So are we mentioning the war or what?

While all my fanclub in Trinidad and Tobago impatiently waits for the second part to my story of Bernard the Booze Barrel, I give you a sequel to my last 'article' type post on German postwar politics.

The picture posted above is a different spin on what I was saying in my last post regarding the utter stupidity of English fans visiting Germany in the run-up to the World Cup this summer.

This article:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006060530,00.html

is a brilliant illustration of the shinanigans which will arise from England fans visiting Germany with the intention of riling them up. The German authorities have taken a very hard line on any references to 'the war', including goose-stepping a la John Cleese. The English will inevitably toe the line in every possible way just to see how far they can take things.

What I am wondering is whether they might actually be right to do so, in a completely ignorant, and rather warped way. The Germans have become very complacent about being a politically aware (correct?) group of people, and are very quick to assume that because they support or condemn something that therefore means the evils of it don't affect them.

Take the advertisement pictured above. A very Aryan young man is pictured naked from the waist up, donning an obnoxious (and rather stupid, let's be frank) hat which shows his support for the German team. The woman on his right is also naked from the waist up, and is clearly miffed by her Teutonic neighbour. The suggestion is evidently that Germany has just scored one over Brazil (the sexual innnuendo starts already with bog standard football terminology) and that the woman has had to grudgingly acknowledge the superiority of the German team as well as her neighbour's taunts.

The caption, however, puts a different spin on it altogether. It literally translates as

"Germany will be the master of the world! Want to bet?"

Perhaps I'm a little oversensitive to the political context when reading this, but doesn't it ring a little uncomfortably in German ears? I asked my girlfriend, who is German, what she makes of the caption. To her it is a stupid ad, and she wouldn't think twice about it. Nobody else I have asked seems as disturbed as myself at the undertones here. I repeat, it says Germany will be the master of the world.

While the German authorities spend their time thinking up the appropriate penalties for a pissed Cockney who decides to goose-step his way out of the stadium (and that will be interesting in court: in what way does goose-stepping consitute incitement to racial hatred?), they are doing fairly little on their own doorstep. While the ad above is an amusing quip at the German ability to turn a blind eye to stupid, insensitive parts of its media, the Nazi march in Stuttgart last week was less amusing. The joint parties which assembled in this city which still has parts under reconstruction from the 1940s, scared the bejesus out of locals by assembling thousands under Nazi banners here.

Can Germans really afford to whitewash their political conscience with good intentions and cast the first stone at those who dare to laugh?

Bernard the Booze Barrel

This is a statue I noticed perched on the wall of the Stuttgarter Hoffbrau brewery in Heslach, just round the corner from my house. Somebody made it out of bits of trash from the brewery. Old barrels, pipes, and of course a beer mug. I don't know if he has a name, but I will call him Bernard.

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Once upon a time in Stuttgart there was a man who was very fond of beer. So fond he was of the brew that his wife would complain to him. 'Bernard!' she screeched, 'Have you spent our reconstruction money in the Kneipe again??'. Bernard would left the house sullenly to drown his sorrows at Dani's Kneipe, the bar round the corner where he always knew he could escape his wife's naggings. 'And you'd better come back before sundown!' came a voice like the scraping of tram wheels on rusty tracks 'or you're sleeping outside tonight!'

The evening in Dani's pub was the same as always. Fred, Uwe, Nic and the others would all come tumbling in, with some story about the people at work they had given a good talking to, decrying their triumph of common sense over 'the law'.

"And then I told him" bellowed Nic, as he squared up to an imaginary boss at the bar, " 'Look', I says, 'if I need to sit down for a fag next to the machine during my shift, I'm sitting down for a f**king fag, alright? You poncey manager types go to your gyms or do ballet or whatever when you've finished work. If you don't want me smoking here, then you can find another driver', I says to 'im"

Bernard heard out the story and the dozens like it, along with the bawdy jokes, the jokes about the Arabs and the cartoons, and the endless games of darts.

When he appeared at the doorstep around midnight, he gave a soft knock so as not to wake the kids. No answer. he waited a few minutes, and then started fumbling for his keys. He didn't like looking through his pockets for them because it reminded him of all the holes in his clothes that needed repairing. And besides, why couldn't Melinda answer the door? It's not as though she was sleeping anyway.

After a few minutes and a few louder knocks, without any answer, it dawned on him. What if, for the first time, she actually meant it? What if she had really decided she wasn't letting him in? What did it mean? It's not as though she could lock herself in there forever, and she knew what was awaiting her in the morning if she made him sleep outside the door.

Bernard raised his right fist as high as he could, then lowered it, and then held it lower, next to his right thigh, leaning back on his leg, like somebody preparing to throw a stone to the other side of a river. He was preparing to slam the door with a bang that would wake half the neighbours and put the fear of God into Melinda. But he paused.

What if he were to spend the night outdoors? He had never really considered it. It hadn't ever dawned on him until now, but why go back into that depressing, lukewarm flat with its dangling brown tassles on curtains, and its smell of babies and cabbage? Didn't he used to love spending the night out?

But where would he go? He didn't want to go far, so as he could keep an eye on Melinda. He stood in front of the dull green apartment door, with the linoleum squeaking beneath his trainers as he shifted his weight, deep in thought.

And that was when Bernard, a 46 year old cashier with a bald patch and no pension, had the unlikely thought of spending the night in the brewery across the road.

Ok, let's mention the war then

On my way out to dinner last night I met a bunch of football fans from Bayer Leverkusen who were on their way to a match with Middlesbrough here in Stuttgart. The Middlesbrough crowd were piled all over the steps of the main 'Schlossplatz' (Stuttgart's castle), and true to their reputation, were chanting slogans and littering the place with beer bottles. They had also hung two judicious St George's Cross flags about four by six metres, on the bandstand. Presumably some subtle message as to the supremacy of their nationality.

Flags are pretty stupid things in the first place. The only reason nation states need flags is because they have no real common culture. Somebody from Middlesbrough has no more in common with a lawyer from Shropshire than they have with a Schwabian from Stuttgart. Down to their very language, the Shropshire lawyer would struggle harder to understand the Middlesbrough fan than he would to understand the Stuttgart supporter. So the flag is devoid of any cultural significance. Especially since most Englishmen would struggle to explain what it actually symbolises.

So why fly this thing over the main square here? Is it to remind the Germans of the fact that the National Socialist government of the 1940s was reduced to a pulp with the help of Churchill? Should I credit a fan with a 24 pack of beer puking on the steps of Stuttgart's castle with even that much historical knowledge? Perhaps I could hazard to say that the same egocentric feeling of dominance which led to the Third Reich is exactly what prompted the football fanatic to hang up the flag. But that would be assuming the worst of people, and that's just wrong.

The last I heard, the British fans who have tickets for the world cup here in Germany will be wearing t-shirts of John Cleese doing the Hitler walk, bearing the phrase "Don't mention the war". This is a response to the FIFA's hard line on English fans coming over for matches and provoking Germans with Nazi salutes and the like. The mere idea that we could put away the war for even the space of a few football matches, is just plain naive.

Rather than picturing these stupid flags, I have posted up a picture of a stature of Venus which was dedicated to the Prussian Empress in the 1880s, which stands tucked away in a gorgeous hill in Stuttgart. She'll be looking over the rest of this town with her expression of amused resignation when all this malarchy flares up in Stuttgart again for the World Cup. And to be sure, none of the travelling football fans will get to see this insignificant sculptural wonder. They'll be too busy reminding the Germans that their culture was obliterated in World War II.

War on words

In Politics and the English Language Orwell drills home the idea that sloppy language in the media leads to sloppy thinking about the world around us. The more emptily we use words like "Democratic" and "free thinking", to simply signify 'good' or to give a sign of our approval, the less we think. So long as a bombing was a democratic one, performed in the name of freedom, it's no longer a mindless massacre. It becomes 'collateral damage', a nice sugar coating for our poison pill.

The most recent version of this language slip as seen in the media is the expression 'War on...' to signal something we don't like. We don't try to hunt down terrorists and restrict access at our borders. We wage a 'War on Terror'. We don't hunt down petty drug thieves and lock them into prisons. We wage a 'War on drugs'. The meaning of the word 'War' - a violent conflict between two groups of people - is completely lost. The signifier has spun out of control. It now means 'a thing we disapprove of'. This article from the Guardian Weekly uses the expression in quotations in the same vein:

Oleksandr Antipov, 52, is recovering in hospital after having his fingers amputated. "We've lost this war with the cold," he said. His wife was also injured when they tried to fix a boiler in their home at the height of the cold spell.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,,1707571,00.html

How can you have a 'war with the cold'?????? Nobody seems in the least bit surprised with these curious metaphors which have slipped into everyday vocabulary when talking politics. I only see two purposes

1. We don't actually know what the situation is, and we use 'war' as a sort of loose bag which can hold pretty much any political activity. If I am campaigning to get a new traffic light, I am waging a 'war on lack of traffic lights'

2. We have watered down the word 'war' so much that we feel comfortable using it about anything and everything. We are so far removed from the reality of war that we think any conflict or action of conviction to be a war

It would be interesting to put the question to Orwell himself, if he were still alive, not only because of the weakness of the metaphor. Orwell joined the resistance to Franco's fascist regime in Spain, and was very committed to representing the reality of war.

I'd love to know what MGM or another such Hollywood studio would say if I were to propose the title of my new film 'the War on language clarity'. Might not fill the box office.

Snow

Back to this bedraggled carcass of a blog after a long time away from it. I prefer not to say anything thank to try to write when I've got nothing to say.

What do I have to say now? Not much. Except that it's snowing. The school is covered in snow, and it's coming down in big thick flakes outside my office as I write. The Mercedes Benz garage across the road has big thick sheets of snow falling off its slanted roof that only just miss the repair guy every time he circles round the car to have a look from another angle. It's all muffled now. And so are the babies who stare up at you in prams, mummified by their mums, and silenced by the snow.

I think the snow is part of why I like being in Stuttgart. This city has a reputation for being a mitteleuropa sh*thole. A bombsite barely recovered from World War II with a decent football stadium and a Christmas market. Actually it's full of gorgeous parks, incongruous statues and architecture you wouldn't expect to find here. I'll get a photo album book together for my millions of readers, if requested. When you can get over being sneered at by the shopkeepers for daring to step into their shop while being foreign.

I'm going to start posting pictures of this city with each post, if the blog can hold them. They'll hopefully represent my state of mind at the time of writing. If photographs can ever do that.

The snow makes my thinking more powdery too. It helps create silence, it muffles footsteps and deadens the grumbling of cars and trams. In the morning, everybody pads through the layer of snow to get to public transport, and ends up thinking their own thoughts. Conversations are hard in the bitter chill of the morning air.

Does the snow force us all to introspect, however hard the metropolitan primate tries not to?