vertreibung oder flüchtlingsthematik

A small village near Weimar, the city that hosted Goethe and Schiller, Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic, is facing some sharp criticism over its suggestion to house refugees in the officers' barracks of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. There unspeakable horrors associated with the memories of this place, and ironically it seems that our memory has become quite a feeble and atrophied thing. The immigration question is a complex one, but so is Germany’s relation to its past—much more so. Do Germans yet have guilt to discharge from the first half of the twentieth century? Surely, as do many of us—but does this make them to feel grudgingly obligated to accept more and more evacuees? That’s harder to answer—as with the Wirtschaftswunder that characterized Germany’s rebuilding and recovery after the wars ended was made possible to a very large extent through its guest worker programme, many also argue that Germany needs an infusion of a young population to sustain its present and retiring work-force and that Germany on balance benefits from immigration. I also feel that we are prone to lose our perspective as well: we’re welcoming in these people who’ve mostly been on the run from poverty and violence.
Mostly—and I think we choose to focus on those exceptions and malingerers. We also forget that while the sites of former concentration camps are sacred places, they were not recognized and consecrated as such right away and were regarded very differently depending on whether one found himself in East or West. Buchenwald was used by the Soviets initially as an internment camp for Nazi prisoners-of-war—although political-dissidents were also held there; Dachau and other locations in West Germany was first used to contain Germany’s own refugee crisis. Some fourteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from territories either ill-gotten and taken back (like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia), lands that had been historically German, like much of Prussia that went to Poland and the Soviet Union, for centuries and other European cities where they were no longer welcome, like Amsterdam, were resettled in a Germany in ruins. Not only did the expelled Germany have to leave everything behind, they also faced the prospect of starting all over in a homeland that maybe was not at all familiar to them—their families perhaps living abroad for generations, spoke differently, had strange mannerisms, didn’t eat proper German food and were failing to integrate—and try to live among a population that if not outright hostile to the refugees were themselves struggling and barely had enough to provide for themselves, to say nothing for these newcomers. In the 1950s, once these crises had somewhat subsided, the regimes of the two Germanys took different positions on how the past was to be remembered. East Germany was quicker to turn Buchenwald and other sites into memorials and strongly encouraged people to visit, especially school-children, to face the incomprehensible and dread past. Whereas, in the West, the subject remained uncomfortable and while not going ignored or unexplored, talk was taboo for a long time and it really was not until Reunification that the public became more willing to confront their autobiographies.  Perhaps empathy is yet harder to face.

pastebin or le grand-large

Though I think, especially in the aftermath of America’s latest film critic and the associated retribution even though responsibility was not clear, that it always wise to assume that the world’s security agencies are always ready to pull a wise one on their citizens and propagandise and exploit any crisis or tragedy towards those ends, it is a stance just as specious as having total communication and movement surveillance and stripping naked all vestments of privacy would result in absolute safety and harmony as America and its accomplices wanting to own the all the wires.

I think that the Fugitive has illustrated that they already do—though what they’ve done with their omniscience seems quite pathetic, but of course, we’re not privy to those successes and near-misses. We’re allowed, yes, to continue being unpleasant, insulting, constructive, and indemnifying even if it goes through abstracted censors though not according to the judgments of the newest abstracted critics. These new censors operate, however, not with the compliance of those shuttle-services, both virtual and physical over great distances and right in our faces, but with legislation that prevents cover and mainstreams all thought. Is that too high a price for security? The mathematics of encryption is invulnerable but not back-doors, graciously held open. The Caliphate apparently has the ability to tear down the posters that the States use advertise at-large (though I never knew who might really befriend these sources except for utilitarian purposes and not regard them with skepticism) but not infiltrate their real and incontrovertible minions and mouth-piece. What do you think? Is anyone taking advantage of the latest, sad headlines and incipient fear?

vis viva or élan vital

The director of Sigmund Freud’s out-patient clinic in Vienna, influential and controversial to contemporaries, was called Wilhelm Reich and due to later public shaming by an agency of the US government is nearly unknown except for a few of his kookier traces. Reich authored many respected works on mass-hysteria, including exploring why people were enervated by fascists and suddenly found it acceptable to participate in mob activities like biblioclasm (book-burning) and worse, linked poverty to mental health, hypnosis, developed what became the concepts of bio-feedback, body-language and Gestalt therapy (personal accountability), massage therapy and spoke very frankly about sexuality and inhibitions.
After the violent coup that elevated Hitler to power, Reich and many other Germans fled to Norway—including future Chancellor Willy Brandt—and Reich, continuing his research, solicited volunteers, Brandt among them, to make love whilst attached to an oscilloscope and study what sorts of voltage was measured. As the war engulfed Europe, Reich immigrated to the United States, sponsored by the psychiatry school of Columbia University—which did not turn out like Operation Paperclip. It was in New York that Reich first described his Orgone theory—which was basically the same notion as æther or the all-pervading Force or Chi, and imbalances in orgone (named after the orgasm, and not unlike Freud’s libido ideas) radiation led to all human ailments, disease and mental disorders. Reich met with compatriot Albert Einstein and tried to convince him of the efficacy and truth behind his conclusions—possibly under the pretext that the Allies such harness the power of this mysterious metaphysical element before the Nazis discovered it. Orgones could also be used to control the weather. Though Einstein heard him out and even tried to recreate his unscientific experiments, ultimately debunking them because of sloppy control-conditions, Einstein probably thought Reich was a touch looney and this encounter may have begun the unhinging of his professional reputation. Undeterred, Reich continued his experiments, which seemingly innocently enough, consisted of placing volunteers (although sometimes seriously ill people too that fell for quackery) in what was essentially a Faraday cage, a metal shield from outside interference that kept internal energies inside, called Orgone Accumulators for long periods, naked, to restore their natural equilibrium. Failing to get back into academia, Reich decided to purchase a farm in the state of Maine, naming it Orgonon, which included laboratories, treatment areas, a conference centre and an observatory for UFO sightings.
For all his eccentricities, Reich received little bad press while on the ranch and those in the psychosomatic medical community still though highly of his earlier writings. One magazine interview propelled his theories to national attention, after the war had ended, and Reich became a target of the US Federal Trade CommisSion (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for medical fraud and possible sex-trafficking. Interstate sales of orgone accumulators and printed materials that espoused Reich’s teachings were banned. A federal officer, posing as a client, asked Reich to ship him an accumulator, thus framing him. One of Reich’s final feats was saving the local blueberry harvest by creating a cloud-bursting device that beamed positive orgone radiation into the sky and ended the drought. Farmers were pleased with the results. The sentence handed down was harsh and provided for prison time and the destruction of Reich’s research facility, all orgone accumulators and his publications. FDA agents were present at Orgonon to supervise the destruction carried out by Reich’s friends and associates with axes and a bonfire, with Reich made to watch. After this unrepentant beastliness, accused of being delusional and paranoid and worse, Reich died while in jail, a cell being no proper accumulator. There was a resurgence in interest in Wilhelm Reich in 2008, fifty years after his death, a vault was opened at a medical library of the campus of Harvard University that held an archive of his unpublished papers.

swiss cheese

Quietly—and hopefully not prematurely, last month Switzerland disarmed around three thousand defensive features hidden in and around transportation infrastructure—bridges, tunnels and roadways, that had been primed for decades to self-destruct in case of invasion and literally close all the borders of this landlocked Alpine nation, whose population would flee to shelter in the mountains, which are apparently hollowed out with secret bunkers like Swiss cheese.

/self-/determination

Though this article may not be complete and totally up-to-date, the Wikipedia entry, yet loving tended for its apparent faults, on separatist and succession movements in Europe provides a pretty powerful illustration—with a map of the tensions and disputes—of how we regard outsiders and insiders even on the smallest regional levels.

Of course most splotches of colour are not typically violent and many just want greater recognition, but surveying the land and finding large areas that don’t contain some sort of break-away politics makes one wonder if the people there are all completely agreeable, just naïve or too cowed to complain. Looking at this situation presented on this map, I am not sure what to think about it. While I am sure that motivations are genuine and not frivolous and people have the right to proportional representation—historic borders being far from infallible too, I suppose that this sort of fractocracy and devolution does fiddle a bit with not only the spirit of integration but also of equal-rights and minority-protection—and we’re all happily minorities in one way or another, and rather than making an honest-effort to try to get along with one’s neighbours (oppressors, by some estimates) simply compartmentise them with a new sovereignty.

harmonic trap

Researchers in Switzerland and Belgium are developing a novel new approach in the search for extraterrestrial life in a very sensitive motion detector, which could identify the sympathetic vibrations that the chemical powerhouses of life produce, whether microscopic or closer to our scale. Complementing current methods of investigation with another sense could certainly boost chances of discover and I think strips away an element of bias that has maybe tainted prior efforts.

heaven can wait

A group of seniors, nostalgic and saddened over the decline of their village of New Port on the Isle of Wight, the once great piers now neglected and decaying decided to do what they could to revitalise their community.

In 2007, they started broadcasting from a local radio studio their own hit-parades, the record library being comprised from their own collections, with the call-sign Angel Radio: Music and Memories. The timeless selection from the 1920s to the 1960s was a resounding success—for young and old alike, and hearing these classic songs perked up quite a few shut-ins, who were feeling marginalised and not much use to anyone, and resulted some becoming engaged again and more than one listener even got their own regular shows, disc-jockeying. Angel Radio is now on the internet—still run by the same founding group, whose biggest intimidation to overcome was using the computer, but have since excelled.

touchstones oder sonderweg

The years from 1806 to 1815 marked some of the darkest times for the kingdom and more peculiar holdings of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as armies of Napoleon ravaged the lands, spanning from the surrender of most of the nobility, the summoning of the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the realm to pledge allegiance to the conquering French in Vienna, until Waterloo, and called into question the survival of Germany as a coherent culture. Retreating to the ancestral city of Königsburg (the modern-day Russian exclave of Kaliningrad) on the Baltic, the royal house of Prussia, the only major kingdom that did not capitulate to the French—and for that saw their lands redistributed and further reparations that exacted too much, the duke instituted many measures to build solidarity, patriotic privation and sacrifice and gave his subjects a waft of equality and egalitarianism which sustained the people through victory and the rebuild and the reorganisation that seemed to be deferred for nearly a generation.
Democratic reforms elsewhere in Europe—including France, culminated in 1848 in Frankfurt am Main with a Constitutional Convention, which rejected the decimated gerrymandering of the former Empire, from some three-hundred fifty quasi-independent states to a confederation of a mere thirty-seven, as not being representative of the people. This revolution, though uniting and healing and never quite killed, did rather die on the vine, with Prussia and other regional powers tossing out democratic ideals, feeling that they had served their purpose and were in the environment of security and renewed prosperity were dangerous and subversive.
In the two years, however, that a united and republican Germany prevailed—not to be taken up again until after the defeat and horrors of World War I in the short-lived Weimar Republic—convened under the auspices of the Bauhaus Movement, in an opera house like the Frankfurt summit in a church, a few trappings and symbols that were destined to return were popularised:
the German tri-colour of gold, black and red (supposedly inspired by the uniforms that a group of resistance fighters worn during the Napoleonic Wars) and without the insignia of any particular royal-holding but rather of the people was briefly flown, and the German national anthem was sung. “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” was not a lyric of dominance but rather a plea for an end to Kleinstaaterei and internal division, though now replaced with the excusable and admirable trinity of Einigheit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity, Rule of Law and Freedom) originally extolled in the third verse.  These events were not an abortive revolution but rather sentiments that came before their times.  One other premature development came about this same year, with social scientists and agitators Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first publishing a thin pamphlet in Köln called the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der kommunistischen Partei) which described all of history as class-struggles, but this too garnered little attention at the time.