Propaganda and Cold War: The mystery of the Colorado beetle

On the right, an image during the Cold War, from East Germany, protesting against the so-called dropping of Colorado beetle by the Americans. It is hard to imagine how the country was back then: poor people, hardly finding food in the middle of a destroyed country. And, instead on focusing on reconstruction, they were arming the media against the Americans and the West. A desperate try to build consensus.

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Where is the failure?

Image via Wikipedia

In the last months, the discussion about the failure of the multicultural model in Germany is becoming a daily issue in the media and academic debates. I assisted already to several public debates and read lots of news about. The most used words are: crisis, failure, minorities, integration. The religious arguments are added linguistic and cultural problems, with references to historical traditions and past, European legislation and local traditions. Movies, cultural events and other public debates are dedicated to this issue, from the German or the perspective of minorities.

What it is very unclear by now is the common understanding of terms - as multi-kulti, for example, a very cool concept if used by the hip youngsters living in Berlin - and the common project of society. What are the expectations of minorities and in what respects the state offer must be adapted or changed accordingly to satisfy these needs? Is this a common understanding of the minority policies at the level of the most part of the minorities - ethnic, religious - living in Germany? What are the limits of the new walls?

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Dealing with the German past

Before starting to write this post, I had a long moment of thinking: what is the category to include this post about the newly published book about the German diplomats during the IIIrd Reich? First choice was to include in a post on foreign affairs and politics - because, as usual, the decision to create a commission to investigate the past is foremost a political decision and this was the red line followed during the discussions taking place yesterday, at a full Haus der Kulturen der Welt. But, after deliberations, I decided that it have to deal with memory and recent painful history and included in my history blog. I bought the book yesterday and I will be back with an extensive

review as soon as my German will allow me to do it. This is the reason why I will focus on a couple of remarks about the issue at large. Using myths in building identity narratives is common place in the history. The role of historians is to document and diversify the sources in order to do not allow the misuse of identities for political reasons. The truth is not pleasant, welcomed or desired. But it have to be followed and exposed. Being relatively familiar with the ways of working of a foreign minister, I continue to be astonished about the surprise of discovering the strong connections between the Foreign Ministry and the Third Reich. Diplomats, in every political regime, as the interface of the home politics and their actions are following a clear political mandate. It was never different and will never be different. The access to the documents to explain certain situations is problematic always, for this reason and you need political will for offering the proper conditions for academics to do their work.

It was interesting for me to watch Joschka Fischer's interventions directed against the idea of "elitism" of the diplomats. He is the product of his times, of a stormy German post-war youth, accusing their parents of the frustrations of a complicate present. Understanding this past is a good insight of understanding various directions of the present, including the diplomatic stances at certain moment regarding the situation from the Middle East. Can't wait to start reading.

1989-The Struggle to Create post-Cold War Europe

1989-2009 - 20 years after the start of the changes in Europe. A process still on the run, as long as even integrated as full EU and NATO members, the Central and Eastern European countries are still struggling to create functional market economies and political institutions. And, other countries - former parts of the Yougoslav Federation - are at various stages of the process of meeting the Western criteris.

1989-The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe is based on documents, television broadcasts, and interviews from many different locations including Moscow, Berlin, Bonn, Paris and Washington. The aim is to recontruct the starting process of the new Europe: the reunification of Germany, the NATO expansion and the redefinition of the role played by Russia on the world stage. A wide array of political players - from leaders as Mikhail Gorbatchev, Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush and James Baker, to organisations like NATO and the European Commission, as well to dissidents - all proposed courses of action and models for the future. The author explains how the aftermath of this fateful victory, and Russian resentment of it, continue to shape world politics today. The author is presenting diverse perspectives from the political elite as well as ordinary citizens.

Mary Elise Sarotte is associate professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. Her previous work includes the book, Dealing with the Devil and German Military Reform and European Security. She has served as a White House Fellow and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Herta Mueller, Nobel Prize in Literature

The profile of the Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in a family of ethnic Germans, she was both critical against the Ceausescu regime and other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, including the former East German writers who collaborated with the secret police. While she was not extensively published and discussed as an author in her home country- mostly through her positions against members of the cultural and political establishment - in Germany she is well known and appreciated and her works are translated in at least 20 languages. Probably now she will benefit of extensive laudatio and impressive articles.

Another brick in the Wall

and the Nostalgia.
The good news is the Wall will remain only a memory.
Good Bye, Lenin, for ever!

When the memories of the past

are different and contradictory and apparently as alive as the present.

Cultural patrimony, reconsideration of the past and history

in the case of the Altar of Zeus from Berlin.

Germany's worrying

undemocratic trends.

Education and Islam

in Germany.

The new elites, by themselves- The German case

Being part of the elites - the best and the first from any domain - wasn't never easy. There are always certain family and professional and financial networks you should be part of in order to get a chance to arrive in this exclusivistic club - how to you succeed to keep your membership being another part of the problem, mostly up to yourself and your professional and intellectual capacities.

The idealistic turned into generational nightmares communist "aim" of a society without classes and with equal opportunities for all was in full contradiction with a reality where the party leaders and their heirs - starting from the top of the leadership - see Romania, North Korea or Cuba, as only a couple of examples of inherited power, from a leader to the members of its family. In some cases, the right to apply at university was guaranteed mostly to those with "healthy origins", meaning from a low social background.

In liberal societies, a guarantee for success is still the social origin. And, in a way, it is easy to understand way. You inherited money and the prestige and you are trained to continue the business of your family. The career and future plans are tailored from a generation to another. The democracy guaranteed by Constitutions are counterweighted by the aristocratic system in the economic sphere. In the same time, a public school system, free/state-supported is guaranteeing to the children the minimum education, to be continued further, on the basis of abitilies and knowledge tests.

But, independently of this public system, the members of the elites have the choice, on the basis of their financial resources to follow the private system, from kindergarten to university, allowing - on the basis of curricula, proportionally evaluated in the prices of the scholarhips paid by the parents - the guarantee of a place in the elite system. Your direct environment is 80% made of the people with the same social background - of course, some exceptions are allowed, as the chances of a scholarhip offered for gifted children - with the same set of values and ways to spend the free time - from the favorite brands to the Swiss winter ski resorts and the exclusivistic expensive social networks.

What Julia Friedrichs is presenting, in Gestatten: Elite, auf den Spuren der Mächtigen von morgen is an inside view of this nascent society of youngsters intensively preparing to be the tomorrow's elites. Even the author is limiting at maximum the academic references and current discussions in the political science and sociology regarding elites, the perspective still remains interesting. Once enrolled in this system you close the doors to the outside reality: intensive works, reading, preparation of various tests. Even if you would like to have an eye outside, it is no time and the opportunities are limited. And, with the time, you loose any interest in it. And the danger in itself is the lack of adaptability and limited sociability. Of course, you have many friends sharing the same values. But, when it is about economy or leadership or mainly politics, the key is not to be good for being good, but to be as fit as possible and as flexible as possible to change and find new ideas corresponding to the needs of the reality. So, for a balance, you don't need an internship to a big company, but a couple of months spent in the real world: travelling with the public transportation, living in a poor neighbourhood, doing social work. Otherwise, you will have the theoretical knowledge and the resources, but you will lack the power and wisdom.

Germany, 20 years after

Is there any East or West Germany identity? Or only one, with the same problems? A recent study, about perceptions of democracy and of the way it turned 20 years ago. (in German)

Triumph and tragedy mark 60 years of German sport

DPA May 18

Hamburg - Radio reporter Herbert Zimmermann's emotional match commentary in the closing seconds reverberates down the years. "The Hungarians are given a throw-in. It's taken - comes to Bozsik - it's over! Aus! Aus! Aus! Das Spiel ist aus! (The game is over!) Germany are world champions...!"The few black and white clips of the 3-2 win over Hungary in football's 1954 World Cup final are testimony not only to another age - when radio rather than television was the medium to galvanize the masses - but to a defining moment in German sporting history. The win in Switzerland became known as "the miracle of Berne," returning pride to a people humiliated and devastated by World War II. Players such as captain Fritz Walter entered Germany's footballing hall of fame. Others were to follow, notably Franz Beckenbauer who led the then-West Germany as captain in 1974 and coach in 1990 to two more world titles. The latter, shortly before German unification, prompted "The Kaiser" to predict Germany would "probably be unbeatable for years" - rashly as he was later to admit. East plus West did not make Germany twice as strong, as the nation was also to learn at the Olympics when the medal tallies soon dwindled and sport had to deal with the legacy of systematic doping. Beckenbauer, however, could claim another major triumph when the nation hosted the 2006 World Cup - 32 years after the tournament took place on West German soil in a nation then divided by the Cold War. With Beckenbauer as organizing committee chief, the event proved to be a catalyst for an outpouring of patriotism and flag-waving. Since the war, many Germans had felt uncomfortable with overt displays of nationalism, but here was a clear sign that people could now demonstrate uninhibited feelings of national pride without shame. Or, as Britain's Times newspaper saw it after witnessing hundreds of thousands at a street party off Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, Germany had become "a normal nation" once more. "Not since the Third Reich has there been such a public outpouring of national pride, though this bears no comparison to the stage management of the Nazis," the paper wrote. As with 1954's "miracle", a World Cup had offered the country a chance to take another look at itself - and it liked what it saw. "The Germans are identifying themselves with their country and its national colours. I think that's great. And I think it's great that I'm not the only one with a flag on my car," President Horst Koehler said during the tournament. If the 2006 World Cup was a high point, the 1972 Munich Olympics - also an opportunity to present the friendly and welcoming face of Germany - marked an abject low in the history of the Games. Munich was the second summer Games to be held on German soil since the Nazi-tainted 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes as a result of a Palestinian terrorist attack remains a lasting stain. Members of the Black September group had seized the athletes inside the Olympic village, immediately killing two of them. In a failed rescue attempt at a military airport the remaining Israelis, a German policeman and five of eight terrorists were killed. The Olympic events were briefly suspended but Avery Brundage, the International Olympic Committee president, controversially decided that "the Games must go on. "Although terrorism was a new dimension, sport had always been used and abused for political prestige, none more so than in communist East Germany, which became a formidable power in Olympic sport. East also famously triumphed over West on the football field at the 1974 World Cup - a result which did not stop West Germany going on to beat the Netherlands in the final in Munich. There have been many other great sporting moments and sporting heroes. Steffi Graf and Boris Becker triggered a tennis boom in the latter 1980s and 1990s. Michael Schumacher did much the same for the popularity of Formula One motor-racing, while East Germany's figure skating queen Katarina Witt was popular on both sides of the divide. Although rivals before unification, both German teams in fact took part in the Olympics as a united team under one flag between 1956 and 1964. But according to historian Uta Balbier, the East German leadership had soon realized it could circumvent diplomatic isolation by promoting cultural relations. "Sport was the ideal vehicle for this," said Balbier, author of The Cold War on the Cinder Track - German-German Sport from 1950 - 1972. A Political History, in an interview with the Goethe Institute. The state could prove how good it was by the number of medals it won and take pride in the hoisting of its flag and the playing of the anthem at victory ceremonies, she said. East Germany won 409 medals (West Germany: 204) at summer Olympics from 1968 to 1988, despite a boycott in 1984. But it was tarnished glory. Germany is still coping with the aftermath of its state-sponsored doping programme and the exploitation of many innocent young athletes.

Le bonheur en Allemagne?

Michel Tournier, about France and Germany, how they see each other and a long time cultural relationship

About stereotypes and how it is necessary to look into reality in order to overcome them:

"Chaque peuple revendique la vertu dont il est en vérité le plus dépourvu. Il en va ainsi du fair-play anglais, du sens de l'honneur espagnol, de la propreté hollandaise et de la prétendue joie de vivre méditerranéenne.

S'agissant de l'Allemagne, il faut se garder de prendre pour argent comptant ses prétentions à l'ordre, le travail et la rationalité, l'efficacité, la méthode". (:49)

As for France:

"Ils revendiquent l'esprit, la légéreté, la finesse, l'ironie, bref toutes les qualités qu'on trouve chez Jean Paul, Holderlin, Goethe, Heine, les petits chateaux baroques et la musique de Mozart et de Schubert. (...) En vérité, le Francais esf un fier-à-bras dont l'ambition est toujours d'éclipser le reste de l'humanité. Ses écrivains sont des encyclopédistes qui prétendent faire entrer la totalité du savoir et du monde dans une oeuvre massive, énorme, définitive. Faire en sorte qu'il ne reste plus rien à écrire après eux". (:51)

Rock against/with communists, in DDR

Rock music in the Eastern block fought between survival and playing with the communist regimes. Some of them were banned and fuelled the main stream opposition against the regimes, some of them supported the regimes and fully enjoyed the advantages of being on the "good side" - state contracts, concerts, involvement in the public life.
Klaus-Renft-Combo band was created in 1958, in Leipzig, then in Eastern Germany. For a while, they supported communist party politics - SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) - with songs as "Chilean Metal" or "That's How Neruda died Too". But, songs like "Doubts" and "The Rock Ballad of Little Otto" criticized the Wall and contributed to the disbanding of the group and the emigration of its members to the Federal Republic. (Photo: concert from May 7, 2009, in Alexanderplatz, on the occasion of the events celebrating 20 years from the the fall of the Berlin Wall)
More luckier, the Pudhys, enjoyed the favors of the communist regime. Considered as "The Beatles of DDR" (in comparison with the "Rolling Stones" - the bad boys from Renft), they played until the end of the regime the role of exemplary socialists. Peter Meyer, the leader of the band, used to say: "We aren't the party types. We prefer drinking milk and cola over alcohol". This non-conflictual attitude brought them lots of advantages. In the 70s-80s, they sold over 16 million records, almost one for each citizen of the DDR, were rewarded with state honors, television and film contracts and toured constantly the Eastern block. The later STASI records revealed later (August 1993) that it was a price - as usual - for such advantages. Peter Meyer had provided between 1973-1989, as Stasi informant (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) information about artists and media personalities.

Think Tank: New Ideas For The 21st Century: Immigration and welfare: a bad mix

How benefits can be a divisive force in a pluralist society

Christopher Caldwell
Sunday Times
April 26

On Tuesday French riot police rounded up 200 migrants near an encampment called “the Jungle” outside Calais. To listen to Eric Besson, the French immigration minister, the immigrants themselves were a side issue. The raid’s real goal was to rid France of “traffickers”. Natacha Bouchart, the mayor of Calais, saw it differently. For her, the problem was “nos amis britanniques”. Once migrants set foot in Britain, she said, “their situation is too comfortable and we [in Calais] can no longer tolerate being taken hostage by that”. Britain’s overgenerous asylum and welfare policies were drawing the world’s poor to the ports of France.

Probably more Britons agree with the mayor than with the minister: welfare policies do lure immigrants. Immigration and welfare are a bad mix in other ways, too. Comprehensive welfare systems (transfers, pensions, healthcare) tend not to arise in societies of mass immigration, such as the United States. In the present downturn, many assume that one path to recovery is to give up some economic dynamism and return to the welfare model that existed from Attlee to Thatcher. But Britain is not the place it was until the 1970s. Welfare states require consensus and society may now be too multicultural to provide it.

Immigrants can be good for an economy, but their contributions tend to go to the private sector through cheap labour. As for the public sector, almost everywhere, immigrants and their dependants take more out than they put in. Native Germans between the ages of 20 and 65 pay out more in taxes than they collect in services, but Turks in Germany do that only between the ages of 28 and 57. These figures worsen over time. The number of foreign residents in Germany rose steadily between 1971 and 2000 – from 3m to about 7.5m – but the number of employed foreigners in work held steady at roughly 2m people.

Until recently politicians suggested that immigrants might actually save European welfare states, replenishing the ratio of workers per retiree which has declined rapidly because of low European birth rates. It won’t work. Immigrants, too, age and retire and the system must take care of them and their large families when they do. But the amount of wishful thinking invested in this idea is impressive. “In the long term, migrants themselves will age and contribute to the increasing dependency ratio,” a Home Office report admitted in late 2007, “but only assuming that they remain in the UK during retirement.” What other assumption can be made? Are we to imagine that migrants will work to fund cushy retirements for Europeans, then slink obligingly back to the Third World to pass their own retirements in poverty?

Immigration also weakens welfare states by making native taxpayers less willing to fund them. Five years ago David Goodhart of Prospect magazine warned that social programmes arise out of a sense of obligation to fellow citizens, which gets harder to maintain when fellow citizens have a different culture.

This seems to be true empirically: Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economists, have shown that roughly half of Americans’ antipathy towards European-style socialism can be accounted for by the ethnic diversity of the United States. This view is given support by the recent work of Robert Putnam, the sociologist, who finds that people living under conditions of diversity “hunker down”. They trust their neighbours less – even neighbours of their own kind. They are less philanthropic, less social and less inclined to pay taxes.

It makes sense. Citizens authorise the state to make welfare payments not just to keep the less fortunate in a living, but also to keep them in a way of life. Once immigrants learn their way around they may have a different idea of the purpose of government benefits. Instead of using them to pay for, say, a British working-class lifestyle, they may use them to pay for, say, Islam. Two-thirds of French imams are on welfare. So are many British ones: Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, head of Britain’s “Muslim parliament”, said in 2005: “Our mosques are largely tribal and controlled by old men on the dole with no understanding of the changing world around them.”

If immigrant welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, then the broader society will turn against welfare or turn against immigrants. Immigrants are innovators. They have fresh ways of doing things. That is what makes them valuable in a competitive market society. But competitive market societies are in bad odour just now and, anyway, welfare programmes are supposed to be a refuge from them. It should not surprise us that scepticism about immigration should rise at a time when people are running in panic towards any such refuge they can find.

Christopher Caldwell is a columnist for the Financial Times. His book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West will be published on May 7 by Allen Lane

Eine Frau in Berlin

The documentary resources and the huge bibliography available worldwide regarding WWII and the period shortly after could offer the illusion that we know almost everything. Almost daily, if not weekly, we are reading information related to these events, still shoking for the Western European conscience. But, it could be almost similar to the sources available for the communism. In the period after the Cold War, as well as before, it is an infinite depository of knowledge regarding the smallest details related to this period. As for the communist regimes themselves, it's still not a satisfactory answer at the question how it was possible, despite the analysis and the experts, to predict the end of these regimes.

The diary of a young German woman experiencing three months - 20 April - 22 June 1945 - in the Berlin under the Russian occupation is a moving testimony and a living history of the new start of Germany. They are individual history of starvation, rapes by the Red Army soldiers, corpses lying in the remnants of buildings or on the street and destroyed houses. About the hurry to change the masters and the need to survive because, as in Curzio Malaparte's books, what matter for the human being is its "skin". The rest, is discussion at a warm cup of coffee. They are not too many stories as such and the author, by now, remains anonymous; we know she was an educated woman, who took her inner distance towards the Nazi regime, traveling often abroad and managing foreign languages - among which the knowledge of Russian will be a benefit. The Red Army entered many Eastern and Central European countries. They are stories already entered in the common memory about the high number of watches they used to ornate their hands, plus some additional alarm clocks hanging up on their chest. In the book, the author is simply explaining that in their country they are lacking the basic needs to have one for themselves. About the food they were using in huge quantities and, of course, the vodka instead of water.

But rape is another story. The instability of the feelings in these tormented times is impressive. First, they were the hordes of soldiers on the streets of what was once Berlin, treating any individual of feminine gender as a sexual object, with the exception of very very old and pregnant women. After not seeing each other long times, the first words exchanged were: "How many times?". Shortly, the women themselves decided that, in order to be safe, they needed to find a high ranking protector. The word is quite appropriate, because once the decision was taken, the woman is going on the street and the first who's more than a soldier will be her protector, offering not only safety of the assaults of other soldiers, but also food. The general feeling is that these times will never end and they "will continue to search for in the ruins as rats the rest" their lives. It's hard to imagine this now if we think about the powerful Berlin we're used to know, but it was the daily life only 64 years ago.

What you should read this book: As a testimony in itself, witnessing three months in the aftermath of the end of a regime who made millions of victims. It is history made up of various human histories, beyond the political ones. And, I think, I just discovered a definitory character of a historian: he/she needs to be coolblooded. Almost at every stage of the human histories, you have tons of accounts about death, war, conflicts, victims - innocent or not. Trying to put yourself in their skin will change you into a fanatic or a nut. Distance and reason, after understanding you constant starting point, are the constant ingredients for writing a good piece of academic work, whatever painful and bloody your theme is.

Being minority, in Germany

The minorities in Germany and their identity strategies.