Category: The City

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Live from Berlin – Lindner

Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’
Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that.
We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

John Ganz on nationalism and reducing humans to insects.

A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.

Above all, I refuse to become an insect or look on others as insects.

SOMETIME IN THE 2000S, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?” a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.” But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,” Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.

Bad Memory

This is a core fear of migrants in Germany and Europe and it’s not at all unjustified.

In this podcast episode a court case is treated (with the public prosecutor) where during a fluke accident a girl riding along on a bike is killed by a bus in Amsterdam.

The thoroughness and consideration with which that is done contrasted immensely with how things run in Berlin and made it clear to me (again) how unserious this city is.