Loomnie

I have sadly never visited the Oktoberfest, and it seems that the longer I stay in Germany the more difficult it is to find any of my Berliner friends who thinks it is worth visiting. Something about it being too touristy and the beer being ridiculously overpriced. Plus there is some distance between Munich and Berlin.

Anyway, in case you wonder what it is like to be a waiter at the Oktoberfest:

To be a waiter is probably the most arduous job at the Oktoberfest. A typical day starts at 8 in the morning and ends at midnight – a sixteen-hour shift. One person has to be able to stem around 10 steins (traditional beer mugs) on average at once, which is equivalent to over 20 kilos of beer. Nevertheless, Harry Maas, a waiter in one of the 35 tents, finds a joy in serving people. “I have always loved working at the Oktoberfest. I work as a waiter full-time so I love to serve people and especially the atmosphere here is exceptional. You meet all different kinds of people which is the most enjoyable part about it.” However, Mr. Maas is quick to address the myth evolving around his wage. Rumors that waiters at the festival earn more than 10,000 Euros at the Oktoberfest are patently false and way too overdrawn. “One would never be able to earn that much”, he says. The money earned would at best suffice for two months, but there is no chance that people are able to live off of their earnings from the Oktoberfest alone. As Mr. Maas points out, it is not the money that he works for but the special experience. For him, there is nothing better than his current job and the anticipation of working another five years at the Oktoberfest.

That is one of the less serious pieces on Fair Observer, a new commentary and analysis site that ‘seeks to bring clarity to the complex and dynamic world we live in,’ and aims ‘to provide a platform for voices from different disciplines, various philosophies and many parts of the world’. They’re actually still in beta mode, but they’re doing a nice job already. You should check them out.

First some ground explanations. Here in Germany, the favourite fashion label of neo-Nazi’s is Thor Steinar. The brand was banned in Germany in 2004 because its logo lookred like that of the Nazi period SS. The label subsequently rebranded itself and now has a legally acceptable logo. In any case, the neo-Nazis love it and it is well-known that if you are wearing that you are almost certainly a neo-Nazi.

State parliamentary elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in German) are approaching, and the parties have been busy campaigning, including NPD, the far-right, nationalist party, otherwise known as the German neo-Nazi party. Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, one of the states in the former East Germany, NPD already has some seats in the state parliament. I was in the state a few weeks ago and as this report states, the posters of NPD are normally so high on street lights that it is almost impossible to reach and deface, for those who might want to do so.

Some left-leaning youth have decided to fight the NPD by creating the figure Storch Heinar, which is itself a play on the name Thor Steinar – Storch is the German word for Stork, and Heiner, well, makes the whole name rhyme with Thor Steinar. The stork is dressed in the Nazi colours, with a Hitler mustache.

For more on Storch Heiner check the organisation’s website and this article, for more on the stork’s campaign, see this Der Spiegel article. For more on the new face of neo-Nazi fashion, see this, also from Der Spiegel.

I recently read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, a very instructive book on the recent financial that looks at the crisis from the point of view those who made money from it. So when I learnt from the Planet Money blog that he has written a piece for Vanity Fair on the country I now call home, I decided to give it a look. Apart from a fair amount of information on the apparent obsession of Germans with the human rear-end and what comes out of it, bits of the article are about German bankers, Germans and the financial crisis, and Germany and the future of the euro.

On Germans bankers and the crisis:

They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise.

On Germany and the future of the euro:

Either Germans must agree to a new system in which they would be fiscally integrated with other European countries as Indiana is integrated with Mississippi: the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyle of ordinary Greeks. Or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce “structural reform,” a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans. The first solution is pleasant for Greeks but painful for Germans. The second solution is pleasant for Germans but painful, even suicidal, for Greeks.

There is not much of the substance here that those who know a little about the financial crisis and are familiar with Germany wouldn’t know, but still, it is worth the read, if only to learn about German obsessions with the said derrière and what comes out of it. The piece is here.

By the way, I haven’t been able to find a German who will confirm the obsessions.

John R. Bowen in Boston Review:

Political criticisms of multiculturalism confuse three objects. One is the changing cultural and religious landscape of Europe. Postwar France and Britain encouraged immigration of willing workers from former colonies; Germany drew on its longstanding ties with Turkey for the same purpose; somewhat later, new African and Asian immigrants, many of them Muslims, traveled throughout Western Europe to seek jobs or political refuge. As a result, one sees mosques where there once were only churches and hears Arabic and Turkish where once there were only dialects of German, Dutch, or Italian. The first object then is the social fact of cultural and religious diversity, of multicultural and multi-religious everyday life: the emergence in Western Europe of the kind of social diversity that has long been a matter of pride in the United States.

The second object—suggested by Cameron’s phrase “state multiculturalism”—concerns the policies each of these countries have used to handle new residents. By the 1970s, Western European governments realized that the new workers and their families were there to stay, so the host countries tried out a number of strategies to integrate the immigrants into the host society. Policymakers all realized that they would need to find what later came to be called “reasonable accommodations” with the needs of the new communities: for mosques and schools, job training, instruction in the host-country language. These were pragmatic efforts; they did not aim at assimilation, nor did they aim to preserve spatial or cultural separation. Some of these policies eventually were termed “multicultural” because they involved recognizing ethnic community structures or allowing the use of Arabic or Turkish in schools. But these measures were all designed to encourage integration: to bring new groups in while acknowledging the obvious facts of linguistic, social, cultural, and religious difference.

The third object that multiculturalism’s critics confuse is a set of normative theories of multiculturalism, each of which attempts to mark out a way to take account of cultural and religious diversity from a particular philosophical point of view. Although ideas of multiculturalism do shape public debates in Britain (as they do in North America), they do so much less in continental Europe, and even in Britain it would be difficult to find direct policy effects of these normative theories.

Here. Thanks to Saratu for the link.

Pretty embarrassing:

It is a German tradition that the president becomes an honorary godparent to the seventh child born to any family. But the custom has proved awkward for President Christian Wulff after he became godfather to a baby born into a neo-Nazi family. A local mayor even received death threats after criticizing the move.

HT to Tyler Cowen

The Economist has a nice article on immigration in Germany. If you can recall, Angela Merkel recently said that multiculturalism has utterly failed in Germany. This was following the furore that was raised by the publication of a book that claimed that immigrants and muslims were causing the downfall of Germany. The book was written by Thilo Sarazzin, a member of the board of the German Bundesbank. He was subsequently forced off the board of the Bundesbank. (See the Economist article for a recap of the main issues.)

What some of the people I have spoken with are scared of is that this might yet become a major political issue, leading, for instance to the creation of an acceptable right wing party. (There are the crazies, like NPD, the neo-Nazi party, but nobody really takes them seriously.) The fear is that if Ms Merkel is unable to contain the discussions surrounding immigration within her party, it is possible that some members might decide to go with the general sentiment of anti-immigration and form a political party that retains the basic economic policies of the right of centre CDU, but adds to it anti-immigration rhetorics and policies. A party like that, I am afraid, will be appealing to certain segments of the German middle-class.

Jonathan Rosenthal, The Economist’s European finance correspondent writes about my (for now) adopted city, Berlin:

Iconoclasm is not just the preserve of the rebellious poor. In Berlin’s opera houses—there are still three, despite the broken budget—audiences are known to boo and hiss. When I went to a performance directed by Nigel Kennedy earlier this year at the Berliner Philharmonie, which was beautiful if unconventional, I found people brazenly getting up from their seats to leave before the end. That may have been because the bad boy of Vivaldi had upset their sense ofOrdnung by discarding the programme. Yet a few months later the audience almost flattened Daniel Barenboim in their rush to leave the concert hall before him.

For all this, Berlin is a very human city and easy to love. A stranger once ran two blocks to hand me a tiny shoe that my infant son had thrown from his stroller. When my wife got into a taxi with a child who was upset, the driver started singing to calm him down. And the city’s many Kindercafés provide a remarkably grown-up environment to drink good coffee while the children head for the communal pile of toys in a sandpit. Berlin’s suburbs are surprisingly compact and easy to get around. London, it is often said, is a city of villages, but that has more to do with its origins than a real sense of kinship. Berlin really is a city of neighbourhoods. Most have been built with a village-like communalism in mind. Park benches are set close to one another, so that strangers can talk. And sharing tables in restaurants is common, as long as you remember to make the ritual enquiry, “Is this free?”

You come across thoughtfulness in unexpected places. I saw a pierced, tattooed and black-clad young man waiting for the lights to change before crossing an empty road. “It sets a bad example for children,” he told me when I wondered why he, of all people, should be so obedient. In this tangle of contradictions, the thing that perplexes me most is the seeming inability of Berliners to form a queue. In this regard there are two sorts of Berliners. Some of my German friends take umbrage at the notion that they are pushy. Yet when quizzed they confess that if confronted with, say, a single queue in front of two ATM machines, they would unthinkingly walk straight to the front to form a second line. The second sort of Berliner tells me that they have noticed when travelling abroad how foreigners line up and often have gates and ropes to guide them. Yet they find this infantilising and an assault on liberty. “Free people”, one tells me, “don’t queue.” I finally felt I had gone native late one night at the main railway station when I pushed past a throng of people waiting for taxis and hailed the first one I saw. As I got in I overheard the wistful complaint of a German couple who had been waiting. “Why can’t we be more like the English?” one of them said. I shuddered.

The Berlin International Film Festival was a product of the Cold War. The US military administration wanted to bring a touch of glamour to a West Berlin that had survived the Soviet blockade. Since then, the festival has gained a reputation for championing political, provocative movies, and has been no stranger to scandal.

The Berlinale is currently on here in Berlin. For a bit of the history of the festival, check this Der Spiegel article.