• Sign up or login, and you'll have full access to opportunities of forum.

German and Austrian Culture and Words ( to run away but also having fun with it before )

Go to CruxDreams.com
In Germany, there is even an advertising company which is now "a victim" of the misuse of the expression "Querdenker" because they are mistaken to be in connection with the demonstrations against the anti-corona-mesurements:

In any case, it is always the same with human beings. The silly ones are always the loudest and the most aggressive part of a society and so, they think they are the majority because of their noise.

Or - as this very true quotation here is often used:

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

Or as a German president of a federal state once said:
"There is the German proverb 'der Klügere gibt nach' (= 'the wiser gives in') because the wiser one does not like to get into trouble or a real fight and unfortunately, this is usually the reason why the stupid ones rule this world! So, in politics, this proverb should better not be used or be valid."


On the one hand, I am afraid this winter 2020/ 2021 will become a terrible winter because of the exploding infection rates in all the Western industrial countries and because of the stupidity of a minority.
On the other hand, I am still hopeful that just because of this terrible probability, the majority of us human beings will now really see who are - or were - the really stupid ones and who are the ones who wanted and still want to save the most lifes of their nations.

And although many "social media" contribute to make people live and believe in their very own bubble of informations in their own parallel world, this virus surmounts and overcomes all barriers of those parallel worlds because it is simply not interested in any of our wishes, beliefs or lies. It reproduces itself as much as it can and if you are not careful enough, it can make you very sick or it will even kill you.
The price of ignoring this possibiliy is very high but maybe, this is also simply the price for a human society of being unable to educate its members in order not to become stupid.

Germany is sometimes seen in Europe as a positive example in the fight against this virus but after having seen so much human stupidity in the hotel where I am still working, I started to think, we Germans are simply lucky to have in comparision a better system of hospitals and early caring for possible patients - and this might only have been pure luck because in the 10 years ago, many politicians and Federal Audit Offices complained about the expensive overcapacities in German hospitals with much too many doctors and nurses who were not necessary.

Thank God now, we Germans are also very slow in reducing overcapacities in staffs because by reducing them, you have to fight against the habits of infrastructures, labor unions (of doctors and nurses) etc. ... and German doctors' unions are usually much more intelligent than the German politicians!

OK, there were made many mistakes in Germany, too, and all our Western nations seem to have underestimated the dangers of the coronavirus under winter conditions ... but confronted with a danger of which we know more and more every day, we are learning very fast because our lifes depend on this learning.

And concerning all the aggressive idiots who still seem to believe, this virus is not a danger but part of a worldwide conspiracy:
I always thought, the invention of television was a good thing because we all are today used to sit in front of our screens in a mood of relaxation, comfort and distraction.
So, maybe I am wrong, but up to now, I do not know any example in the world in which any political leader or war monger was able to convince the TV spectators of his nation to start a revolution or to go on war in a hate speech. Hate and conspiracy theories of hate do not really work successful as convincing arguments for the majority of the spectators on their TV screens, I think.

And in spite of the bellicose or martial history of Germany, it was never really easy to make a majority of Germans aggressive enough. The war mongers in our German history usually needed some years of constant propaganda and misinformation via synchronized media channels to get Germans to that point.

Or as Lenin once said when he was disappointed by the failing uprisings in Germany at the end of WW I: "Germans will never make a communist revolution or succeed in any revolution because that would require stepping on the grass of their parks!"

Maybe, he was right in this point of his opinion.
 
Last edited:
“Querdenker” is a good word, it’s a shame it has been tarnished by association with those who really ought to be called “Gegendenker”.

It’s a bit like the English word “skeptic “; it used to mean someone who values reason and empirical evidence.. but these days it usually means a whack-job conspiracy nutter who believes everything they read on Facebook... :doh:
 
Yesterday, there was a new article in German language about a part of Austrian-German history which is surely completely unknown by the silly people who compare themselves today to the victims of Nazism.

It is a story about the probably greatest Jewish poet of the 20th century who wrote his most famous and psychologically most "cruel" poem - "Die Todesfuge" - in German because he loved this language and historically, he - Paul Celan - had no other choice but to write in German:





The voice recorded under the last link is really Paul Celan himself, I think, because there is a very small dialect which seems to me like from my father.

And now ... hard to believe even for me but it is true: My parents were born around the same time as Paul Celan only 80 km away from him in the South Bucovina in a little village which had only 2.000 inhabitants, founded by Austrian and Hungarian workers of a silver mine there, this small village under imperial Austrian government until 1919 had four tiny Christian churches (Catholic, Lutheranian, Calvinist, Orthodox) and one Jewish synagogue for its inhabitants and my parents remembered it was "almost normal" for them to visit the other churches and places of worship at their highest days of religious celebrations and that you had to speak a different language with the parents of your school-friends when you were visiting your school-friends at their homes for playing kid's games.

Then came WW II and all it's racist madness and it was for my parents like it was for Paul Celan, who said: "The country of my youth and childhood does not exist any more. It was a beautiful world fallen into absolute oblivion and only parts of its literature remained which can show you in small parts what you and what human culture has lost there."

The Jews disappeared from the Bucovina, the Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Polish disappeared from there, the Jews were sometimes killed in their villages, the Germans transferred just before the greatest killings started under the Hitler-Stalin-pact to German newly conquered parts of Poland, Romanians and Polish were driven out of the Northern Bucovina by the Soviets and you find today only some old ruins of both their churches and their synagogues with words over their entrances no Romanain or Ukrainian inhabitant of today can read any more there today like this Lutheranian church in the tiny Bucovinian village of Pojorata in today's Romania with Martin Luther's song title "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" (= "a strong castle is our God") :

Pojorata.jpg This tiny church is still visited and being upheld by about 20 Romanian citizens with Austrian-German ancestors.

I have visited some of these villages there and it was one of the saddest summer trips I have ever made although the beautiful landscape there looks a bit like the Italian Toscana.
You see and you feel there that human people of many different origins, nations, religions and languages were really able to live for at least one century in peace together in the same villages - until fanatic nationalism, racism and chauvinism destroyed all their lifes.
 
Last edited:
Germans and Austrians liked to refer to themselves as "Land der Dichter und Denker"

probably greatest Jewish poet of the 20th century who wrote his most famous and psychologically most "cruel" poem - "Die Todesfuge" - in German
I was wondering (since we talked about “Querdenker”) if there’s such a thing as a “Querdichter”, possibly Celan is an example ?

Great post @Silent_Water , it is tragic to see these shattered remnants of a vanished pluralistic Europe destroyed by war and nationalism.
 
If there had not been WW II, Paul Celan probably would simply be a "great Austrian poet of Jewish origin" in all our German schoolbooks.
Now, he is "the greatest German-speaking-and-writing Jewish poet with the most famous German poem about the Holocaust" in a few of our German schoolbooks.
He probably is not a "Querdichter", because he had not really a choice to be against the thinking of a majority as I would understand a "Querdichter" to be.
History and fate made him "the unfortunate poet of the holocaust" and he did not really wanted to be remembered this way, but it was his destiny, I think.
 
Just to show you a bit more of the knowledge of my family's history in historical maps and in order to show what I was talking about during the last postings here:
These historical maps are still to be found in many German and Austrian publications and sometimes, incredible but also true, you can find more historical maps about some Eastern European countries in Germany than in those countries themselves. For example, I have heard that you can still use historical German road maps of Eastern Prussia and the Baltic states when are making a trip there with a SUV, because the roads have not really changed so much.

The following maps will even explain some international problems of Eastern European states because imagine that more than 75 % of all state borders in Eastern Europe developped after 1919:

Österreich-Ungarn 1910 .jpg = The Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910. Bohemia, Moravia and the Bucovina were the first parts of this empire with their own regional mutli-ethnic parliaments, but women were principally excluded in those times from politics. By the way and concerning lost knowledge about history: Almost no one in Romania - except an old Romanian professor of history - believed me the story of the regional multi-ethnic parliaments already existing in 1910 until I showed them this map. (There were no German or Austrian minorities living in Romania or "existing" until 1919 because they lived on Austrian and Hungarian territory which became Romanian territory in 1921.)

SOE nach Erstem Weltkrieg 1 SU.JPG The new sovereign states which followed the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1919. Some smaller wars on the Balkans were immediately following because of the new borders and I would even add the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars between Serbia and its neighbours inside Yugoslavia during the 1990's as late consequences of WW I.

historische provinzen rumäniens 1 din a 5.jpg The incredible changings ot the borders of Romania during the last 150 years. In the region around the Bucovina within these 150 years and in the "wrong village" you could be a citzen of the Russian Empire, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of the Romanian Kingdom, of a Hungarian dictatorship, of the Soviet Union and finally of the Ukraine - and you and your family would not even have had to leave your house to change your state citizenship four or up to five times - because the troops of these states and these states were coming to you into your garden!
Certainly, no family and no intelligent one dared to stay in his house all these times.

And finally a map from a German book about "lost places in history" you will probably never find or see in Romania later again: A hand-drawn map in German by an Austrian silver miner & his wife, both refugees from and of Pojorata / Pojoritta which shows all the most important houses and all the many churches in this small peaceful village in 1938 !

Pojorata around 1938.jpg I have been there and the most houses or former churches of this plan are really still existing there but their former residents of nationalities as Jews, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles and Ukrainians who all lived there peaceful together in this small village until 1940 / 1941 ... they are all gone and if they survived like my parents, they are scattered all over the world.
Such regions were "ethnically cleansed" first by Nazi troops and later by the nationalist Stalinist governments who were driving other nations away which were suspicious of working with other Eastern European governments which Moscow did not really trust although they were all called "ideological brothers in communism". Well, there was a saying in all those countries about the governments in Moscow: "You can choose your friends but unfortunately not your brothers!"
(And the "Big Brother" in Moscow draw new border lines which enabled a direct military invasion of its own troops into any satellite state without crossing another state. For example, there was no direct border between Hungary and Russia after WW I. After WW II, there was one between the Soviet Union and Hungary.)
 
Last edited:
My German word of the day: "querdenken" (= to think off the mainstream)

In English I guess the saying would be "to think outside of the box" ... when doing so one of course has to take care, that one is not just jumping into another, smaller box ... or even a padded cell...

To my knowledge the expression 'Querdenker' actually goes back to Karl Valentin, a very unusual, rather anarchistic comedian of the 1930s and 40s.
Another thing that makes me angry about the use of this word by those raging idiots.
Some of his humour was created by looking at things from a totally unexpected perspective and by applying a twisted kind of logic coming to very funny results.That's what 'Querdenken' originally meant.

It seems like we all had slightly different understandings of the word "querdenken" to begin with.

Ah, isn't our language wonderful? Not even native speakers come to the same conclusion about the meaning of a word. :D

But in the end, @malins brought it to the point about the recent abuse of the word:

yeah, they're definitely poisoning the word...
 
Ah, isn't our language wonderful? Not even native speakers come to the same conclusion about the meaning of a word. :D

In this sense, I had once a conversation with my Polish girlfriend who told me that Russian is by far much more "indefinable" than every language in Western Europe. She told me she had once to translate a speech by Gorbachev into Polish and English. She exaggerated a bit but she showed me the length of the translations and the Polish translation had one third less words or text and the English translation was "evaporated" down to almost a half of the Russian text.
When I asked her how this is possible, she said, it is almost incredible for her, too, but there is so extremely much "redundant information" in this speech of Gorbachev that she had the impression, it was his intention to make a speech in Russian which should be as unclear as possible so that his supporters were content but also his political enemies should have the impression that he was at least right now on their side. Her translations then showed only the real statements which were really clear for her and she said: "In English, it is for her as there is only black or white, there is only a few grey in between, In the political Polish language, there are at least "fifty shades of grey" between black and white, but in the political Russian language, there are thousands of shades of grey between black and white!"
For her, Gorbachev was a master of producing fog around the sense of his speeches.
 
When I look at history books of the last 2.000 years, I always get the impression that mankind is usually making three steps ahead to a brighter future and then at least two steps backwards because of some foolish or fanatic decisions in the governments.
I would not like to decide if some unusual opinions in history are or were right but this following is one I always thought about "Mhm!?" :
:eek::rolleyes:
Some decades ago around 1995, I saw an interview on Austrian TV with one of the oldest Austrian diplomats who celebrated his 100th birthday a few days before.

He said most people did not agree with his opinions during his lifetime but he always thought, it was a mistake to dissolve the Austro-Hungarian empire, especially when you compare it with the - for him - "new" European Union, because this EU is now more or less directed by a multi-ethnic and multilingual parliament.

Especially the Austrian part of the Empire had two governments in succession which were convinced that they could not keep this empire in the 20th century by force, so they tried since 1908 to install regional multi-ethnic parliaments in three "Kronländer Böhmen, Mähren und Bukowina", three very developped parts of the Austrian half in order to balance the problems between the different nations within the Austrian Empire.

This could have become the most interesting political experiment in European history because it was not so far away from the idea of the EU but inside one of the old Empires.
But then, World War I started, the Empires were falling and after the war, everyone thought, all the nations with different languages should have their right of self-determination.

In principle a good idea, but the nations in Eastern Europe were so mixed that the new frontiers and borders set big parts of some nations out of their "home nation's" borders. After the unexpected results of census in many regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the majority of the inhabitants in one region was sometimes belonging to another state and the minority there was the majority in another state.
For example, 40 % of all Hungarians were suddenly living outside of Hungary and Romania doubled the size of its territory because Romanians were the majority in Transsilvania which belonged before to Hungary. Conflicts between both started about the rights of the Hungarian minority in Romania and never really stopped until today, because they really have a lot of privileges but the Hungarians also claim to have been the first settlers in some parts of Romania and the Romanians came later.
And this is only one conflict on the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, which fortunately stayed a conflict without a real war, but some others were much worse like those in the former Yugoslavia which led to these terrible wars in the 1990's, which dissolved Yugoslavia.

So, this old Austrian diplomat, which I mentioned in the beginning of this posting, said:

"The decline and fall of an Empire always causes smaller wars inside around the territorial heritage of the old empire and when you think about the measures of Austria to find balances between the many different nations, in my opinion, it would have been better to expand the autonomy of the regions instead of dissolving this Empire because after all these nations were so glad to become independent, they were too small and too poor to fight back against the dictatorships of the Soviet Union, which was a new ideological empire of its own.
Now, this empire has fallen, too, and all these small former satellite states of the former Soviet Union want to get back under the "umbrella" of the rather rich "Western" European Union which is politically not so very different from the Austrian Empire's regional parliaments in its last decade until WW I started.
So, from my point of view of a very old Austrian diplomat, the 20th century was an almost completely lost century for Europe with incredible many mistakes on all sides and millions of citizens and millions of soldiers who died in vain on the battlefields, created by madmen on all sides.
It is terrible for me to have seen all this madness during my whole 100 years of living and there is only the hope for me that the European Union and its members have learned from all this amount of mistakes in the 20th century."

Hm, what should I say more ...?
 
Last edited:
When I look at history books of the last 2.000 years, I always get the impression that mankind is usually making three steps ahead to a brighter future and then at least two steps backwards because of some foolish or fanatic decisions in the governments.
I would not like to decide if some unusual opinions in history are or were right but this following is one I always thought about "Mhm!?" :
:eek::rolleyes:
Some decades ago around 1995, I saw an interview on Austrian TV with one of the oldest Austrian diplomats who celebrated his 100th birthday a few days before.

He said most people did not agree with his opinions during his lifetime but he always thought, it was a mistake to dissolve the Austro-Hungarian empire, especially when you compare it with the - for him - "new" European Union, because this EU is now more or less directed by a multi-ethnic and multilingual parliament.

Especially the Austrian part of the Empire had two governments in succession which were convinced that they could not keep this empire in the 20th century by force, so they tried since 1908 to install regional multi-ethnic parliaments in three "Kronländer Böhmen, Mähren und Bukowina", three very developped parts of the Austrian half in order to balance the problems between the different nations within the Austrian Empire.

This could have become the most interesting political experiment in European history because it was not so far away from the idea of the EU but inside one of the old Empires.
But then, World War I started, the Empires were falling and after the war, everyone thought, all the nations with different languages should have their right of self-determination.

In principle a good idea, but the nations in Eastern Europe were so mixed that the new frontiers and borders set big parts of some nations out of their "home nation's" borders. After the unexpected results of census in many regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the majority of the inhabitants in one region was sometimes belonging to another state and the minority there was the majority in another state.
For example, 40 % of all Hungarians were suddenly living outside of Hungary and Romania doubled the size of its territory because Romanians were the majority in Transsilvania which belonged before to Hungary. Conflicts between both started about the rights of the Hungarian minority in Romania and never really stopped until today, because they really have a lot of privileges but the Hungarians also claim to have been the first settlers in some parts of Romania and the Romanians came later.
And this is only one conflict on the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, which fortunately stayed a conflict without a real war, but some others were much worse like those in the former Yugoslavia which led to these terrible wars in the 1990's, which dissolved Yugoslavia.

So, this old Austrian diplomat, which I mentioned in the beginning of this posting, said:

"The decline and fall of an Empire always causes smaller wars inside around the territorial heritage of the old empire and when you think about the measures of Austria to find balances between the many different nations, in my opinion, it would have been better to expand the autonomy of the regions instead of dissolving this Empire because after all these nations were so glad to become independent, they were too small and too poor to fight back against the dictatorships of the Soviet Union, which was a new ideological empire of its own.
Now, this empire has fallen, too, and all these small former satellite states of the former Soviet Union want to get back under the "umbrella" of the rather rich "Western" European Union which is politically not so very different from the Austrian Empire's regional parliaments in its last decade until WW I started.
So, from my point of view of a very old Austrian diplomat, the 20th century was an almost completely lost century for Europe with incredible many mistakes on all sides and millions of citizens and millions of soldiers who died in vain on the battlefields, created by madmen on all sides.
It is terrible for me to have seen all this madness during my whole 100 years of living and there is only the hope for me that the European Union and its members have learned from all this amount of mistakes in the 20th century."

Hm, what should I say more ...?
Fascinating post, thank you. I would add that war has been Europe’s general default-setting since Charlemagne died (814 AD) and his sons squabbled over their inheritance. The EU, for all its faults, is part of the ongoing peace process, and that’s why I (and millions of other British people) support it and will campaign to rejoin. Plus Brexit is going to be a DISASTER for the UK, experts are predicting shortages of food and medicines in January... but don’t get me started.. Please remember many millions of us British voted and marched and protested against this shit! End of rant :p
 
When I look at history books of the last 2.000 years, I always get the impression that mankind is usually making three steps ahead to a brighter future and then at least two steps backwards because of some foolish or fanatic decisions in the governments.
I would not like to decide if some unusual opinions in history are or were right but this following is one I always thought about "Mhm!?" :
:eek::rolleyes:
Some decades ago around 1995, I saw an interview on Austrian TV with one of the oldest Austrian diplomats who celebrated his 100th birthday a few days before.

He said most people did not agree with his opinions during his lifetime but he always thought, it was a mistake to dissolve the Austro-Hungarian empire, especially when you compare it with the - for him - "new" European Union, because this EU is now more or less directed by a multi-ethnic and multilingual parliament.

Especially the Austrian part of the Empire had two governments in succession which were convinced that they could not keep this empire in the 20th century by force, so they tried since 1908 to install regional multi-ethnic parliaments in three "Kronländer Böhmen, Mähren und Bukowina", three very developped parts of the Austrian half in order to balance the problems between the different nations within the Austrian Empire.

This could have become the most interesting political experiment in European history because it was not so far away from the idea of the EU but inside one of the old Empires.
But then, World War I started, the Empires were falling and after the war, everyone thought, all the nations with different languages should have their right of self-determination.

In principle a good idea, but the nations in Eastern Europe were so mixed that the new frontiers and borders set big parts of some nations out of their "home nation's" borders. After the unexpected results of census in many regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the majority of the inhabitants in one region was sometimes belonging to another state and the minority there was the majority in another state.
For example, 40 % of all Hungarians were suddenly living outside of Hungary and Romania doubled the size of its territory because Romanians were the majority in Transsilvania which belonged before to Hungary. Conflicts between both started about the rights of the Hungarian minority in Romania and never really stopped until today, because they really have a lot of privileges but the Hungarians also claim to have been the first settlers in some parts of Romania and the Romanians came later.
And this is only one conflict on the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, which fortunately stayed a conflict without a real war, but some others were much worse like those in the former Yugoslavia which led to these terrible wars in the 1990's, which dissolved Yugoslavia.

So, this old Austrian diplomat, which I mentioned in the beginning of this posting, said:

"The decline and fall of an Empire always causes smaller wars inside around the territorial heritage of the old empire and when you think about the measures of Austria to find balances between the many different nations, in my opinion, it would have been better to expand the autonomy of the regions instead of dissolving this Empire because after all these nations were so glad to become independent, they were too small and too poor to fight back against the dictatorships of the Soviet Union, which was a new ideological empire of its own.
Now, this empire has fallen, too, and all these small former satellite states of the former Soviet Union want to get back under the "umbrella" of the rather rich "Western" European Union which is politically not so very different from the Austrian Empire's regional parliaments in its last decade until WW I started.
So, from my point of view of a very old Austrian diplomat, the 20th century was an almost completely lost century for Europe with incredible many mistakes on all sides and millions of citizens and millions of soldiers who died in vain on the battlefields, created by madmen on all sides.
It is terrible for me to have seen all this madness during my whole 100 years of living and there is only the hope for me that the European Union and its members have learned from all this amount of mistakes in the 20th century."

Hm, what should I say more ...?
I think he was right about that insight.
 
Well, human beings are always learning many things during their lives but nations as a whole are often very slow in learning from history.

In that way, I like those Austrian politicians very much which are concerned with foreign policy because they often have a very special, charming and also morbid kind of humor which is probably only possible when you know, you are the administrator of something small which once was an international empire built on quicksand right from the beginning.
So, these intelligent Austrians are not really sad about their historical losses in territory but rather pleased that they do not have the burden any more of being a kind of "police" between enemy nations within their empire.

At the same time, they seem to be "a kind of amused" about Western Europeans and their politicians who simply cannot imagine living in a state with many other minorities because Western states like France or Great Britain are usually "homogeneous states" with the same language and the same borders for almost 200 years without the knowledge of problems which occured in Eastern Europe after the World Wars.

For example, I once witnessed a guest lecture at a German university in which an Austrian EU-diplomat was telling his experiences within the EU parliament and the discussions there after the first battles within Yugoslavia started next to the borders of Austria, because the Serbian government tried to regain the control of all Yugoslavian borders which were already in the hands of the Slovenians and Croats BEFORE they declared their independence from the Yugoslavian government in the capital Belgrade in Serbia.
There were suddenly Slovenian and Croat police forces shooting at Serbian military forces and vice versa at the Slovenian and Croatian border crossings to Austria just some meters away from the Austrian border police and at the same time there were Austrian tourists returning from their holidays in beautiful Croat cities like Dubrovnik (by the way: some parts of the "Game of Thrones"-serials were filmed in Dubrovnik) at the same border crossings.
This shows how absurd modern wars can become even in our "civilized" Europe because imagine this: The border police in your holiday country is suddenly shooting at the military of the same country because they are from different regional governments which are now suddenly military enemies! And you are driving home from your peaceful holiday in the same country because the war is up to now only happening between the guys in different uniforms at the border crossing to your home country Austria which is the most peaceful country you can imagine only just 50 meters behind the war zone!

So, the Austrian military was called for the first time since WW II to secure the Austrian border and Austria called an emergency session of the European parliament where really no one knew what was going on in Yugoslavia at this time in 1991.
The Belgian foreign minister - according to the Austrian diplomat in his lecture at my German university - even said: "I do not understand why the Yugoslavs are suddenly shooting at each other when they are all speaking the same language!"
The Austrian diplomat replied in his morbid sarcasm: "I guess that's because the situation there is so similar to Belgium where all citizens are certainly speaking 'Belgian'!"
:facepalm:
And later, the same Austrian diplomat said to be amused about the decision of the EU parliament to send an envoy to Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina NOT to declare their independence from Yugoslavia because this would cause the immediate reason for war with Serbia, so someone should tell and explain to them that such small future states like Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia without a real industry and no products of interest for the EU markets would probably not be "survivable" within the EU.
So, the EU-parliamentarians of this emergency summit choose one of their best EU-diplomats as envoy to go there and to explain them why their countries would be too small for a possible future in the EU: The foreign minister of Luxembourg!

The Austrian diplomats in this emergency summit aroused some disapproving and unintelligible looks by their Western European colleagues because the Austrians broke out in a kind of hysterical laughter after they heard "Luxembourg".

:eek: The Germans in this session just shook their heads with "a sad smile of wisdom" ... :facepalm: Sometimes, politics in Europe can be so sad that it is funny ...
 
Last edited:
And this is accidental AUSTRIAN humor in political TV news at its best. Nothing in the English comments in this video is correct but if you understand AUSTRIAN German, you really get two jokes for the price of one:


In fact, the picture behind her was forgotten of the political news before and then, she seems to be talking about an Austrian Easter custom of not painting but scratching eggs as ornamental decoration and in this combination she says something you can understand as: "It is very difficult to find women today who are still active artists and masters in the technical art of 'balls-scratching'!"
.... "This is the worst text I had ever to read on TV and you are guilty of that because I would never have had the idea of something like that!"
 
Last edited:
now those make me remember cramming for history tests with "dtv atlas zur weltgeschichte" ...

Exactly my thought. I learned pretty much every map and diagram in that book by heart -- still have my copy somewhere. They are an incredibly information-dense way of presenting historical fact and connections. Just two thin small volumes, crammed with the entire history of the world. Never understood why they aren't better-known in the English speaking world.

And yes, I do remember that map of the nationalities in the pre-WWI Habsburg monarchy very well. Mind you, the fact that they considered "Serbo-Kroaten" as a single ethnicity resulted in the absurd (in hindsight) misrepresentation of showing Bosnia as the sole ethnically homogeneous region of the monarchy.
 
Last edited:
When the war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, many people in the Low Countries said they did not understand why people, speaking the same language, started shooting at each other. They obviously lacked historical understand of the problem. Yugoslavia was an established nation in Europe, a popular travel destination (cheap!), with champions in many sports branches, a redoubtable national soccer team,...

Yugoslavia was still considered as 'Tito's country', although the man was already dead eleven years, and Croat, Slovenian, etc nationalist uprises were associated with the fascist client states of WWII. Many considered the government in Belgrado still as a national government, while in fact, it was no longer 'Yugoslavian' and it had been seized by Serb nationalists, who wanted to stay in control over the entire country. A reason for the misperception by the EU was that The Netherlands were then presiding, a homogenous nation state with historic sympathies for the Tito regime, hence the EU completely misjudged the situation during the first crucial weeks of the conflict.
 
Never understood why they aren't better-known in the English speaking world.
I still have them also though volume 1 is missing somewhere ...

but .. it is extremely condensed. From an Anglospheric perspective for instance ... the US is placed on the same level as other nations, the Civil War for instance gets one map and a bit more than one column of text on page 95 ... that's unacceptbale to the ENlish speaking world ;)
However it is so compressed that the usefulness is limited without background knowledge but it is great for situations where you vaguely recall "there was something going on there" and it gives a reasonable framework for the absolute basics. And of course the dtv Atlas also does have its own way of looking at the world.

When the war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, many people in the Low Countries said they did not understand why people, speaking the same language, started shooting at each other. They obviously lacked historical understand of the problem. Yugoslavia was an established nation in Europe, a popular travel destination (cheap!), with champions in many sports branches, a redoubtable national soccer team,...

Yugoslavia was still considered as 'Tito's country', although the man was already dead eleven years, and Croat, Slovenian, etc nationalist uprises were associated with the fascist client states of WWII. Many considered the government in Belgrado still as a national government, while in fact, it was no longer 'Yugoslavian' and it had been seized by Serb nationalists, who wanted to stay in control over the entire country. A reason for the misperception by the EU was that The Netherlands were then presiding, a homogenous nation state with historic sympathies for the Tito regime, hence the EU completely misjudged the situation during the first crucial weeks of the conflict.
Hmmm.
Misperceptions as such might have contributed to the Dutchbat fiasco...
 
but .. it is extremely condensed. From an Anglospheric perspective for instance ... the US is placed on the same level as other nations, the Civil War for instance gets one map and a bit more than one column of text on page 95 ... that's unacceptbale to the ENlish speaking world ;)
However it is so compressed that the usefulness is limited without background knowledge but it is great for situations where you vaguely recall "there was something going on there" and it gives a reasonable framework for the absolute basics. And of course the dtv Atlas also does have its own way of looking at the world.
Oh, absolutely. In writing about history, there is no such thing as a factual account -- selecting is itself an act of expressing a view. And of course it's a German book making selections with more detail on German history. I was really thinking more of the concept than a straight translation (which does actually exist, I believe, but doesn't really work in English). Because although German-centric, there is at least an ambition at evenhandedness and focus on fact-centric presentation rather than pushing a particular narrative (even if that is an unachievable aim). Given the pitfalls of writing this book in the 1960s, with all the baggage of German history to contend, I think they succeeded admirably.
 
Back
Top Bottom