Downtown on Fulton Street

The Brooklyn opera

Exotic, bold reliefs

Our afternoon ended on Coney Island:

Famous Nathan's:

On our way home, we strolled along the 6th Avenue street market with impressive smoked turkey drums ...

... and humble German Bratwurst.

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Johann Andreas Silbermann

One of the recent great moments in German cultural history was the acquisition of Johann Andreas Silbermann's travel diary by the University of Dresden at Sotheby's London.

©Uni Dresden

©Wikipedia

The Silbermanns of the 18th century are known as organ builders. While many of the clan were busy in Thuringia and Saxony, Johann Andreas Silbermann worked in Strasbourg. He built 57 organs in Alsace during his life.

On February 24, 1741, Johann headed out to visit his relatives on the other side of the Rhine. During his trip, he kept a diary that the University of Dresden has made accessible on the Internet as a facsimile. Red Baron likes to read old travel diaries like the one by Peter Hagendorf written during the Thirty Years' War, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's description of his trip to Italy, or Johann Gottfried Seume's book about his long walk to Syracuse.

Frequently Silbermann decorated his handwritten diary with sketches and marginal notes. The following map shows his itinerary.

©Uni Dresden

Red Baron tried hard to read some of Silbermann's handwritten text. Here I present a menu card the author copied in Berlin. He marked the paragraphs placing astronomical symbols in front of them.

A good friend of mine made me aware that Silbermann had actually copied the "restaurant's weekly lunch." The astronomical symbols stand for the days of the week. In English, most days are named according to Nordic mythology. It goes like this: 

Sun > Sunday

Moon > Monday, 

Mars > mardi in French > Tuesday > day of Tyr or Tew (Nordic god of combat), 

Mercury > mercredi in French > Wednesday > day of Woden or Odin (Main Nordic god), 

Jupiter > jeudi in French > Thursday > day of Thor or Donar (Nordic god of thunder) > Donnerstag in German, 

Venus > vendredi in French > Friday > day of Freya (Nordic god of beauty) > Freitag in German, 

Saturn > Saturday. 

With difficulty, I figured out that Magsamen is Mohnsamen (poppy seeds), Schmalbraten is Schmorbraten (pot roast), and Blätzer means tripe but only in Koblenz. However, according to Silberman's footnote, the word is known in Strasbourg too. There are five words in the text below that I could not make out. Therefore Red Baron is impatiently waiting for the transcription of the handwriting the University of  Dresden has promised to provide.

©Uni Dresden

Allgemeiner bürgerlicher Mittags Kosten in Berlin 1744 Sonne:  Linssuppe mit Milch, Eyer und Butter Kleine Rosinen mit Zucker und Zimmet Schaaf Kaldaunen* mit Kohl Braten mit Pflaumen *sind bay uns Blätzer	Public bourgeois lunch table in Berlin 1744 Sun:  Lentil soup with milk, eggs, and butter Small raisins with sugar and cinnamon Tripe* of sheep with cabbage Roast with plums *are called Blätzer in my place
Mond: Sauerkraut und Bratwürst oder eingebächelte (eingemachte) Schink[en]bohnen oder Reiß	Moon: Sauerkraut and brats or preserved beans with ham or rice
Mars: Fisch in gelber Brühe Rosinen, Zestiablau? und Citronen	Mars: Fish in a yellow broth Raisins, ??, lemons
Merkur: Schög-sauflaisch mit klainen Rüblan	Mercury: ??pork meat with small turnips
Jupiter: Kälberbraten, Schmalbraten (Schmorbraten) oder Sauerbraten	Jupiter: Roast of veal, pot roast, or marinated pot roast
Venus: Erbsen und Häring, oder ander Fisch auch Butter	Venus: Peas and herring, or other fish also butter
Saturn: Kaldaunen klaingehackt mit Rüben Weißkraut klaingehackt mit Milchgetapt (mit Milch abgeschmeckt?)	Saturn: Tripe finely chopped with turnips White cabbage finely chopped and seasoned with milk.
Sonsten wird auch viel Magsamen (Mohnsamen) gegeßen. Vorher in agasten (aus Ahornholz gefertigt) hölzren Schüsseln gerieben daß er öligt wird. Semmel in Milch gescharigt? in dem Magsamen herum gedulgret?, und kalt gegeßen.	Apart from that, lots of poppy seeds are eaten. First, they are crushed in bowls made from sycamore until they become oily. A roll macerated in milk is rolled in crushed poppy seeds and eaten cold.

Here is another highlight. In Berlin, Silbermann met the tall Englishman Kirkland serving in the Royal Guard of Frederick the Great. Frederick had inherited die Langen Kerle (the tall guys) from his father, the Soldier King. Silbermann was so impressed that he bought an engraving and placed it in his diary.

Picture of the tall and handsome Englishman in Berlin
 called Kirkland, 7 feet tall, presently serving his Royal Majesty
 as a haiduk (bodyguard) (©Uni Dresden)

©Uni Dresden

On his way back home, Silbermann visited Magdeburg. Here in the corner of the cathedral, he noticed as a curiosity a Tetzelkasten (Tetzel box), made a sketch, and noted: An einer Seite ist Johann Tetzels eines Dominicaner Mönches von Pirna Ablas Kasten zu sehen, er ist sehr groß und wohl mit reichen Beschlagen verzier hier zu sehen (On one side you can see Johann Tetzel's box in which the Dominican Friar from Pirna collected the money for the indulgences he had sold. The box is big and nicely decorated with copious metal fittings). 

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Frack You, Germany

On April 1 (!), the German government passed a draft bill concerning fracking. This was not an April fool hoax, so Red Baron is stunned. With my country promoting renewable energies, I had always assumed that fracking is a no-go in Germany. Fracking means fossil energy and energy from fossil sources, something we must reduce rather than increase.

I know that most of my compatriots are against this new way of exploiting Mother Earth too. However, there is only a tiny hope of parliamentary rejection as the proposed bill must only pass our Bundestag (House of Representatives), where the ruling grand coalition has a comfortable majority. Although the Länder (States) are directly concerned - strangely enough, according to our constitution - the approval of our Bundesrat (Senate), where the Greens in coalition with the Reds have a majority, is not required. This is why the Green ministers of the environment of North-Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg immediately protested: They demand further restrictions on fracking, or the bill must not come into force.

However, our federal government is not that quick on the trigger for the draft bill is nothing other than a legal framework. Being strictly against fracking, our Federal Minister for the Environment, Barbara Hendricks of the Social Democrats, was visibly embarrassed when she presented the draft bill to the press. She said that the main reason for the government proposal is to provide legal certainty. In addition, all exploratory drilling will require a license and is only allowed beyond a depth of 3000 meters. This should ensure that no chemicals will seep into the groundwater table. Concerning the many other restrictions, Hendricks went so far as to call the bill a fracking hindrance law.

The reactions of the industry were commensurate. They called the constraints utterly excessive: In Germany, the profitably exploitable reserves are at depths between one and two thousand meters.

©Die Grünen and their fracking monster

Red Baron is strictly against fracking, not so much out of fear of groundwater contamination but of exploiting our last fossil energy reserves. The world should finally accept that our future, or our grandchildren's future, depends on renewable energies.

And the markets behave as they always have behaved: Since the US is exploiting fracking on a large scale intending to become independent of foreign fossil fuels, the oil price has dropped to such a low level that extraction in the States has become uneconomical. This shows that cheap energy no longer assures steady growth but instead will stop investment in renewable energies.

Stop fracking!

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Schopenhauer versus Hegel

On March 27, Red Baron attended a talk by Kristof Rouvel about Schopenhauer versus Hegel. Rouvel is a philosophy and theater arts professor at Freiburg's Pedagogical University.

Immanuel Kant's modern philosophy is a synthesis of Plato's theory of forms and Aristotle's scientific approach or, instead, is a further development or synthesis of French Rationalism and British Empiricism. Kant wrote in his fundamental work, The Critique of Pure Reason, that both rationalists and empiricists transgress their limits. Philosophy needs a recognizing subject, but what can we recognize? Rationalists confidently claim to know the existence of God, free will, and the immortality of the human soul. However, they are far from knowing the "thing-in-itself" beyond all possible experiences. With experience fundamental to human knowledge, empiricists frequently forget that only reason can process experience into coherent thought.

Following Kant's synthesis, two German epigenetic philosophers, Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, bitterly fought over Kant's legacy. The key issue was Hegel's progressive world spirit (Weltgeist) versus Schopenhauer's blind world will (Weltwille).

In the 19th century, technical progress was so clearly visible that Hegel's philosophy was attractive. Hegel, the thinker of progress, sees a teleologically evolving world where a changeable Weltgeist develops in steps until it becomes the world spirit itself.

The New Yorker's Weltgeist of the 21st Century (©The New Yorker)

Schopenhauer and his poodle by Wilhelm Busch
(©Wikipedia). The philosopher's pessimistic view:
Seitdem ich die Menschen kenne, liebe ich die Tiere
(Since I have gotten to know people, I love animals).

For Schopenhauer, Hegel's ideas were garbage. Red Baron also thinks that replacing God with a Weltgeist alienated from humankind is pure speculation.

Schopenhauer personally suffered from Hegel, for Hegel's lectures following the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) drew crowds of students while only a few people were interested in Schopenhauer's ideas. The fact that he had masochistically scheduled his courses simultaneously with Hegel's sheds light on Schopenhauer's pessimistic approach to philosophy. He claims that the world will not become better. He sees a world governed by the struggle for survival, by the "will to live." 

Schopenhauer personally suffers from this blind Weltwille where reason is just an adjunct of will. From there, it is only a short step to nihilism. Do we all end up in nirvana?

Karl Marx took up Hegel's ideas not so much by writing about God or Weltgeist (any religion is just opium for the people) but by emphasizing a materialist interpretation of Hegel's historical development. This is, in particular, because of the alienation of humankind resulting in class struggles. In Wikipedia, we read: Marxist methodology uses economic and sociopolitical inquiry and applies that to the critique and analysis of the development of capitalism and the role of class struggle in systemic economic change.

For Friedrich Nietzsche taking up Schopenhauer's ideas, the world is not guided by reason but by will. He interprets the blind will as a personal will for power or, as time goes by, to sing it with Frank Sinatra: It's still the same old story, the fight for love and glory. According to Nietzsche, humankind must eventually overcome itself to create the Übermensch.

Where do we go from here? Red Baron does not see his world progressing per Hegel's Weltgeist. The defeat of Communism based on Marxism entailed an unchallenged accelerated development of capitalism based on growth with all its harmful excesses of slave labor, exploitation of natural resources, and climate change. Nowadays, big corporations acting globally govern the world. They are undisturbed by governments susceptible to blackmail: If you do not fulfill our demands, we shall move our factories and, in particular, the jobs elsewhere.

So the seamstress in Bangladesh exploited for a starvation wage should be happy as long as the rising tides of the 21st century do not flood her factory. Refugees from Africa are knocking on Europe's door for survival, but they are sent back if their demand for asylum is motivated economically, i.e., if they are looking for work.

The present economy is still based on unlimited growth and takes this for granted. However, Red Baron doubts that turbo-capitalism will survive when the fight for Mother Earth's resources, particularly freshwater, shifts into high gear.

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Bächle Bashing

Today is the birthday of this somewhat dreamily gazing young man. Red Baron had planned to write a blog about this guy who was no April fool and had such an influence on German history. However, when I opened today's Badische Zeitung, the following article knocked me off my socks:

Freiburg will probably have to fill up its brooklets.

What happened? A lady from Swabia had an accident in Baden's capital by stepping in one of the many brooklets running through Freiburg, rupturing her anterior cruciate ligament. Now, her accident insurance is asking the city for indemnity. Although the sum is only a little more than 2 million euros, the officials fear higher indemnities should American visitors step in (sic!). They decided to fill the brooklets in a hush-hush operation, thus increasing street security for pedestrians and cyclists. But as in the case of the Berlin Wall, where a mark on the ground shows the visitor the path of the long-gone object, Freiburg's officials plan a "soft filling," i.e., they will have flowers planted in the former stone beds, making the brooklets visible.

Original former (?) Bächle in Freiburg.
Already in the Middle Ages, Freiburg had a system of brooklets running through the streets.
This one in Marktgasse runs in the middle of the street, i.e., the position of all original brooklets.
Nowadays, all other Bächle run on the side of the streets.

You may imagine that the decision caused a storm of indignation, although no shitstorm yet, for in the 16th century, Freiburg's city council had already forbidden the deposition of excrement in the brooklets: Und soll nymandt dhein mist, strow, stain ... in die bäch schütten … (And nobody shall drop dung, straw or stones into the brooklets). A citizens' initiative, Rettet die Bächle jetzt, spontaneously formed last night, asking for signatures to Save the brooklets now.

As was asked in the BZ article, Red Baron immediately went downtown to sign the petition at 11 a.m. Here, I only met people in good humor around a table without a paper to sign:

Typical April weather.
On the left is a BZ newsperson collecting the people's reactions and taking notes.
A friend I hadn't seen for a year who happened to pass by is on the right.

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