"Let’s Get On With It Mrs. Chancellor"

The Germans didn’t waste much time with that historic 'first woman' bullshit.

This headline would lead one to believe that she’s sort of expected to produce miracles single-handedly. If anyone has high hopes, they’re not saying much. There’s an awful lot of talk about the high price paid for this negotiated settlement. Eight ministers will be from the SPD, and six plus chancellor and speaker from the CDU...so basically, eight and eight with the coveted (until it was attained) leadership role going to the CDU. This pretty much mirrors their respective number of Bundestag seats (222 to 226) as fairly as it possibly can. Frau Doktor Merkel is a physicist, I’m pretty sure she’s capable of doing the math.

The local paper ran this interactive map "Where Women Are/Were in Power"―The first thing you notice is that, although we’ve all heard enough about Angela Merkel’s looks to last a lifetime...she’s one of the best looking, compared to female heads of state the world over (Where does that leave us? Where are the future Pamela Andersons who are going to step up to the plate here people?).
Historic? Sure, but Merkel herself played down the red letter day when prompted by female jounalists to express how she was feeling or acknowledge this step in Germany’s history..."Mir geht’s gut" (I’m well), she said, describing herself as being focused on the tremendous amount of work in front of her. Deutsche Welle had this to say about the all-around Lage der Frauen (situation of women) in Deutschland.

Management circles in German business are still a man’s world. A meager 11 percent of German companies have a woman in management positions, compared to an EU average of 14 percent. With 40 percent, the United States and Canada are way, way ahead.

Barbara Schaeffer-Hegel, founder of the European Academy for Women in Politics and Business (EAF) in Berlin, attributes the shortfall to German cultural traditions. "The mother ideology of the Third Reich and the conservative women’s’ politics in the postwar time have left deep marks," she explains. "The division of the areas of public and private were cemented with the exclusive responsibility of women for the private areas (of life) – caring for children and ensuring the welfare of the family."

In addition to the mentality, there’s also an institutional problem, the former professor of pedagogy said. The daycare infrastructure in Germany is underdeveloped, as is the preschool system. And companies are often reluctant to trust women with important projects because they could get pregnant at any time. In other words, latent discrimination is perpetuate throughout the business culture here.

"It’s a lot harder to reconcile having a family and a career in Germany than it is in most developing countries and almost all industrial nations," she says.

There’s still an enormous paradox here: Most of the women recently making headlines for making it to the inner circle of managers have been imported from abroad. Karin Dorrepaal is Dutch, Lucrezia Reichlin is Italian and Beatrice Weder di Mauro has dual Swiss and Italian citizenship. But that comes as little surprise to Schaeffer-Hegel.

"The word ‘Rabenmütter’ (raven mother, a term loosely translated as ‘bad mom with latchkey kids’) only exists in Germany," she says. "In other European countries and in America, women achieve huge things and still manage to have kids. Nor do they feel like bad mothers for doing so."

It seems odd that the Germans spend so much time wringing their hands about the low birthrate here, without ever mentioning detrimental social mores or infrastructures.

Who's Baad?

I was going to mention how the recently rebuilt Frauenkirche of Dresden will be consecrated on the 30th of October...how the ruin was preserved as a monument...how they studied, measured and catalogued every speck of it so that the new version could be 44% original (this was tricky as they were only sure of the design of approximately two-thirds of the 18th century baroque--does it undulate? If yes, then it's baroque--edifice...not to mention the fact that the church did not collapse until after the bombing, and this due to the extreme heat of the firestorm that swept through the city--therefore the structural integrity of the disassembled pieces was a tad iffy).


...how they found the original cross that topped the church (Kuppelkreuz, cupola cross) in the rubble when, after reunification, plans could finally be made to rebuild (because one-party states are only good for serious maltreatment of human beings, outrageous egotism on the part of a handful of total morons, and um...let's see, what else? Oh yeah, nothing at all getting done--unless you count the proliferation of rampant corruption). Hey, what about a monument to no longer belonging to some head-up-the-ass, misguided excuse for a country--woohoo, now there's something to celebrate.


...how the original cross was so badly damaged that they had to have a new one made anyway, and how the guy that made it was British and his father was one of the bomber pilots who destroyed Dresden in February of 1945.


...but then we watched our--German version of Netflix--DVD rental (which frankly, we'd been dragging our feet on), about the Baader Meinhof Gang--you know, the Red Army Faction


...which was way more admired here than you might think, until it became quite clear that they were indeed quite interested in killing people. Anyway, it was enlightening (what with them going to a terrorist training camp in Jordan around 1970 and all), but you can't get it from Amazon.com (where a search for Baader only brings up 'Badder Santa' with Billy Bob Thornton).

Das also war des Pudels Kern!

The poodle was originally a German hunting dog, before the French got a hold of it...and, well, you can see for yourself how important cultural differences can be (not in this picture of course, as this is a Doberman in a poodle costume). "So that was the poodle’s core"...in German the genitive (possessive) noun comes second, or risks sounding poetic (as in 'Pudels Kern'). Sound backwards? If you’re learning German, get used to things sounding backwards. Colloquially the whole issue is typically ignored, and the word 'von' (of or from) is used instead.

In German you can be poodle-wet (pudelnass), poodle-naked (pudelnackt), poodle-clownish (pudelnärrisch), fit as a fiddle (pudelwohl), you can go away with your tail between your legs (abziehen wie ein begossener Pudel), throw a gutter-ball (einen Pudel werfen), or wear a knit cap (Pudelmütze)...but the most famous thing you can do (in a literary sense), is to identify something as having been the poodle’s core.


The original Doktor Faustus (Johann) was born in Roda, about 180 miles north of here. Legend has it he made a deal with the Devil (important to sign with your own blood, that way the contract doesn’t look casual or accidental), this included renouncing his Christian faith (natch)...and a 24 year expiration date. The day after his time was up the locals ventured into his room only to find "Bloodstains were everywhere. Bits of brain clung to the walls. Here they discovered an eye, and there a few teeth. Outside they found the corpse, its members still twitching, lying on a manure pile." Obviously the devil wasn’t just playing around.

I bought a copy of Goethe’s Faust and a DVD of an excellent 1960 film version starring Gustaf Gründgens, so I can watch the movie and follow along with the text. They certainly do not talk slowly, but it rhymes. This is supplemented by the English copy I bought for European lit thirty years ago (pretty sure I never read it, hated the teacher and he hated me).


Faust is out for a walk to shake off suicidal tendencies on Easter Sunday (symbolic), when he comes across a poodle (symbolic) outside the city gates (symbolic). The poodle follows him home and settles down behind the stove, only to turn into the devil. Notice the familiar form of "you see" in the text above (Du siehst), corresponding with the English (Thou seest). The 'du' form in German typically ends with 'st'...like the English hast, etc. What it signifies is simply an additional form of every damned verb, not to mention the unnecessary social intricacies created by having both a formal and a familiar form. People are dispensing with the formal more and more these days, but in general the Germans still want you to command their respect. Extraneous aspects of the German language are dropping like flies, but not fast enough to do me much good unfortunately.