Das Duell

Last night the first of two Chancellorial (?) debates was on. Unfortunately, they insist on calling it a duel even though the German language happens to include the perfectly good word...Debatte. I was surprised that Angela Merkel said at one point that Schröder would be out in a couple of weeks, and that she would be Chancellor (but it doesn’t seem to have struck a particularly noticeable chord with anyone else). New Orleans was mentioned, if only to indulge in backhanded U.S. bashing, but then it isn’t easy to communicate some of the idiosyncrasies of Americans to some Germans, so I do cut them some slack. You have to use the dictionary a lot, that’s for sure.


They do understand unsettling aspects of one’s own culture, however. It’s hard not to when you’re never more than about an hour away from a part of the country that—until the end of 1989—had the following emergency strategy all mapped out:


"...meticulous plans, current throughout the 1980’s, for the surveillance, arrest and incarceration of 85,939 East Germans, listed by name. On 'Day X' (the day a crisis, any crisis, was declared), Stasi officers in the 211 local branches were to open sealed envelopes containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested.

The arrests were to be carried out quickly—840 people every two hours. The plans contained exact provisions for the use of all available prisons and camps, and when those were full for the conversion of other buildings: former Nazi detention centers, schools, hospitals and factory holiday hostels. Every detail was foreseen, from where the doorbell was located on the house of each person to be arrested to the adequate supply of barbed wire and the rules of dress and etiquette in the camps: armbands, 'green, 2 cm wide' for the oldest in the room, 'green, three stripes 2 cm wide' for the oldest in the camp, yellow with the letters 'SL' in black for Shift Leader to be worn on the left upper arm..."
(from Anna Funder’s "Stasiland—Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall")


Other than that it’s just endless summer here as usual in Bavaria.