Dialog International

German Fiction Should Get Real

Richard Kämmerlings in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung looks at the scandal at the French Bank Societe Generale involving a rogue trader and complains that contemporary German fiction doesn't depict the realities of modern life: it is too focused on the private sphere:

"As a reader, you start to starve, after eating from only one food group. What's missing is the stuff that forms our lives beyond the private sphere: the economy, technology, medicine, the military, even media. It’s easy to explain why this is happening. But it’s harder to explain why no one reacts. These days, a writer generally has absolutely no idea about these highly sophisticated systems, with their inherent logic and terminology."

Kämmerlings points to the American writer Tom Wolfe and his book of social satire The Bonfires of the Vanities which captured the essence of the Wall Street trading floor as an example for German writers. But maybe German writers should look to revive the Zeitroman, which flourished in the Weimar Republic.  Back then writers such as Herman Kesten and Erich Kästner wrote novels about book publishers, newsrooms, and advertising agencies. Martin Kessel captured the human comedy of big city office politics in Herrn Brechers Fiasco , a novel which could have served as a model for today's popular TV show The Office. Writers such as Ernst von Salomon wrote about life in the military, while Arbeiterlitatur  - fiction about the factory floor written by echt proletarians such as Willi Bredel and Kurt Held - was very popular. 

Of course, in the 1920s and 1930s there were no "writing programs" for fledgling novelists at German universities.  Writers were forced to make a living in the workplace to subsidize their writing, and literature profited from this closeness to and knowledge of everyday experience.

Germany's Five-Party Reality

Yesterday's elections in Hesse and Lower Saxony changed the political landscape in Germany.  Attracting the most attention was Roland Koch's spectacular fall from grace thanks to his right-wing populist attacks on foreign youth in Germany.  Andrea Ypsilanti's breezy advocacy of social justice won the day in Hesse. But perhaps the biggest surprise was the success of the Left party (Die Linke) in both Hesse, where it enters the state assembly for the first time with 5.1% of the vote and Lower Saxony, where it had even stronger results.  So the Left is no longer just a legacy party of the eastern states - it is a legitimate national power. The Social Democrats, under the leadership of Kurt Beck, have vowed to ignore the Left and try to form a "traffic-light coalition" (Ampelkoalition) of SPD, Greens and Liberals, but that may be impossible.  Five-party representation in the state assemblies is now a fact, and the major parties marginalize the Left at their own peril. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung sees this as a very negative development:

"The elections have not only brought about an unpleasant stalemate between the two largest established parties, but also the entrance of the political left, which calls itself the ‘Left Party.’ It got a foothold in Lower Saxony, too, where the CDU and FDP kept their hold on the government. This has now highlighted the disastrous five-party pattern in West Germany, which is tantamount to the destabilization of the parliamentary system. All established parties treat the Left Party as a bunch of street urchins. But how can a government be formed without them? One practical solution would be a Grand Coalition between the CDU and SPD, clearly a stop-gap method, as the black-red partnership on the federal level has demonstrated numerous times of late.

Last week the FT had very good article about the rise of the Left party:

The Left party, forged from the debris of the east German ruling party after reunification and known then as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), gained a western breakthrough after trade unionists and others rebelled against Agenda 2010, a package of social security and labour market reforms instituted four years ago by Gerhard Schröder, chancellor in the SPD-led government of the time.

As voters turned their backs on Mr Schröder, bringing a string of spectacular electoral defeats and a collapse in SPD membership, the idea of a nationwide, unashamedly leftwing party gained traction. Discontented westerners in the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG), which embodied the resistance to Mr Schröder’s attempt at reconstructing the SPD along market-friendly lines, began talks with the east German PDS. Last June they merged into the Left party under the joint stewardship of easterner Lothar Bisky and westerner Oskar Lafontaine, a former SPD chairman and finance minister.

“We are already a nationwide party,” says Mr Bisky. “But we haven’t yet got the seal that our entry in the parliament of a big western state would bring.”

The results from the election yesterday made one thing clear: the German electorate is now clearly left-of-center. When will the government reflect this new reality?

Review: Kempowski's Alles umsonst

Walter Kempowski's last novel Alles umsonst (trans. All for Naught) was something of a departure for the great postwar chonicler.  Most of his fiction - including Letzte Grüsse are highly autobiographical. And his epic work Echolat is a collective diary about   World War II from the German perspective based on real diaries, documents, photographs and letters.  But Alles umsonst is a work of historical fiction where the author has narrowed his focus to the fate of one family in East Prussia.  With the precision of a Dutch master, Kempowski paints the life in this small corner of Germany, before it was swept away for good by the war.

It is the winter of 1945, the fifth winter of the war; the landscape is frozen and inhabitants of the von Globig estate Georgenhof are frozen in time.  For the most part, the war has left the von Globig family unscathed: food is plentiful, the young Peter von Globig can while away his time in his room with his microscope while his mother can retreat into her bedroom and read books. Her husband was transferred from the Ostfront just in time, and is an officer in the Wehrmacht, overseeing the plundering activities in sunny and warm Italy.

Deutsche Bank: America's Foreclosure King

There is no question that the subprime mortgage crisis has been devastating for communities across the US.  Entire neighborhoods have been virtually abandoned as homeowners are forced to walk away from properties they can longer afford. For many Americans, the dream of owning one's home has become a nightmare. Many cities are now pleading to Washington for emergency aid:

“We’re the ones left boarding up these places, cutting their grass, doing demolition on the abandoned structures, picking up the trash, making sure no one breaks in,” said Mayor Frank Jackson of Cleveland.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, has more than 16,800 homes that have been abandoned because of foreclosures.

Cleveland is the first major city to file lawsuits against banks for their predatory lending practices that created this crisis in the first place.  At the top of the list  is Deutsche Bank, which foreclosed on more the 5,000 homes in the area so far. In another part of Ohio, Deutsche Bank has earned the ire of a community activist - Pete Witte - who is trying to preserve a section of Cincinnati from the widening epidemic of foreclosures:

The community activist, a Republican, reserves most of his anger for big banks, particularly Deutsche Bank, which serves as a large trustee for foreclosed homes in Ohio. An analysis by the local newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, last November found that Deutsche Bank National Trust "owned" 188 homes in Hamilton County, more than anyone except for the federal government, and was taking on nine or 10 newly foreclosed properties a week. "Deutsche Bank doesn't show up, the city can't even find them. They almost act as if they don't own the property," Mr Witte says.

Nor are Deutsche Bank's foreclosure activities limited to Ohio.  A community activist organization in Boston - City Life/Vida Urbana - as been staging protests throughout the city to prevent the foreclosure eviction of homeowners.  The group has been putting up flyers around town warning against Deutsche Bank's business practices: Deutsche Bank Facts.

Condi's Greatest Hits

The Center for Public Integrity has created a valuable tool for documenting the lies of the Bush administration with respect to the run-up to the Iraq invasion.  The database War Card contains more than 935 false statements made on 525 separate instances by Bush administration officials following the WTC attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 to the invasion of March 2003.  You can search the database using key words such as "mushroom clouds" or "yellow cake", or search by the name of the individual actually said the false statement.

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

It turns out that the then Secretary of State Colin Powell made the most false statements (244) during the period, closely followed by President Bush (233), including the false statements Bush made in his State of the Union Address in early 2003. Condoleezza Rice comes in a distance 5th, with only 56 false statements. But for my money, Rice was the most effective liar, and her false statements had by far the greatest impact in the media.  It is worthwhile using this database to re-read all of Condoleezza Rice's false statements: they are impressive in their sheer brazenness.  Here is one her more memorable statements, made in an interview with CNN on September 8, 2002:

“We do know that he (Saddam Hussein) is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance — into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to — high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.”

No wonder President Bush has promoted Condoleeza Rice as his most trusted aide: the woman has real talent.

Denigration of Islam ....and Barack Obama

Watchblog Islamophobie links to a TV interview with German hate-blogger Stefan Herre, whose blog Politically Incorrect is a flash point for anti-Muslim sentiment in Germany.  In the interview, Herre says "Islam is not a religion, rather it is an ideology of violence". The reporter also quotes Herre as stating that Senator Barack Obama is a "secret Muslim".  In blog post on Politically Incorrect Herre writes that Barack Obama lied about visiting a mosque and that he is a "racist".  The comments that follow are filled with hate against Muslims and Barack Obama.

Herre's big hero is President George W. Bush. Is he aware that President Bush also - to his great credit - visited a mosque?  Will Herre have to remove the American flag from his blog in one year, when President Obama takes office?

In a great op/ed piece in today's Boston Globe, former Roman Catholic priest James Carroll had this to say about Barack Obama and Islam:

In last week's debate, moderator Brian Williams put to Barack Obama a question about Internet rumors that claim he is a Muslim. The tone of the question suggested that Obama was being accused of something heinous. He replied with a simple affirmation that he is a Christian. He did not then ask, "And what would be wrong if I were a Muslim?" Had he done so, it seems clear, he would have cost himself votes in the present climate.

The denigration of Islam has unfortunately become a fixture in what passes today for political discourse in America.

n recent years, the public realm has been invaded by a certain kind of narrow Christian enthusiasm, made up partly of triumphalistic self-aggrandizement (exclusive salvation), and partly of the impulse to denigrate other religions, especially Islam.

Today America celebrates Martin Luther King Day.  It was completely appropriate for Senator Obama to deliver a speech in Dr. King's church in Atlanta where he stressed unity.  It is a magnificent speech.  You can read it here and watch the video here. Here is a brief excerpt:

"Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."

German Literature Quiz

Dispatches from Zembla asks if you can identify 10 passages from great works of German literature in English translation (actually Germanic literature, since it includes Austrian authors and one Czech).  It is, of course more challenging to recognize the excerpts in translation, but I am pleased to announce that I was able to get 5 out of 10 right off the bat: two from Thomas Mann, one from Goethe (Die Leiden des jungen Werther), the anti-Märchen from Büchner's Woyzeck, and - most proud of this one - the opening paragraph of Rilke's exquisite but obscure novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.  I'm pretty certain I would have recognized the Kafka passage if had been in the original German, since Kafka's style is unmistakeable.  How did you do on the quiz?

I was linked to the quiz from the blog Three Percent at the University of Rochester, a blog devoted to international literature in translation.  Why Three Percent?  The blog editors explain:

Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation. That is why we have chosen the name Three Percent for this site. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%. While that figure obviously represents more books than any one person could read in a year, it’s hardly an impressive number.

An even greater shame is that only a fraction of the titles that do make their way into English are covered by the mainstream media. So despite the quality of these books, most translations go virtually unnoticed and never find their audience.

We have been blessed with some wonderful translators and translations of German literature: Michael Hamburger's translations of Paul Celan, John Wood's extraordinary translations of Thomas Mann, Michael Hoffmann's brilliant work on Wolfgang Koeppen - rescuing the the great novelist from obscurity in America, and Eric Bentley's groundbreaking introduction of Bertolt Brecht to American audiences.  And so many of out greatest poets - Robert Lowell, Robert Haas, Galway Kinnell - just to name a few - have provided rich translations of Rainer Maria Rilke. But the editors of Three Percent are correct: how much contemporary German writing gets translated, and of that, how much is ever reviewed?  One gratifying exception was the New York Times Book Review Section, which last week reviewed two German novels in translation: Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink and Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier (who is Swiss).

I myself am reading a novel in translation currently: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. You can read an interview with Bolaño's translator - Natasha Wimmer - here.

Youth Violence and Demagoguery

I have been following the elections in Hesse with a great deal of interest, since this time there are some clear parallels to the US presidential election.  In the US, illegal immigration (primarily of Mexicans) is a huge topic, which dominates right-wing hate radio as well as prime-time CNN reports. In Hesse, minister president Roland Koch (CDU) is trying to gain reelection by criticizing youth violence by immigrants. Koch's incendiary language has polarized Germany and damaged the CDU.

"We have too many criminal foreigner juveniles in Germany," Koch said. "In the name of multi-cultural tolerance, we've been blinded to accept behavior that can lead to dangerous aggression. We've got to put an end to the grand delusion." (Koch said)"it must be clear that the slaughtering (of animals) in the kitchen...runs counter to our principles." He also said: "People who live in Germany must behave properly and refrain from using their fists. That's how one behaves in a civilized country."

The racist overtones of Koch's rhetoric sound quite similar to the xenophobic speech of Republican congressman Tom Tancredo (who dropped out of the race for US president) and the Islamophobia of Rudy Giuliani.

The Hamburg journalist Jens Jessen, who ealier urged us to "forget America", stepped into the fray earlier this week in his video blog, when he accused his fellow Germans of being Spießer (an untranslatable word roughly equivalent to petty-bourgeois philistines), who are partly responsible for the youth violence since they display intolerance against immigrant children.  It is eye-opening to read the online comments Jessen received in Die Zeit.  Jessen himself responded to outpouring of hate. Bild-Zeitung exploited the situation by fanning the anti-Jessen sentiment and selling more newspapers.  Germany is completely polarized over the issue, just as America is polarized over what to do about illegal immigration.

But there are some hopeful signs on both sides of the Atlantic. It appears that Roland Koch is falling in the polls in Hesse and the SPD candidtate Andrea Ypsilanti has an excellent chance.  In the US, Rudy Guiliani has yet to get more than 5% of the votes in any primary.

Facebook Comes to Germany

The Samwer Brothers in Germany continue to have their fingers on the pulse of Web 2.0:

Three German Internet entrepreneurs, the Samwer brothers, have taken a stake in the social networking site Facebook, Alexander Samwer said. Mr. Samwer, who declined to reveal the size of the stake, said the brothers would now become Facebook’s strategic partners in Europe. “We are going to support the expansion of Facebook in Europe,” he said. Alexander, alongside brothers Oliver and Marc, made their name in 1999 when they sold the German Internet auction site Alando.de to eBay for $50 million in stock.

Heise Online has a few more details on the transaction:

Die Höhe des Investments beträgt nach internen Informationen, auf die sich das Wall Street Journal beruft, bis zu 15 Millionen US-Dollar. Bisher hatten sich Microsoft mit 240 Millionen und der Hutchison-Chef Li Ka-shing mit 60 Millionen US-Dollar an Facebook beteiligt.

Based on the Microsoft investment, the imputed valuation of Facebook is ca. $15 billion, so the Samwer Brothers' investment has more of a symbolic meaning. It does signal that StudiVZ probably does not have much of a future. The Samwers had an equity stake in StudiVZ before it was acquired by Holtzbrinck.  In an interview today with Der Spiegel, Alexander Samwer explains why Facebook will soon surpass StudiVZ in terms of market position:

Samwer: StudiVZ gehört jetzt zum Holtzbrinck-Verlag, nicht mehr zu uns. Das ist ein offener Wettbewerb der besten Ideen - das beste Unternehmen wird gewinnen. Facebook hat eine sehr starke technische Plattform und ein starkes Wachstums-Momentum.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: StudiVZ ist in Deutschland unbestrittener Marktführer. Hat Facebook überhaupt noch eine Chance, wo doch ein Plattformwechsel für den Nutzer hohe soziale Kosten bedeutet?

Samwer: Wir sehen das sehr langfristig. Soziale Netzwerke sind keine Mode, sondern so etwas wie die Fernsehsender der Zukunft. Leute verbringen dort sehr viel Zeit, finden interessante Inhalte, die Freunde und Bekannte generieren. Wir spüren jetzt schon den Sog durch die Facebook-Öffnung für externe Entwickler: Es gibt mehr als 7000 Anwendungen, manche haben Millionen Nutzer, sind für sich eine Attraktion. Dieses System wird sich in allen Kernmärkten durchsetzen. Das ist ein bisschen wie mit Microsoft Windows: Wenn auf einem Betriebssystem die meiste Software läuft, wird es sich durchsetzen. Wenn auf Facebook eine riesige Entwicklergemeinschaft Anwendungen programmiert, so kreativ, dass keiner damit konkurrieren kann – dann ist das fast unschlagbar.

That is key to Facebook's dominance: there are a slew of start-ups in Silicon Valley that are doing nothing but developing Facebook applications; there are even venture capital groups that only fund Facebook application developers. In supporting this mushrooming ecosystem of developers, Facebook is mirroring the success of Google.  Google now dominates search in Germany, with over 26 million Germans using Google each week. It is now estimated that Google had about €1 billion turnover in Germany last year. 

American dominance in Web 2.0 continues.....

Nous sommes tous fascistes...

Godwin's Law holds that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." And not just online discussions. Yesterday Günter Grass, speaking at a camapaign event in Hamburg, accused Roland Koch, the minister-president of Hesse, of using neo-Nazi speech: "Bei einer Wahlkampfveranstaltung für die SPD in Hamburg warf der Literatur-Nobelpreisträger dem Hessischen Ministerpräsidenten vor, sich der Sprache der NPD zu bedienen."

Godwin's Law also applies to books. In a comment to a post below, Hattie mentioned Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism, which describes the Democratic Party in the US as a fascist movement. I haven't read the book, and I refuse to buy it so as not to further enrich Jonah. I may borrow it from the university library if I am in need of comic relief. David Oshinsky neatly trashes the book in his New York Times review. I also note that many readers on Amazon.com have nominated Liberal Fascism as the worst book of all time, although it's hard to imagine that it could be worse than Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internmment, which celebrates the imprisonment of 150,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

If there is an equivalent figure to Jonah Goldberg in Germany, it must be Götz Aly. In a long and depressing debate about the '68er generation' which for some reason Sign and Sight decided to translate into English and publish, the historian Götz Aly looks back on his time as a Maoist student in Berlin in 1968 and determines that the entire generation was fascist:

Aly:... The children of German mass murderers were running after another mass murderer. I myself carried a Mao placard. 1968 was a delayed offshoot of European totalitarianism – especially the German variety.

Far from being a progressive force in Germany, the '68er generation' was - in Aly's eyes -an anti-democratic, authoritarian force that blocked any positive change:

Kohl's generation turned its back on '68, because it realised that there had been something wild and totalitarian in it, that it had missed its big chance and had fallen back into totalitarianism, into the tracks of our fathers of 1933, who had also created a student movement that had operated with similar methods. The "bewegung" or movement – a hateful Nazi term – denounced serious reformers as "shitty liberals." That's why the student movement tended to slow down the liberalisation of the Federal Republic rather than accelerate it.

Godwins Gesetz rules on both sides of the Atlantic.

UPDATE: How could I forget Michael Savage. the king of right-wing hate radio who reaches over 10 million American listeners each week?  The other day he told his audience that the media watchdog Web site Media Matters "a homosexual, fascist website ... "Let me explain who Media Matters is. ... It's run by a bunch of fascist homosexuals. They're the brownshirts of our time."