Stranded in Gelnhausen

On my way to Dresden for a one-week trip to Wroclaw (Breslau) and Cracow (Krakau), I started in Freiburg on Saturday, October 9, at 6.52 a.m. taking the InterCity Express (ICE) direction Frankfurt. Red Baron left instead at 7.15 a.m. since the train from Basel arrived in Freiburg twenty minutes late. Initially, I didn't worry about the delay but rather enjoyed the Butterkuchen (a piece of cake made from yeast dough covered with sugared sliced almonds roasted in butter) and the pot of coffee that one gets served at the seat. This treat has become my favorite standard whenever I travel by ICE in Germany.

Luckily, I caught my train to Dresden at Frankfurt's central station because my connection arrived on the other side of the same platform and was also delayed. Soon after the ICE to Dresden had left Frankfurt toward Fulda, the loudspeaker informed us about an abandoned Aldi plastic bag in coach 22. Oh, oh! A few minutes later, the train ground to an unscheduled halt at Gelnhausen station. All passengers had to leave the train, the platform, and even their luggage behind.

Gelnhausen is a small town in Hesse with beautiful half-timbered houses. The poet Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen was born there in 1622. He is famous for the first German novel, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, which was written during the Thirty Years' War. Gelnhausen also has the remains of a Kaiserpfalz (Emperor's palace).

Waiting at a safe distance on platform 1 for the big blow

Time was too short for a visit, although it took 30 minutes before the Federal Police arrived to investigate the plastic bag affair. At the same time, we waited at a safe distance on platform 1 for another 90 minutes. Luckily enough, it was a beautiful sunny day.

A female German shepherd on her way to sniff explosives

Suddenly, the crowd opened a passage for an awe-inspiring police officer and his dog. From then on, it still took another hour before the sniffing dog declared the plastic bag clean. Ultimately, we were invited to re-mount the train and meet our luggage again.

*

The Conquest of Space and Time

Professor Peter Günther's talk describing how the Puritan heritage developed into a political religion made me think about two points: Possible future developments in America's drive to new frontiers and, as Herman Melville saw it, the political Messiah had come in the American people.

Reaching New Frontiers
Once the settlers had arrived at the West Coast of the American continent and had pitched up their tents on the beaches of the Pacific Ocean, had they not reached their final goal? 

No, to me, President Kennedy's call to make it to the moon within a decade was a manifestation and continuation of the pioneers' spirit of conquering space and time. And even today, there are frontiers to be reached, e.g., in science, where the US has the highest rate of Nobel Prize winners.

What about old and new social challenges and how to meet them? The Puritan attitude, i.e., those who in this life count themselves already among the chosen people, clashes with charity for the unsuccessful and miserable neighbor. Is this why Socialism is the devil in person for some Americans? 

In 1848, Theodor Mögling, a leading figure during the German revolution in Baden-Württemberg, gave the following definition: "Socialism wants the unification of forces on a voluntary basis to reach goals that cannot be reached by an individual alone. However, the freedom and self-determination of an individual must only be limited to a degree necessary for reaching the goal." What could be wrong with that?

Spreading Freedom and Democracy
Europeans, mainly Germans, will never forget America's intervention during two world wars, where, in a second attempt, the US succeeded at "imposing" democracy in Central Europe.

Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George:
You, too, have the right to self-determination.
Would you like your pockets to be emptied before or after your death?
Contemporary cartoon by Th. Heine

The first attempt had to fail because President Wilson somewhat naively left the execution of his 14 Points to the Europeans. In his book 1000 Years of Annoying the French, Stephen Clarke writes, "Britain's Prime Minister, Lloyd George, thought the Allies should be less lenient on the Germans. He wanted to punish them while keeping their country healthy enough to act as a barrier against the new Communist state of Russia in the east. 

The French, though, were obsessed with bringing Germany to its knees. Remembering the Franco-Prussian War, France's Prime Minister, the 77-year-old Georges Clemenceau, was determined that the Germans should never be strong enough to invade France again - which makes it hard to understand why he insisted on a peace treaty so harsh that they would come back looking for vengeance only twenty years later."

After the first aborted attempt followed the successful second. In 1945, Europe was in such a shambles that only massive American help (the Marshall Plan) prevented the continent's western half from drifting under communist rule too. The American seed mostly fell on fertile ground. Germany is now a stable democracy, even to the point of being admired by some less fortunate countries.

The next international hot spot where the US successfully missionized was South Korea. However, the following Operation Vietnam failed to leave deep scars on how America sees itself. I will skip the Iraqi War, so next comes Operation Enduring Freedom focusing on Afghanistan. 

Here, a Western Alliance is fighting the Taliban militarily and politically together with the US, providing the lion's share as usual. Defending the US and Germany against the Taliban at the Hindu Kush? Concerning our troops, more than two-thirds of the German people deny that statement and would prefer to pull our personnel out by tomorrow.

My conclusion is that at the bitter end, the Alliance will not have established a democratic regime in Afghanistan but will count thousands of lives lost and billions of U$ and euros burned.

Is there another way to meet the aggressiveness of the militant faction of Islam? The question is not answered. The latest remark by our federal president, "Germany has a Christian-Jewish (yes!!) past, but in the meantime, Islam belongs to Germany too," neither helped nor calmed down the debate.

**

Essen Reloaded

Before I attended my class reunion in Essen, I visited the places of my youth. Here is another photo of my early days:

My playmate from 1938 to 1942 and my beloved tricycle.
Me picking my nose? 

The house is well-kept, where I lived on the second floor.
I rang the bell, and who answered?

On the doorstep, Ursula, my former playmate, is still living in the apartment on the first floor.

Mein Kindergarten is below and behind the Collegiate Church of Rellinghausen.
The church was founded in the Romanesque style in 996.

At the Primary School, in the rooms on the left-hand side,
they taught me how to handwrite in Sütterlin (Gothic)

The station where I used to take the train going downtown together with my mother 

**

Essen!

  I do not know why, although I was born in the city of Essen. Whenever I hear the word, Madison's Essen Haus comes to my mind. During my visits to our Sister City, I have never made it to the place. It resembles Bavarian, featuring Gemuetilichkeit with an additional "i" and a charming selection of antique Hummels! Promise, next time in Madison, I shall visit Essen Haus.



 The city name Essen has nothing to do with a meal or eating. Because of the heavy industry that boomed around the Ruhr River in the late 19th century, a pun was shared that the name Essen is derived from die Essen (German for "the smokestacks"). All wrong! Essen may be derived from the common ash tree (Esche in modern German).

The big name in those times was Krupp, and boozing men used to boast: Was Krupp in Essen, sind wir im Trinken (What Krupp stands for in Essen, we stand for in drinking).

This weekend I shall be in Essen for my yearly class reunion. I only had two years of primary school in Essen and later went to and finished high school in Hamburg. My former classmates change meeting places yearly to make our gatherings more interesting.

Here is an old photo from 1938. It shows a tiny Red Baron with his father in front of our house in Goldammerweg 4. No, the car is not an Audi; it is a DKW.

Later, during World War II, when I visited my grandparents' farm in Westphalia, I encountered the following teaser: "In Essen gibt es große Schüsseln, aber nichts zum Fressen" (In Essen, there are big bowls, but there is nothing to eat). This was partly true; I remember the big but simple meals my grandmother prepared on an enormous stove. 

Just across the expansive kitchen, I sat around a large wooden table with all the farmhands. We dug into the food once my grandfather had said grace.

In the Herrgottswinkel (the corner where a crucifix hung), the only modern accessory set on a high shelf was the Volksempfänger (the people's wireless set). God and Goebbels, what a vicious combination! But that is a different story.

**

German Language Day 2010

Somehow typical showing the European Flag
and the UN-logo

Today is German Language Day (Tag der deutschen Sprache), and it happened that this very morning I finished Günter Grass's latest book: Grimms Wörter; Eine Liebeserklärung. The New York Times wrote about Grimm's Words: The book is a declaration of love, as the subtitle states, to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's collection of German words into a dictionary. 

The Brothers Grimm started their Deutsches Wörterbuch in 1848 when following a conflict about the Hanover Constitution with their king, they - together with five other colleagues (the Göttingen Seven) - were not only ousted from their professorships but also expelled from the Kingdom of Hanover.

The Wörterbuch is more than just a dictionary. It is like an encyclopedia of German words, their origin, and their development. It is a treasure trove, particularly for a writer like Günter Grass, who loves German Baroque authors and their style.

Coming back to German Language Day 2010, the Badische Zeitung published an interview with Professor Ludwig Eichinger, full professor of German linguistics at the University of Mannheim. It is there where the Duden, Germany's reference source for our language, is published. When Eichinger was asked about the influence of American English on the German language, he gave an all-clear.

We had earlier impacts on our language. In the 18th century it was the Français that caused outbreaks like: O spei aus, vor der Hausthür spei der Seine häßlichen Schleim aus! Rede Deutsch, o du Deutscher (Oh, vomit in front of the front door, vomit the Seine river's hideous slime! Speak German, oh you German). 

Concerning the American influence, we are far from such outbursts. Why not use the English word if there are no acceptable German translations? Who knows the German equivalent of "upgrade?" 

The other day I read cute translations for drop-down lists and browsers: Klapplisten and Stöberer. Since my early days with the computer, I have fought a personal battle using the word hard disk for the good German Festplatte. After all, I try to compensate for my lapsus linguae by forcing E-Post instead of e-mail.

In fact, in recent years, German enterprises have rediscovered German like the Deutsche Bahn (German Railway). They promised to rename their Service Point into Kundenzentrum.

*

St. Odile

Today I took part in an excursion with colleagues of Feierabend. The English translation of Feierabend is "quitting time," but this does not convey the sentimental German meaning: Imagine a farmer or a blacksmith sitting on a bench under the linden tree in his village. After a hard day's work, he has folded his brawny hands in his lap, watching the sunset. This is German Feierabend!

In our case, Feierabend stands for a bunch of older-generation people interested in computer activities, garnishing their hobby with other group activities, mostly excursions.

Statue of St. Odile with attributes of an abbess of Hohenburg

A one-and-a-half-hour walk took us to a chapel above Freiburg built in 679 at the place where St. Odile once found refuge in a rock that opened just in time before her father's men arrived to catch her. In fact, Duke Etichon of Alsace had ordered his daughter to marry, which she refused. Eventually, her only solution was a getaway. Her hiding in the rock blessed the region with a source.

Grotto and entrance to the source below St. Odile's chapel

You must descend into the grotto below the chapel to get to the source. An iron gate blocks access to the water. On the rock above the praying St. Odile is barely recognizable. 

The water of the source is said to have curative virtues in case of eye trouble. It flows out of a green garden hose below the gate. To reach the water, you must bend down quite a lot. Eventually, I managed and rinsed my eyes, although I washed my hands at the dedicated facilities before our group had lunch at a tavern adjoining the chapel. The place now called St. Ottilien is a popular excursion site for Freiburgers.

**

The Grand Design

The latest book by the Oxford genius, Stephen Hawking: The Grand Design, will be in bookstores next week. In advance, I read the following catchphrases on CNN's website: Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, and why we exist, and it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the Universe going. I pre-ordered the book immediately.

The question of Intelligent Design has occupied me for years and is a permanent topic of discussion in the States, where many people fight against Darwinism. 

When I finished Hans Küng's last book, Der Anfang aller Dinge (The Beginning of All Things), in 2005, I discussed the topic at one of Freiburg-Madison's Stammtische in 2006. Near the end of this book, Professor Küng gives a small glimpse of what he believes. I wanted to learn more.

Since then, Küng has published a new book in 2009: What I believe. Although I was hot on the topic the book is still lying on my desk unread. When I now opened it, I started reading at the end and found what I expected: Saint Paul’s visio beatifica from 1 Corinthians, 13: Die Liebe kommt niemals zu Fall: Prophetische Gaben – sie werden zunichte werden; Zungenreden – sie werden aufhören; Erkenntnis – sie wird zunichte werden. Denn Stückwerk ist unser Erkennen und Stückwerk unser prophetisches Reden. Wenn aber das Vollkommene kommt, dann wird zunichte werden, was Stückwerk ist. Als ich ein Kind war, redete ich wie ein Kind, dachte wie ein Kind, überlegte wie ein Kind. Als ich aber erwachsen war, hatte ich das Wesen des Kindes abgelegt. Denn jetzt sehen wir alles in einem Spiegel, in rätselhafter Gestalt, dann aber von Angesicht zu Angesicht. Jetzt ist mein Erkennen Stückwerk, dann aber werde ich ganz erkennen, wie ich auch ganz erkannt worden bin. Nun aber bleiben Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, diese drei. Die größte unter ihnen aber ist die Liebe. (Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. Right now, three things remain faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.)

Spontaneously, I decided to read Küng's book first before digging into Hawking's The Grand Design. Hawking's book has already started a new debate on the fundamental question of creation. 

The head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, said that physics alone will not settle why there is something rather than nothing. Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.

Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation ... The Bible simply isn't interested in how the Universe came into being.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, endorsed the Chief Rabbi's eloquent statement about the relationship between religion and science.

As I had expected, Imam Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, expressed his fundamental belief: If we look at the Universe and all that has been created, it indicates that somebody has been here to bring it into existence. That somebody is the almighty conqueror.

Like in physics, where the Standard Model matured into the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), Intelligent Design evolved into a more extensive Grand Design (TGD). Perhaps I should have read Hawking's book first.

**

LLL

Today, I read an article in the Badische Zeitung titled Der Blick nach Deutschland (Looking unto Germany), referring to a blog by Richard C. Longworth called Another Way To Work. The blog published in The Midwesterner discusses a book entitled Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan.

In his blog, Richard gives lots of flowers to Germany, particularly to its economy. For me, however, the article smacks of the stinking dictum: Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen. (The German spirit shall heal the world.) I instead prefer the German proverb: Not all is gold, what glitters.

Let us compare job security. Traditionally, jobs are more secure in Germany than in the United States, but one can still lay off people when they are no longer needed. Since unemployment (which comes right after inflation) is a political issue in Germany, firms asked their staff to work fewer hours during the recent economic crisis (Kurzarbeit) instead of laying off part of their workforce. 

This practice was honored by the German government, paying most of the difference between the full pay and the loss of income due to Kurzarbeit. This measure - meant to avoid social tensions and psychological traumata for unemployed workers - had an additional benefit. When China re-started ordering massively high-technology products in Germany, production could be increased without delay with the trained workforce still present. All seems to look good; however, since Germans are notorious Bedenkenträger (worry warts), they ask: What will happen in the long run if the diligent Chinese have copied Germany's high technology?


Enter education. We can only keep our export-driven economy alive if we always remain a step ahead of our competitors. This means keeping up or even increasing the standard of our educated and skilled workforce. When comparing our education system to the States, we feel humble. Most Nobel prize winners come from the US, and I am convinced that all these people practice lifelong learning (LLL).

Good old Wilhelm Busch wrote in 1856 when schooling in Germany became compulsory:
It was decided that man/woman must learn.
One can learn, thank God, also throughout one's life. (German stamp)

LLL, lebenslanges Lernen, recently became the catchword in discussing Germany's education system. As in the States, education here is not centrally organized as in France. We in Germany boast of as many and even more education systems as we have Länder (States). 

In European comparisons (PISA Studies) of schooling results, German students never even come near the top, which regularly causes a national outcry. At present, university reforms within the European Union, e.g., changing the traditional diploma degrees to bachelor and master, cause frustration among students. Will Germany meet the challenge of keeping its educational system at a necessary high standard? Will people accept LLL? Only the future will tell. Discussions about education and formation in Germany are in full swing.

*

Marianne m'a tuer

Recently I read a book by Bernard Wittmann titled: Marianne m'a tuer. According to the critics, I expected a book about the history of the Alsace. However, instead, I read how governments in Paris had subdued and still tuent (kill) - according to Wittmann - the Elsassdütsch. This German-Alemannic dialect spoken by the local population is choked to foster (or force) the French language.

Bernard chose the book title - it indeed is the most exciting part - for publicity. At the origin is a well-known catchphrase in France: Omar m'a tuer. (Omar has killed me).

Living in her villa in Mougins, South of France, a distinguished widowed lady employed a Moroccan gardener called Omar. One day in June 1991, she was found stabbed dead in her cave. On the door, written in blood, the police read: Omar m'a tuer. The gardener was arrested and indicted for murder. Soon the prosecutor was in a dilemma. How can an educated old lady possibly write such a grammatical blunder: tuer instead of tuée?

A similar mistake is neither possible in English nor in German. There is a distinct difference between the infinitive and the past participle of a verb in these languages, i.e., kill and killed or töten und getötet. In principle, the same is true in French. However, the pronunciation of tuer and tuée is the same, and uneducated Frenchmen and women are known to have difficulty choosing the correct grammatical form. But if the educated lady did not write the grammatically incorrect phrase with her own blood, had a third person been blaming an innocent Omar for the murder?

The fact is, the 5000 francs the victim had kept at home were gone, and Omar needed money as he had gambling debts. On the other hand, Omar had an alibi at the time of the murder. To make a lengthy court case short, he was condemned in 1994 for first-degree murder to a prison sentence of 18 years, although Omar was defended by the best council for the defense in France, Maître Vergès. 

Vergès - in his since then famous last words - went back in history reminding the court of the Dreyfus affair: Il y a 100 ans on condamnait un officier car il avait le tort d'être juif, aujourd'hui on condamne un jardinier car il a le tort d'être maghrébin. (Hundred years ago, one condemned an officer because he had the flaw of being Jewish, today, one condemns a gardener because he has the flaw of being Maghrebian). It is known that many people in France applauded Omar’s sentence in the way as a good friend of mine felt when he once told me: Tu sais Manfred je ne suis pas raciste mais je n'aime pas les Arabes (You know Manfred, I am not a racist but I don't like the Arabs).

Addendum

The following cartoon complements the old story or was even initiated by it.

The text on the wall: War Selbstmord! (It was a suicide!), convinces one officer while the other simply shouts: Feierabend!

*

Wallenstein's Camp

©Badische Zeitung

The other day, I read an article in the Badische Zeitung about archaeologists digging up a graveyard dating from the Thirty Years War near Stralsund, a German city on the Baltic Sea. The diggers unearthed bones, sculls, lances, swords, and firearms.

This reminded me of Generalissimo Wallenstein’s venture into the north of Germany. Wallenstein is well known for his widely publicized aborted siege of Stralsund. The annual bicycle trip of 2005, together with some former classmates from high school, took us into this region along the Baltic coast.


So I was all excited when I discovered written on a map Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein’s Camp),  a place hidden in the woods.

Instantaneously Friedrich Schiller came to mind, who wrote his dramatic trilogy (Wallensteins Lager, Die Piccolomini, Wallensteins Tod), Leopold von Ranke with his book Geschichte Wallensteins and Golo Mann, who composed an opus magnum of 1293 pages about Wallenstein.



Eventually, I convinced my fellow bikers to detour on our way from Graal-Müritz to Rostock to visit Wallensteins Lager. I was pretty deceived when there was nothing else to see at the magical place but an identification plate on a cable box lost in the wilderness.

*

Cycling in Freiburg, Madison, Münster and Washington

When Freiburgers think their city is Germany's capital of bicycling, they are wrong. The place to visit is Münster in Westphalia. 

I cycled the city and region with my high school classmates in 2006. My parked bicycle on the Privatparkplatz of Der Tolle Bomberg Inn bears witness.

My bicycle in Westphalia

In 2008, Madison's Mayor David Cieslewicz came to Freiburg for the 3rd Meeting of Freiburg's Partner Cities. Because he had expressed a wish to cycle in the Black Forest, the Freiburg-Madison Gesellschaft organized a cycling tour around the Schluchsee.

Starting the tour around the Schluchsee

In the spring of 2010, Mayor Dave visited the cycling strongholds of Amsterdam and Münster. Afterward, Mayor Dave wrote an article in the Isthmus Weekly on August 12, titled In Defense of Madison. 

Mr. Steve Nass, a Republican from Whitewater and a Madison-basher, as Mayor Dave calls him, has spent a full two decades in the Legislature. His specialty is beating up on the University of Wisconsin, but he took a time-out this spring to issue a press release attacking Madison for installing pavement markings called a "bike box."

According to Nass, this is just part of the liberal, anti-car agenda. It starts with a little pavement marking, and before you can say "euro," we're all sitting in cafes drinking small cups of really strong coffee, wearing berets, and talking about Kafka and soccer.

Mayor Dave in Madison with a helmet

Dear Mr. Nass, what is wrong with that? In a global economy, you should know there is lots of competition: We Europeans swallow Big Macs, listen to the late Michel Jackson on our iPods, and sip hazelnut-flavored mocha at Starbucks while surfing the web on our iPads.

Coming back to bicycling ... in Washington. On August 14, the Badische Zeitung published an article about the U.S. capital. It was mentioned that Mayor Fenty had recently opened a bike path on Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the White House, with car drivers protesting vigorously as they lost one traffic lane. The city now has 50 miles of bike paths, with 30 more to come. Otherwise, bikers in Washington live dangerously as drivers chase them off the streets.

There is this subtle difference between Washington and Freiburg. Here, pedestrians are at the mercy of bikers riding on footpaths. Call yourself lucky if bicyclists come the wrong way, as you have a chance to escape by jumping to the side. If they come from behind and you happen to hear them, then stand still and pray; otherwise, as I wrote nine years ago: In Freiburg, it is impossible not to be hit by a cyclist.

Addendum

I would like to comment on a phrase an American friend recently sent me describing his cycling experience in the States: When I am in one mode, I hate all the others.

I feel similarly: I am annoyed by cars and pedestrians when riding a bicycle. Although I am a very defensive driver at my age, I curse cyclists in front of me and pedestrians crossing the street at any moment; as a pedestrian, I hate any cyclist on my footpath and parked cars blocking it. What kind of atavistic feeling is unleashed here? Does anybody know the answer?

**

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, champagne bottled in France could be shipped safely 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 high price decrease? In the future, Clarke hopes for better deals in England, as the onset of global warming shifts ideal champagne-producing conditions 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 of 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 when problems arise. But 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.
**

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 Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tale Woods, vast and dark, where people are always lost, 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 the 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 pastureland; thus, farmers drove horses, cows, and pigs into the woods to forage. 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 rent for their use. While only a few Pfennigs sufficed initially, in later years the owner asked for more, so the expression Schweinegeld (pigs' money) was coined; 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, which once stretched from the Brandenburg Gate to Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. The Tiergarten became public when, during the 1848 Revolution, people gained the right to smoke there. Were the authorities at that time more liberal than today?

Most of our woods were spared in the 19th century because, unlike in England, the Industrial Revolution in Germany came later, and coal from the Ruhr met the demand 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 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 challenges stereotypes such as the one about German food. It is indeed generally heavy, though varied, because cooking in Germany is regional. In fact, Sauerkraut is the specialty in Alsace, but that is not German territory.

He rightly points out Germany's obsession with the Middle Ages, when the world was still 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 built by the Teutonic Order 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 of Paul von Hindenburg, the victor of the Second Battle of Tannenberg, which was fought in the First World War against the Czar's army. As Reichspräsident of the Weimar Republic, he eventually made Hitler the Chancellor in 1933, only to die a little later, not seeing what disaster his decision led to.

While reading the pages on old history is generally 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 the 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 it "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 degrees 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. As they pass 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 not only looked, 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 happen to have a nice view from their balcony into a neighbor's garden wake up one morning staring into a deep hole for underground parking.

This is followed by a year of noise and dust. Walls are thrown up, and one morning, they look out onto 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 grew up with mainframe computers and punched cards, and later became a proud user of an IBM PC running 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 Reverse 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, and micro keyboards didn't help when taking notes, e.g., in libraries. So I settled for an HP200, later switching to the HP720 for my out-of-the-house text work.

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, was always a pain in the neck. I often spent hours figuring out why the machines wouldn't mate. Should I have bought a netbook instead 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 meets all my external text-processing needs, even for longer documents.

Do I have to open the word processor for small notes and odd information on the road? Enter 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 are instantaneously 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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