Singing Christmas Carols in Freiburg‘s Minster Church

Red Baron likes to sing, so he went to Freiburg's Minster this afternoon. But when I arrived at a quarter to five, the church was already full to bursting.

I walked with my stick to the front without hoping for a place in one of the pews. However, in row six, a young lady was keeping a few seats free, desperately looking for three latecomers from her family. I counted and said that a thin person would still fit in. So she offered me the seat by one of the church pillars.

Needless to say, only one additional person showed up, and Red Baron eventually had lots of free space and a perfect view into the church choir.

When the event started, I got my fill. Here is the complete list of Christmas Carols I sang out loud with the people around me strangely remaining as mute as a fish.

All the songs you find on YouTube. Some melodies are familiar to my English-speaking readers, so they may like to sing or hum along without an English text. Click on the German titles below.

Tochter Zion freue dich 

Nun freut euch ihr Christen 

Es ist ein Ros entsprungen 

Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier   

Ihr Kinderlein kommet 

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht 

Hört, es singt und klingt mit Schalle

O du fröhliche, o du selige

It is not surprising that the text of most of the songs contains the word "peace," for as Luke 2:14 states, "In the highest heaven, glory to God! And on earth, peace among people of goodwill!"

Let's hope that in 2025, decision-makers in the various regions of our earth will show goodwill for peace and stop the suffering of civil populations.

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The Beginninglessness of the Universe and the Theological Consequences

Remember the Seminar early this year titled:

Which Truths Can We Build Upon? Physics and Theology in Discourse?

My friend Thomas made me aware of the seminar, and he and I attended. As a result, I wrote a few blogs (Click on the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ).

The discussions were not over for Thomas, so he proposed an institute discussion as a follow-up. The topic he formulated was:

The Beginninglessness of the Universe and the Theological Consequences

The discussion took place on December 19 in a small circle at the Theological Institute of Freiburg's university, comprising the theology professors of the seminar. The conversations were animated by wine and Christmas goodies. The physics professor could not attend, so experimental physicist Red Baron had to stand in for questions of modern cosmology.

In the run-up to the event, Prof. Magnus Striet had put forward eight theses with the title:

Creation Out Of Nothing Or an Eternal World?

1) From the point of view of scientific theory, theology is an integrative science. This means that knowledge complexes from non-theological sciences must be incorporated into theological thinking about the world. Theology interprets them under the hypothetical assumption of God.

2) The concept of God must
a) be defined,
b) it must be possible to think it consistently in relation to world knowledge and 
c) it must not collide with the (transcendental-logical) fact of human freedom.

3) From a historical point of view, the concept of creation out of nothing emerged in the emerging Christianity because one wanted to think of God's historical power, which in turn presupposes freedom on the part of God.
This cannot be conceived under the presuppositions of Greek philosophy. At the same time, one wants God to think of an absolute, which is not given if matter or the world are eternal.
Neither the concept of nothingness nor that of eternity can be positively defined.

4) The practical needs of reason (which can be traced back to contemporary philosophy) allow us to hold on to the concept of a free God.

6) Identifying the cosmic process with the "divine" and abandoning the distinction between God, the world, and man is contrary to the needs of practical moral reason.

7) Philosophically, the question of whether the world (the quantum vacuum) is eternal or not cannot be decided. Nor can the existence of a free God be sufficiently proven.

8) Theologically, the existence of a free God is posited. In this perspective, the fact of the world is anchored in a reason that is this God without being able to conclusively clarify the relationship between the free God and the beginning of the cosmic process.

Freiburg, 18.12.2024

Red Baron received a copy of these theses, which included additional information (printed in red). Here, I would like to come in (the original text is in italics). In a physical sense, the quantum vacuum preceding the Big Bang is not nothing. In a scientific way of thinking, it can no longer be asked whether this vacuum has a non-physical reason.

At the end of the paragraph, the author writes, We cannot say anything about the nature of the world before/beyond the Big Bang. Red Baron would underline this, although theoretical colleagues have speculated about a quantum vacuum before the Big Bang and accordingly made model calculations.

Taking up the argumentation, The vacuum of quantum mechanics is the energetic ground state of a (bound) physical system. It is directly linked to the existence of space (or an associated measurand)."

Indeed, the present standard Lamda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model of cosmology describes the beginning of our space-time and makes no statement about what was before the Big Bang.

This present-day knowledge contrasts the beginninglessness of the universe, meaning that it has no beginning in time. However, there are several theories to it, just to name a few:

1. The universe is eternal. It has no beginning and has always existed in some form.
2. The universe bounces through cycles of Big Bangs (expansion) and Big Crashes (contraction), with no definitive beginning.
3. The universe could have originated from quantum fluctuations ex nihilo, which does not require a precise beginning time.

However, with all those theories, there is a caveat: These studies rely on mathematical models that cannot be directly verified by current observational technologies. The theoretical findings assume specific conditions that remain hypothetical.

On the other hand, experiments have repeatedly confirmed Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. However, dark matter had to be introduced into the standard ΛCDM model to fully align with cosmological observations.

Other descriptions of the universe exist, like the MODified Newtonian Dynamics theory, or MOND for short. This model eliminates the ugly dark matter assumption.

Recently, astrophysical results obtained from the James Webb Space Telescope supported MOND. Astrophysicists observed large, bright galaxies in the early universe instead of the small, simple ones predicted by the ΛCDM model. These observations impressively fit the MOND theory.

In conclusion, the authors write in their paper:

A number of puzzling observations in cosmology were anticipated by MOND, including the early formation of massive galaxies.

Despite the predictive successes of MOND, we do not yet know how to construct a cosmology based on it. In contrast, ΛCDM provides a good fit to a wide range of cosmological observables but does not satisfactorily explain the many phenomena that were predicted by MOND.

We find ourselves caught between two very different theories that seem irreconcilable despite applying to closely related yet incommensurate lines of evidence. The simple force law hypothesized by MOND has made enough successful prior predictions that it cannot be an accident; it must be telling us something.

And then the authors can't resist a side blow: What that is remains as mysterious as the composition of dark matter.

Red Baron's initial religious education was based on Bible stories. However, as a young student, I realized I had to take up the subject again as an adult and deepen it.

A great help was my father-in-law, a teacher at the Catholic Apostel Gymnasium (high school) in Cologne, who introduced me to Rudolf Bultmann, Edward Schillebecckx, Karl Rahner, and Joseph Ratzinger. With Toni, I had long discussions. Later, Hans Küng was my favorite reading. Despite all my efforts, I never found proof of the existence of God.

That is why verse 13 of St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians has always been my maxim, So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. This verse is preceded by For now, we know, in part, regarding theologians, philosophers, and physicists alike.

As for verse 13, let me put hope above love for once in the coming year. Hope for a lasting peace in our world.

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We Will Never Surrender!

The third session of the seminar "80 Years, End of the War in the Southwest" (1944/45) dealt with the final military battle in spring 1945 (Der militärische Endkampf im Frühjahr 1945).

The East

Before the Endkampf, the Russians had successfully pushed back the German Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Center). 

The "Operation Bagration" began on June 22, 1944, with a massive artillery bombardment of German positions. Nothing was to be left to chance. Initially, four Soviet "fronts," i.e., the 1st Baltic and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian armies, went on the attack. In the rear area, the Red Army concentrated more than a dozen armies, more than two million soldiers, over 5,000 tanks, around 5,000 fighter planes, and tens of thousands of guns. The Heeresgruppe Mitte had nothing to oppose this enormous superiority.

The date of the attack and the name chosen were highly symbolic. On this day, three years earlier, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and begun a merciless war of annihilation.

Joseph Stalin chose "Operation Bagration" for the name. Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration (1765 to 1812) was a Georgian compatriot of the Soviet dictator and a hero in the "Patriotic War" of 1812 against Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion.

No better name than Bagration could be chosen for the decisive offensive in the "Great Patriotic War," as the Russian defensive struggle since the German invasion in 1941 was called.

The Eastern Front collapsed within a month. By December 1944, the Red Army had "liberated" the Baltic states and was on the border with East Prussia. At the end of March 1945, the Russian Winter Offensive had reached the Oder River. During its advance, the Red Army had surrounded the cities of Danzig and Breslau, leaving them aside.

The West

 The Allies reached the Rhine River in March 1945. The metropolis Aachen had already fallen on October 21, 1944.

In mid-December, Hitler put all his eggs into one basket. He scraped together whatever reserves the German military machine had left and started an offensive against the Allies in the Ardennes on December 16.

The first wave of the German attack involved more than 200,000 soldiers spread across three armies, around 600 tanks, and assault guns. This concentrated power drove a bulge into the Allied front in Belgium and Luxembourg. For the Americans, this desperate attempt to turn the tide of the war went down in history as the Battle of the Bulge.

The predetermined target of the Battle was far away Antwerp, the Belgian port on the Channel, through which the Allies had been delivering large quantities of supplies for their troops.

While the fight was going on, Paul Scherrer invited Werner Heisenberg, head of the German atomic project, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, professor of physics at the Reichs University Strasbourg, to give a scientific lecture at ETH Zurich on December 18.

The OSS agent and former baseball player Morris Berg, whom Alan Dulles had smuggled in with Paul Scherrer's help, sat in the lecture hall. Although Berg had completed a crash course in physics with Bob Robertson in England, he, like the experimental physicist Scherrer, could not follow Heisenberg's lecture on the S-matrix theory. At the time, nobody in the room knew that Berg was carrying a loaded pistol with him to shoot Heisenberg if anything, he said, convinced him the Germans were close to a bomb. As is well known, this political murder in neutral Switzerland did not take place.

The follow-up meeting to the physics seminar was scheduled at the Kronenhalle restaurant. Heisenberg bought a copy of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from a passing vendor, eagerly read about the Ardennenoffensive, and commented, "Sie kommen gut voran*." The Jewish physicists sitting at the table, who had fled from Germany and Austria to Switzerland to escape the Nazis, felt their blood run cold. After the war, Heisenberg's remark stamped him as a Nazi in the eyes of many of his colleagues.

*They are getting on well.

Hitler's Ardennenoffensive was as megalomaniacal as it was doomed to failure.

The Southwest

End of January 1945, the Gauleiter (Nazi Governor) of Baden and the Alsace, Robert Wagner, tried to boost the population's will for defense with daily slogans, 

We will never surrender!
Remain unyielding, believe, trust, fight.
Resistance to the last kitchen knife.
Victory or doom.
Fight back or die! Fight to the death!

We must replace what we lack in material things with faith, will, bravery, tenacity, and obedience ... We don't sit down; we fight! Anyone who leaves his place without orders will be tried by a court martial. There can be no doubt about his end.

End of March, security services reports frequently complain about the opinion in the population that the war will soon be over because of the rapid advance of the Anglo-Americans, while the majority is "almost happy" that this war is finally coming to an end.

On April 1, we know from Goebbels's diary that Wagner complained to him about the people in Baden, that morale among the population and the troops had sunk extraordinarily. People no longer shy away from harsh criticism of the Führer ...

In contrast to the Soviets, the Anglo-Americans were not feared by the people ... on the contrary, large sections of the people were happy when they came so that they would be protected against the Soviets...

[In Alsace], the population exercising resistance has occasionally taken active action against the troops, which has a highly depressing effect on them.

This misery prompted Wagner to publish in a last effort the following leaflet at the beginning of April:

German men and women on the Upper Rhine! National Socialists!

The enemy is now trying to break into our immediate homeland with a violent attack. This means that we in the Upper Rhine region now have to pass the most challenging endurance test ... 

The Gaullist Negro divisions are to be unleashed on our women again as a black disgrace*. At the same time, behind the Americans, the Jews lurk as occupation officers, military policemen, and economic exploiters for the hour of their revenge ...
*Allusion to assaults after the end of the First World War

Even from Alsace, we have enough witness reports to make things unmistakably clear: Arsons out of sheer destructive rage, stabbings, non-stop theft, violent separation of German-conscious families, sadistic torture of German people, rape and defilement, alcoholic excesses... Forced labor in Negro quarters ...

There is only one thing to do against the intentions of our enemies. Fight to the death by all means, with our last strength. The Siegfried Line must be defended with fanatical ferocity! None of the positions erected by the Volksaufgebot (people's corps), no town, no village, no farmstead, must be abandoned without a fight. There is no turning back!

At the end of our brave struggle is our victory!

In the following days, no further consideration was given to the civilian population. The Führer's Nero-Befehl (officially "Burnt Earth Order"), issued on March 19, 1945, and aimed to destroy Germany's infrastructure, was primarily exercised in blowing up bridges.

Thousands of apprehended men were court-martialed by hastily assembled tribunals that carried out their bloody work.

Click to enlarge

The last edition of "Der Alemanne," the Kampfblatt (combat journal) of the National Socialists of Upper Baden, was issued in Freiburg on April 12, 1945. It had only two pages. 

In the article "Under the Sign of the Werewolf," we read that 1945 we entered the decisive phase of the mighty world struggle. And once again, the methods of warfare have intensified, for the final battle is always the hardest, cruelest, and most ruthless.

At the Yalta Conference at the beginning of February 1944, the Allies had formulated their war aims. Among other things, it was decided that France, if it so wished, would be invited by the three Allies to take over an occupation zone and participate as the fourth member of the Control Commission. The size of the French zone was to be decided.

The French wished to create a fait accompli and were hurrying towards the war's end. At the beginning of 1945, French troops, mostly comprised of colonial men, quickly advanced in southwest Germany, which the Americans did not like at all.

In the French press, the advance of General Jean-Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny is described as follows: To the complete surprise of the Germans and the Allied General Staff, General de Lattre pushed his forces southwards and seized Freudenstadt, at the foot of the Black Forest, cutting the enemy line in two. From there, he returned to the Rhine, between Offenburg and Kehl, and launched offensives in two other directions: south of Stuttgart, towards the Swiss border and the Danube. On April 21, Stuttgart was taken; on the 24th, our flag flew over the walls of Ulm. On the 26th, our tanks entered Constance. Two days later, our troops crossed the Austrian border.

The tricolor flies over the walls of Ulm, and French troops enter Austria; the thought of Napoleon may have inspired de Lattre in his advance.

Before that, on April 21, 1945, the French occupied Freiburg.

In the meantime, Werner Heisenberg had returned from Switzerland to his experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch near Hechingen. In his autobiography, Heisenberg reports that the last remnants of disbanded German troops moved eastwards through Hechingen in mid-April. One afternoon, we heard the first French tanks. In the south, they had probably already advanced past Hechingen to the crest of the Rauhe Alb.

Around three o'clock, I set off on a bicycle toward Urfeld*. When I reached Gammertingen at dawn, I had probably already left the battle line behind me. I only had to avoid the threat of strafers again and again. Because of this threat, I traveled principally at night in the following two days.
*in Bavaria on Walchensee

On the third day, I came to Urfeld and found the family safe and sound.

Many returnees were not so lucky.
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Wokeness

Wokeness is often identified with non-national/non-religious identity politics. It claims that under the guise of equal rights for all kinds of marginalized identity groups, a claim to power is enforced by authoritarian means. 

 Red Baron is appalled by the extent the wokeness has reached. Anyone who criticizes 'woke' theories that advocate for the oppressed automatically makes common cause with the oppressors. This divides the world into strict categories of good and evil, and wokeness exerts moral pressure to silence its critics. 

 Even in a factual debate, criticizing wokeness is impossible because it makes itself irrefutable: It rejects scientific objectivity as a fairy tale of white, patriarchal, Western-individualistic knowledge production. Michel Foucault should have already stated that every claim to truth, including that of science, is nothing other than a claim to power. 

 And even worse. Wokeness scrutinizes every even thoughtless statement for political correctness, and if it doesn't meet the standard, it is denigrated as hate speech. 

In his lecture at the Museumsgesellschaft  Science and Freedom of Opinion in the Whirlwind of Contemporary Cultural Wars, Prof. Rainer Asch discussed the limits that wokeness imposes on freedom of opinion in science. Do scientists have to bend politically correct, for example, when justifying the financing of their research projects? Isn't this opening the floodgates to hypocrisy because the proposed project could fail without great overcautiousness in the wording?

Universities feel compelled to establish professorships or academic positions dedicated to critical race theory, diversity (LGBTQ+ studies), and social justice in inclusivity and that critically assess how language and behavior impact marginalized communities. These institutions develop a life of their own.

Cancel culture can erase parts of our history, such as renaming the Eberhard Karls University ofTübingen. Canceling the founder's name for Eberhard Karl was an anti-Semite like many of his contemporaries.

For Red Baron, above all, the corruption of the German language is an abomination. It all started with the Green Party, which introduced the gender starlet in November 2016. What is simply called migrants in English will become one word in German, too, using a starlet: Migrant*innen. 

This would "correctly" address the two genders, Migranten (male) and Migrantinnen (female). When written, it is ugly, but what is worse is when speakers on television try to pronounce the starlet, inserting an artificial pause between Migrant and innen. 

You may think that English-speaking people don't have the same problems as Germanophones. However, there is gender madness at Brighton and Sussex University Hospital (BSUH). It is the first hospital in the UK to formally implement a gender-inclusive language policy for its maternity services department, now known as "perinatal services."

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Association Supporting the Freiburg Documentation Center on National Socialism

The Förderverein Dokumentationszentrum Nationalsozialismus Freiburg held its annual meeting on November 18. Red Baron has previously reported on the Center.

The flyer

Having been a member of this supporting association for nine months, this was the first time I could meet fellow supporters of the Center in person. Indeed, the annual meeting was well attended.

The new logo

The association board gave its annual report and showed photos of the progress of the construction work at the former tourist office that will become the NS Documentation Center, which is due to open in March 2025.

Last year, donations to the Center amounted to almost 35,000 euros, and membership rose from 39 to 147.

The resurrection of the Old Synagogue, which was burnt down
on Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, in its present surroundings.

The Center will employ the latest technologies to make the past present.

During the slide show, Red Baron suddenly appeared in a photo, listening attentively to Prof. Bernd Martin, who gave a guided tour to members of the Förderverein Dokumentationszentrum Nationalsozialismus Freiburg in 2022 about the Nazi history of the Albert Ludwig University.

Here he talks about the Nazi eagle that used to hang on the façade of the Kollegiengebäude 1 above the university seal. It was removed after the war, but you can still see the traces all too clearly in the photo.

Prof. Martin, an expert on Martin Heidegger, naturally focused on the philosopher who joined the Nazi Party as early as 1933, became chancellor of the university, and worked to subordinate it to the Führerprinzip (leader principle). Here, he was supported by a right-wing student body where National Socialist ideas were most strongly within the medical faculty.

The renovation work at the former tourist office is on schedule. Red Baron is eagerly awaiting the opening of the Documentation Center.

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