Giles MacDonogh: After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation
Christoph von Marschall: Barack Obama - Der schwarze Kennedy
Murat Kurnaz: Five Years of My Life. An Innocent Man in Guantanamo
Hilde Domin: Wozu Lyrik heute. Dichtung und Leser in der gesteuerten Gesellschaft.
Matthias Beier: A Violent God-Image: An Introduction to the Work of Eugen Drewermann
Helmut Lethen: Der Sound der Väter. Gottfried Benn und seine Zeit (***)
Oh, no! According to the Blog-Raters at Mingle2, Dialog International is rated inappropriate for children under 17 years of age.
Why? The Blog contains too many mentions of Torture, Death, and Bomb.
Does that mean that any blog that discusses the policies of the Bush Administration is off-limits to children under 17?
Could this be sign that political blogs in Germany are finally coming into their own? Onzeblog announces the first political blog carnival for German blogs. Here in the US we have a number of high-profile political blogs on both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum, and they play a increasingly important role in the political discourse, organizing and fundraising. Some bloggers, like Glen Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias have become media stars in their own rights, and now blog professionally under the auspices of big media outlets. None of that has happened so far in the German blogosphere. Onzeblog explains:
Einen politischen Blog-Karneval also auch deshalb, damit der Blick nicht nur ins große Amerika gerichtet werden muss, wenn über politische Blogs berichtet wird. Es gibt in Deutschland eine große politische Blogszene. Der Karneval auch um darauf aufmerksam zu machen.
Aber es geht nicht nur um den Hype. Es geht um Diskurs. Es geht um politischen Diskurs in Deutschland und Blogs, die einen Teil dazu beizutragen haben. Dafür dieser Karneval. Für eine angeregte Diskussionskultur in Deutschland, an der Blogs schon durch ihre kommunikative Struktur viel beizutragen haben. (HT TooMuchCookies)
Continuing on this topic, blogger Daniel Kömpel asks whether political blogs contribute anything to public discourse, or do they rather harden the fronts between the ideological perspectives, contributing to greater polarization. Citing the example of Politically Incorrect, which routinely prints factually untrue "news stories", encourages illegal actions (primarily against Muslims) and infringes on copyright for content, Kömpel sees political blogs as primarily effective - but also potentially dangerous - propaganda vehicles:
Solange für Weblogs keine journalistische Sorgfaltspflicht wie für klassische Printprodukte besteht und man sich ungestraft über rechtliche Konventionen, Copyrights und sogar das Grundgesetz hinweg setzen kann, dabei aber absichtlich den Eindruck von professionell recherchiertem Journalismus erweckt, besteht meines Erachtens ein großes propagandistisches Potenzial, das nicht unterschätzt werden sollte. Denn wenn nur genügend Blogger ihre ideologisch verblendeten Ansichten ins Netz stellen und sich in der Argumentation aufeinander beziehen, können “Tatsachen” willkürlich geschaffen werden, denen dann auch professionelle Journalisten (die Blogs mehr und mehr als Informationsquelle nutzen) schon einmal auf den Leim gehen können.
My blogger colleague Big Berta (in the non-virtual world she is a medical doctor in the German Army) has launched a new group blog Watchblog Islamophobie. The blog is the brainchild of Arne Hoffmann, and is meant to combat the pernicious influence of popular - ostensibly "pro-American" - blogs such as Politically Incorrect. Here is the blog's mission statement:
Mit unserem “Watchblog Islamophobie” führen wir ein Projekt als Multi-Autoren-Blog weiter, das der bekannte Autor Arne Hoffmann vor einigen Monaten begonnen hat.
Jetzt haben sich mehrere Gleichgesinnte zusammengeschlossen, um diesen Weg mit ihm gemeinsam zu gehen. Zunehmende Fremdenfeindlichkeit gegen Muslime, häufig geprägt von Klischees, Vorurteilen und modernen Mythen, macht es für uns notwendig, dagegen gebündelt die Stimme zu erheben.
(With our "Watchblog Islamophobie" we have created a multi-author-blog to continue the project started by the well-known author Arne Hoffman several months ago. Several like-minded individuals have come together to join him in his effort. Growing xenophobia and hostility towards Muslims - usually informed by clischees, prejudices and modern myths - has made it necessary for us to speak out with a common purpose.)
The initial posts are quite good, including a review of Murat Kurnaz's book FIve Years of My Life - recounting his time as a captive in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Hopefully this new blog will generate as much traffic as PI, so that it too will be indexed by Google News. Non-German readers may want to check out the excellent blog Islamophobia Watch.
(Via BIg Bertha) Heribert Seifert has a nice piece - Die Kampf-Blogger - in NZZ-Online on the phenomenon of the Islamophobic blogs in Germany. Seifert rounds up the usual suspects:
Die ganze Welt erscheint hier, im weltweiten Netz, als Schauplatz einer säkularen Auseinandersetzung. Überall finden «Akte Islam», «Politically Incorrect», «Fakten & Fiktionen», «Jihad Watch», «Daniel Pipes», «Gudrun Eussner», «Roncevalles», «Dhimideutsch» und ihre Kampfgenossen Belege für ihren Verdacht, dass «der» Islam und «die» Muslime offen und verdeckt an der Machtübernahme arbeiten.
I have written about Politically Incorrect, which tries to present itself as pro-American (it even has the American flag in its banner), as it propagates a message of hate and intolerance. But Seifert makes a good point: while in the US the hate sites are published by well known and well-paid individuals such as Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer (he should have also mentioned the millionaire racist commentator Michelle Malkin), in Germany the bloggers are for the most part relatively unknown ("publizistisch Unbekannte"), even though the blogs generate a huge amount of traffic.
Seifert points out the technique used by these blogs of smearing an entire people and religion based on the actions of some extremists:
In rabiater Übernahme eines Denunziationsmusters der «antifaschistischen» Aktivisten gilt hier auch, dass nicht der verrückte Rand eines Milieus das Problem ist, sondern das gesamte Milieu. Nicht die Islamisten und die sich mit Versatzstücken des Islam kostümierenden Terroristen sind die eigentliche Gefahr, sondern die ganze Umma. Jeder Muslim wird so auf eine Identität reduziert, die ihn zur Bedrohung werden lässt. Entsprechend schrill ist der Ton. Da werden bei «Politically Incorrect» (PI) die Muslime zu «Anhängern eines pädophilen Massenmörders» erklärt oder als «Handabhacker und Steiniger» bezeichnet. Die Leserkommentare nehmen den Stil dieses Blogs gern auf. Eine Zeitlang wurden sogar offene Mordwünsche publiziert: Dies scheint jetzt eingestellt zu sein. Unter den politischen Blogs rangiert «PI» ganz oben in der Popularität.
These blogs don't do any original reporting or analysis; rather they search through the international press for news that they can highlight, frequently taking words or actions out of context. Politically Incorrect reports on an "incident" in Maine, very close to where I live: a student was charged with a "hate crime" for putting a ham sandwich on the table next to a Somalia classmate. Only problem is, the incident never happened; it was fabricated by a humor Web site. That didn't stop PI and its commenters from using it to propagate hate.
I never tried to hide my real identity on my blog. One one hand, I always felt that using a pseudonym was for the most part an exercise in futility. On the other, the theme of German-American relations is pretty obscure to most Americans, so it was unlikely that crazies that hang out at blogs like LittleGreenFootballs or MichelleMalkin.com would find their way to Dialog International and harass me personally.
It seems to be different in the German blogosphere, where many of my blogger colleagues such as Dr.Dean, erphschwester, 2020, and Quirinus prefer to remain anonymous.
After reading this rather frightening article in the Washington Post, I am much more sympathetic to the idea of preserving blog-anonymity.
"As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.
A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."
America could use some friends in the German blogosphere; unfortunately, those blogs that identify themselves as "pro-American" are often racist and contain the worst kind of right-wing, militaristic propaganda. The popular German blog Politically Incorrect has an American flag in its banner, and describes itself as fervently "pro-amerikanisch". But there is nothing "American" about the blog: in post after post it publishes hateful pieces about Muslims in Europe, alternating occasionally with posts that celebrate Israeli actions against Palestinians.
News for Politically Incorrect: America doesn't hate Muslims. America has always been a melting pot that welcomes all races and religions. There are at least five million Muslims living in the US, and they are among the most successful - and most assimilated - group in America. Yes, we also have racists who say hateful things about Muslims, but they are by and large marginalized (two unfortunate exceptions: the political pundit Pat Buchanen and the neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer). So please remove the American flag from your blog; your content is profoundly anti-American.
Note: I am horrified that Google News now indexes Politically Incorrect in its searches, exposing more readers to this hateful content. To give you an idea of the readership of PI, a journalist writing under the name of Bastian Engelke wrote an article in Telepolis where he criticized PI's racist rhetoric. For this he recieved a barrage of hate mail, even threats, from PI fans (HT Dr. Dean).
For the past year I have been following the development of Web 2.0 with a great deal of interest. Blogs were an early example of the potential of Web 2.0, but only a very few blogs were able to attract enough advertising dollars to make them viable businesses. Venture capital began to flow into some start-ups that were building software facilitating social networking and then last month there was the stunning success of YouTube , which Google is now buying for $1.65 billion (incidentally making Jawed Karim from eastern Germany VERY rich).
So what is going on with Web 2.0 in Germany? I found a list of the ten "hottest German start-ups" in the Web 2.0 space on the blog sichelputzer.de.
Of these, StudiVZ - a facebook knock-off - is perhaps the most successful, having attracted a Euro 10 million investment from the venture capital arm of Holtzbrinck. Kasi-blog has very informative report on StudiVZ. The site supposedly has over 1 million registered users but so far has not attracted much advertising. The strategy of StudiVZ (and Holtzbrinck) appears to be one of waiting for facebook to acquire it (facebook itself is rumored to be in the sights of Yahoo!). Is this the business model of German Web 2.0 startups: create a German clone of a US site, attract as many users as possible, and then get acquired by the Americans? A closer look at sichelputzer's list shows that most these startups are clones: sevenload is a YouTube knock-off, Qype imitates Insiderpages.com while Mister Wong (which I like very much) resembles the tagging service of del.icio.us. But maybe the founders of these German sites will get very rich with this approach: it is an easy way for US sites to acquire German users. On the other hand, are there any start-ups in Germany that are "pushing the envelope" in terms of realizing the infinite potential of Web 2.0?
I guess standards have declined at American graduate schools compared to when I was an impoverished grad student. The blogger RayD has posted what he describes as a "research paper" he wrote for a graduate program at Georgetown University (for which he proudly boasts he received an "A" from the professor)which "proves" that the German media has an anti-American bias. This so-called "research paper" contains only six footnotes: five from once source - the German media research institute Media Tenor, the only other one from an opinion piece by the neoconservative pundit and Iraq War apologist Jeff Gedmin. The report also includes some quotes from German journalists and reproductions of covers from issues of Der Spiegel and Stern that depict President Bush critically, implying that criticism of Bush or the Bush administration's Iraq War policy represents anti-American sentiments.
What American readers of RayD's "research" should know, is that Media Tenor is hardly an unbiased source of information. In fact, Media Tenor's analyses has been criticized for some time in Germany because of its strong bias against the big public television networks in Germany - ARD and ZDF. On the other hand, Media Tenor's "research" has generally favored the right-wing media empire of Axel Springer. Both public media outlets have prevailed in legal actions against Media Tenor; Professor Klaus Merton of the University of Muenster has even accused the institute of falsifying data, and warned the CEO not to use the term "scientific" in describing its research methodology:
Wir werden Ihnen nahe legen, das Wort „wissenschaftlich“ bei Ihren Analysen nicht mehr zu verwenden und beispielsweise Ihre Mitgliedschaft in der Dt. Gesellschaft für Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft aufzugeben: Diese Gesellschaft ist eine wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, für deren Mitglieder Begriffe wie Datenmanipulation, Datenfälschung und interessengeleitete Dateninterpretation im Repertoire des wissenschaftlichen Tagesgeschäfts nicht inventarisiert sind
More on Media Tenor and its highly questionable ethics on Wikipedia and here. Most recently Media Tenor accused the German media - especially the public television programs - of anti-Israel bias in their reporting of recent Israel-Lebanon war. Typically, the institute's findings were first reported in Bildzeitung - the Springer daily where all "journalists" must pledge unconditional support of Israel. The Media Tenor report furthermore alleges that the anti-Israel bias in the German media can be traced to the defeat of the Social Democrats in Israel - implying an antipathy by the German press to the conservative ruling parties in the country. Typically, no data were presented by Media Tenor to back up its accusations against the ZDF and ARD. Telepolis commented on this as follows:
Spätestens hier wäre es an der Zeit, die Prämissen der Autoren genauer zu untersuchen. Denn um diese Behauptung zu belegen, müsste eine jahrelange Medienuntersuchung vorausgegangen sein. Schließlich wechselten in dem letzten Jahrzehnt konservative und sozialdemokratische Regierung ab und zur Zeit regiert eine große Koalition unter Einschluss der Sozialdemokraten das Land. Außerdem ist die Außen- und Militärpolitik der israelischen Sozialdemokraten und Konservativen nicht so verschieden. Warum dann aber eine sozialdemokratisch geführte israelische Regierung in den untersuchten Medien besser dargestellt wird, muss nach der Studie offen bleiben
So blogger RayD turned in a "research report" that is based on "data" from Media Tenor, an unethical group that has been known to falsify data in order to attack media outlets which present views it opposes. Pathetically, RayD is so proud of his sloppy scholarship that he chose to publish on his Web site so the whole world could read it. The fact that his professor gave him high marks says more about the state of higher education in the US than anything about "anti-American bias in the German media". The German media is no more "anti-American" than the US media, which is finally reporting on the facts on the administration in Washington and its failed policies in Iraq and in America. RayD shows zero promise as a scholar, however, he has bright future as a data falsifier at Media Tenor.
There weren't quite as many submissions to this quarter's Blog Carnival of US-German Relations, perhaps because after the World Cup Americans turned their attention away from Germany, and in Germany other issues - such as Germany's participation in the Lebanon UNIFIL forces - took center stage. Nevertheless, there were some good blog postings from the "Old Guard" bloggers on transatlantic relations, and some other bloggers are making an appearance here for the first time.
A common topic for many was the five-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11. This day obviously carries different meanings for different people. One perspective is presented by erphschwester - a blogger in Germany who offers up daily rants on politics. She expresses a certain sadness that the US has squandered the world's goodwill after the attack by waging an unnecessary war in Iraq which she deems a failure ("eine Niederlage"). America's pain and anger about the 9/11 attack has crystallized into a diffuse fear and hatred of Islam, which has resulted in further tragedy such as the recent bombing of Lebanon. She laments that 9/11 destroyed forever the dream of peace that we had for a brief moment following the collapse of the Soviet East Bloc.
Swiss blogger Manfred Messner (Arlesheim Reloaded) provides a very private account of his shock that day five years ago. His post reminds us that many Europeans had a personal connection with New York City and the Twin Towers - their grief is just as visceral as that of any American. We must also never forget that, of the nearly 3,000 victims of the attack, 500 were citizens of other countries.
One of the foreign victims of 9/11 was the German citizen Christian Adams, who was on the fateful United Flight 93 that was brought down by the passengers to prevent it from hitting the Capitol building in Washington DC. It turns out that Adams was a Fulbright scholar, and so his fate is of special interest to the German Fulbrighters who publish the blog Atlantic Review. Joerg of the Atlantic Review has a great post on how Christian Adams was defamed in the American feature film United 93 - something that nearly every US critic missed in their (generally positive) reviews of the movie. United 93 purports to be a factual depiction of what actually took place on the plane, and passenger Adams is portrayed as a weak coward who is willing to go along with the hijackers' demands. Trouble is, there is absolutely no evidence that Christian Adams behaved in this way. For all we know, he may have been leading the charge into the cockpit. Obviously, the director was playing to the anti-European prejudice of the American moving-going audience, who imagine Americans as action heroes, while Europeans are cowardly appeasers.
I am pleased to announce that Dialog International and Liberale Stimme will be hosting the next Blog Carnival on US-German Relations on September 24. This is the fourth such event arranged by the Fulbrighters at The Atlantic Review, and we have seen the number and quality of the submissions increase over the last 12 months. The blog-contributions can be in English or German; Dialog International will select and introduce the best English pieces, while Liberale Stimme will do the same for the German.
Instructions on how to submit your piece can be found here.
While most of the Carnival blog-submissions focus on political issues pertaining to the German-IS transatlantic relationship, we welcome contributions on any relevant topic. Karsten Dürotin, the author of Liberale Stimme, has written an excellent announcement of the Carnival, urging bloggers to consider non-political topics, such as personal experiences involving German-American relations. Here are some ideas that occur to me:
Of course, bloggers are for the most part political junkies, so it is difficult to avoid political topics altogether. Both Karsten and I hope that we receive submissions representing the entire political spectrum - not just the pro-Bush perspective that have dominated up to now. And there is plenty to blog about in politics: after the new Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to be mending the US-German alliance with her successful visits to Washington, is the rift growing once again over the Israeli- Lebanon War? I am certain that is but one of the topics that will engage the Carnival bloggers.
In any case, we look forward to another successful Carnival, and Dialog International is pleased to play a role in this forum which advances transatlantic dialogue and understanding.
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