Germany – Federal Republic of Bananas aka Bananenrepublik

 

In the GDR there was a lack of bananas. This was because the German army, the Bundeswehr, wasn’t there to protect sea routes for the packets of bananas for GDR citizens. Different country, no Bundeswehr, no bananas.

In the new trailer for the Bundeswehr, „Marine Trailer Bananen“ (why waste time with catchy titles) the army tells us plebeian citizens that – thanks to guns and soldiers – we can enjoy the sweet taste of these exotic fruits. The video really does enlighten my understanding of economy, wealth and the food industry. The army fires at the pirates, who board merchant ships, kill the sailors and make sea routes dangerous. Piracy must be the reason for why they came up with this bananas idea. You cannot actually see a pirate in the video. I guess Johnny Depp was too expensive and they couldn’t cast people with darker skin because that’s racist.

But the video does seem like a trailer for the army or at least the arms industry (but where is the difference anyway, Thomas De Maizière?). The content: Bombs exploding, guns firing senselessly into the sea. Smiling soldiers. Protecting the prosperity of Germany, wicked activity. A blond female soldier looking at screens (women can also do technical stuff in the Bundeswehr!). Ships and ships and ships. A clip for 16-year-old kids from the countryside with no clue what to do in their life. Join the army! Train on the Gorch Fock!

But for me, it’s conveying a deep, uncomfortable feeling that Germany has too many weapons. All that for a stupid banana? A banana that puts a smile on the blonde girl’s face (why is every woman blonde in that clip by the way?) at the obvious REWE supermarket in the beginning of the clip? Or is it all about publicity? Come on. As Stefan Kuzmany puts it in his Spiegel Online article, it’s weapon porn.

It is such a sad video. Even the shining sun in the video pollutes the atmosphere with awkward pride. We are proud to be soldiers, we are proud to make the way free for bananas for our affluent society. Disgusting.

But most disgusting is that they seem to use the same font for their text in the video as the right wing party NPD on their campaign posters. Yes, I am proud of you, Bundeswehr. Do some research before you produce videos. Or do you want to have this commonality? I guess not.

I want more of these ridiculous videos. I am so proud to be back in the Federal Republic of Bananas. Next time with some drones, please. Let’s forget the famines of the world. Germany wants bananas? Germany gets bananas!

Living German II: The mother does nothing. She sits.

After the last trip to Cologne, we are now heading to Miesbach, the village, where “The Family” lives. The Family has no surname. Reminds me a bit of la famiglia, whichoften refers to the Mafia groups. But as the language book is written in post-war Germany, I guess that the Italian guest workers were just about to find themselves miserable in Italy, so there was no scene for la famiglia in Germany – yet.

In chapter 3 “Was macht die Familie?” (“What is the family doing?”), we get to know the family members a bit better. They are:

-       Anton, the father, teaches, tells anecdotes

-       Marie, the mother, sings, domestic habits

-       Liesel, the daughter, characterless

-       Karl, the son, musical

-       the dog, old and lazy

-       the kitten, young and playful
-    Paula, appears mysteriously in the text

All in all an average family in Bavaria. I think the names are becoming en vogue again.

While the readers are sweating over the accusative case of the German language, they are being indoctrinated about roles of old-fashioned German families. Again, the book is written in the 50s but published, like that, in the 80s. By R.W. Buckley, M.A., a „Lecturer in German, Technical College, Coventry. The suffragettes didn’t come to Coventry I guess.

The hobbies of the kids are boring: Liesel is playing in the garden, Karl is playing the violin (first indication of a middle-class family). The mother sings. Hopefully well.

So the story goes like this:

“Anton doesn’t play when Liesel plays: he is working. He is a teacher (second indication of German Bildungsbürgertum, 60 years later also named as Wutbürger). The village has a school and Anton is the schoolteacher there. He is a village schoolteacher (God, yes I think we all got that).

But Anton plays in the evening: he plays the piano: he is musical. Also his son, Karl, is musical and plays the violin. Marie doesn’t play an instrument. She sings. (I guess very badly, because it is not indicated that she is musical too, but probably she doesn’t have a lot of time to practice because:)

What does the mother do, when Anton works and Liesel plays? (probably shagging the postman) She works too. (does the postman give her money?) Her work is big (and sinful), because the house isn’t small. (damn the Bourgeoisie!)

Marie cleans the house. (Booh) She makes every bed and cleans every bedroom. She cooks. (shame that there are no wives of the guest workers yet, they could do the cleaning and Marie could concentrate on her singing and paint some watercolours of the Bavarian landscape) The house has one kitchen, where the mother cooks. The kitchen is nice and clean. (sedulous mother).

The Family, apparently Paula looks like a boy?

Every child has one bedroom but the house only has one living room. The living room is where one sits and lives. (well, I do live also in other rooms, but maybe the family has transcendental experiences in the other rooms and can only be down-to-earth there). Here Anton plays the piano. Here Marie sings in the evenings (you wannabe rockstar). She likes to sing.

The father drinks wine or beer, the mother likes to drink coffee (Marie has to be sober to cook, the father has to relief himself from the school stress), Paula and Karl like to drink tea (Paula??) and Liesel drinks milk. (Wait, who is Paula?)

The day is nice, but it has come to an end (the arc of suspense!). The sun isn't shining anymore. Because it is evening and then comes the night. Liesel doesn’t play in the evening, she sleeps. What does Marie do? She doesn’t do anything. She sits. (no comment) What does Karl do? He also has work. He is studying. (but lives still at home). He likes to study his book. (I think he never had a girlfriend. Or boyfriend.) He works day and night. (At least that’s what the parents think)”

So, a typical evening with the family: father comes home, eats, drinks, plays the piano, drinks, tells anecdotes, drinks. The mother sings a bit, and sits and watches her husband getting drunk. What a middle class family.

Living German I: American pomposity vs German wittiness

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Because I worked for an educational publisher, I still have a thing for language books. Especially when they are serving stereotypes under the guise of German grammar. Which is perfect because German grammar is one of the nasty ones. The syntax is so complicated that you focus on every single ending of a word instead of the content.

So you don’t realise that you are being brainwashed.

In the fabulous book Living German by R.W. Buckley, M.A., who is (or was) a „Lecturer in German, Technical College, Coventry“, first published in 1957, you can see the patriarchy in German families, written by a Brit and feel the resentments of Brits towards Americans after World War Two in Western post-war Germany. I have the third edition from 1981 on my table. It is remarkable how old-fashioned the dialogues are and it makes me wonder how much they changed during the editions or how little. I guess the latter is the case.

Living German: a guide through cultures

The first dialogue I want to show you is about an American in Cologne who gets guided through the city by a local. Chapter 16, “Karl erzählt eine Anekdote (Comparison of Adjectives)” I translated into English:

(…) An American visits Cologne. This man is a very nice guy (You have to make that extra clear when you describe an American). But he has one bad habit: he shows off too much (well…no comment needed on that). His friend from Cologne shows him the oldest buildings in the beautiful city on the river Rhine. The stranger finds everything smaller than in his country (!). The German shows him the Kölner Dom.

-       “What’s the name of this church?”, asks the American. (beginning of teasing)

-       “That’s the cathedral of Cologne”, answers the German. (poor guy, ignoring the rudeness of the American, might be a slip-up?)

-       “The church of Mary in Boston is much bigger and higher than this dome. Also, reinforced concrete is better than stone. (no, no slip-up, it’s simply rudeness) Do you know our skyscraper, the Woolworth building? (yes, it’s an old book) It’s the biggest building in the world.” (told you)

The German gets tired: he is fed up and searches for a practical answer. (oh these task-orientated Germans) They arrive at the Rhine. There’s the Rhine-bridge, the longest of all bridges. (I think this anecdote is full of phallic metaphors)

-       “What’s the name of that bridge there?” asks the American

-       “What bridge?” asks the German. “I can’t see a bridge.” The foreigner points at the bridge. “Ach so” (I didn’t want to translate this part, because it’s… a very good reflection of Germans being surprised) answers the person from Cologne. “That’s new. I was here yesterday and there wasn’t a bridge before.” (how can you respond to that!?)

The American isn’t so stupid at all. (why this sentence, did it occur to the reader that the American might be stupid?) He laughs and says: “I understand. I have everything better than you, (at least that’s what your insisting on) and you’re making a mockery of me (in original it’s und Sie halten mich zum besten which means to mock s.o, but it is also a word game because it is playing with “best”)

That is how Karl’s anecdote ends, and all the family laughs of that word game. (…)

So, while you were learning about the comparison of adjectives, you also learned that Americans are competitive arseholes and Germans are witty and task-orientated. This doesn’t come from me, it comes from the British person R.W. Buckley. What does that say about the relationship between Brits and Americans? I think Buckley has some resentments towards Americans and really does like Germans. Who else would say that Germans have a great sense of humour?

Blogosphere get-together

Laurie Penny explaining the World. Sort of. Cybersexism Speech at re:publica 2013.

Digital Bohemianism gone OAP

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Well, well. This is how it goes. But I’m not gonna give up. I am not giving up this blog. People who tell me ‘It was fun reading your stuff’ should hold their breath and put their glasses on, ‘cause this ain’t over. They should type in this ambitious, postcolonial and slightly ambiguous theme: marginal man – a woman in between in their mobiles, laptops, iPads and other electronic devices I can’t think of at the moment.

Plus, whenever I hear that phrase it is obviously clear that they weren’t my true readers. Because then they would have known. Known the truth about this next series/season/chapter of this blog.

So making the blog as a topic in the blog and mentioning that is not making this interesting. So I have come up with a nice anecdote from my lovely café with the long-legged hedonistic existentialistic wannabe dandy.

As I was sitting there at a table, reading in my lunch break from work, the ‘philosopher’ wasn’t there. I was quite glad, because I slightly have the feeling that he always recognises me when coming now and then to the café. The bench at the back, which is his hunting ground, was packed with fresh pensioners. Not the young, unable-to-work types, but the ‘I am now a pensioner and the world stands now open for me, I can finally do whatever I want’ types (they made it this far and are still naïve). Sitting there with their newly bought electronic devices, because now they have the time to understand this Internet thing. Oh yeah, they are all male and dressed in muted colours.

While reading Heinrich Böll (I know, a bit too serious and disturbing for a light lunch) the hedonist came in. I looked up and then tried to hide very quickly behind my book. Not very successfully because it’s a paperback. But, fortunately, he passed my table because he was focussed on the back. He stopped in the middle of the café and said loudly: “Here we are now, all assembled. What a nice companionship”.

Oh boy. Who is mocking freelancers working in cafés? This is worse. Imagine a start-up-founder entering a café and saying that. You know what people would say? “Shut up hipster and go get a real job!”

So I say: “Shut up pensioner and go feed the pigeons.”

Existentialistic hedonism

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Hey, yo! Routine. You’ve got me back. Missed me? No? I didn’t miss you either. I’m now fully back physically and mentally. My London time feels now like a dream that occurred once in a while but was never fulfilled.

This is in fact not true at all. It’s my everyday routine that blurs my memory.

Occasionally, I spend my break from work in an office in a café. Oh yes, I have another internship now. I should search for an internship union, I could be their president. Become a person like Bsirske, only with a much better sounding name.

But that is not my aim and would also be a topic for another post. While sitting in the café in Kreuzberg, I always see the same people there. One guy is quite interesting to mention. He has long white hair, kept together with a black hair tie. This ponytail-man, around 60, wears black clothes. In an existentialism way, which means polo-neck jumper and round eyeglass lenses. He is possibly a relict from the student protests of the 70s, but hasn’t got this glow of intellectual radicalism. It’s a glow that most students are lacking. Whether it’s intelligence or radicalism. I leave that open. I’m lacking both. But I’m fine with that. I’m working class. That makes me radical enough and any academic achievement of mine makes me a good example of integration as I’m half not from Germany and officially counted as a ‘Person mit Migrationshintergrund’.

But back to wannabe Camus. He always has, of course, a book with him, sitting in a corner of the café. This overview gives him a perfect chance to spot his victims, whom he can torture with his breathtaking philosophy. These victims are female, middle-aged and good-looking. On a day, when Sartre-double had the book ‘Hedonistic World Views’ (I did NOT make this up) on his table, I saw him with his prey in the corner, discussing emotionally societal norms.

Yes, everyone has their own routine. I’m glad that mine changes every three months. This the length of the average internship. I have been living with that for years now. That is my normal pattern, my memory works in these time units. What does that say about me?

I think I should read more Foucault.

Things that I missed and didn't miss

Missed: German beer
Not missed: bottle deposit