malins
Stumbling Seeker
yeah, they're definitely poisoning the word...Another thing that makes me angry about the use of this word by those raging idiots.
yeah, they're definitely poisoning the word...Another thing that makes me angry about the use of this word by those raging idiots.
Germans and Austrians liked to refer to themselves as "Land der Dichter und Denker"
I was wondering (since we talked about “Querdenker”) if there’s such a thing as a “Querdichter”, possibly Celan is an example ?probably greatest Jewish poet of the 20th century who wrote his most famous and psychologically most "cruel" poem - "Die Todesfuge" - in German
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.
yeah, they're definitely poisoning the word...
now those make me remember cramming for history tests with "dtv atlas zur weltgeschichte" ...until I showed them this map
Ah, isn't our language wonderful? Not even native speakers come to the same conclusion about the meaning of a word.
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 rantWhen 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!?" :
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.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!?" :
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 ...?
now those make me remember cramming for history tests with "dtv atlas zur weltgeschichte" ...
I still have them also though volume 1 is missing somewhere ...Never understood why they aren't better-known in the English speaking world.
Hmmm.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.
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.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.