American culture shows up everywhere here. English is routinely inserted into advertisements and many stores have English names only. On each police vehicle, there's "VERDÃ"žCHTIG GUTE JOBS" ["SUSPICIOUSLY GOOD JOBS"]. In tourist infested Markplatz, I saw a big band playing Jazz standards. Swinging along rather ploddingly, all songs were belted out in English. Not too far away, there was a middle-aged German dressed like a country music singer, though in a straw cowboy hat. Twanging or growling in English, he channeled Glenn Campbell, Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan, sometimes all within the same song. Well, at least he sounded like an American.
Strolling by, a teenaged girl chirped "hello baby" into her cell phone. Olliver, "It's how they talk now. It's cool to insert English words into a conversation. They would say something like, 'Alles easy. Ich bin voll happy. Das ist nice. See you!'" Years ago in Iceland, I heard a woman complain that English syntax was creeping into Icelandic conversations. English was rearranging their minds' furniture, in short. The internet has accelerated this linguistic hegemony. HÃ ¶r auf bitching! Alles groovy!
Downtown, there are bars with names like Texas, Big Easy and Papa Hemingway. One night in Staubsauger [Vacuum Cleaner] Bar on trendy Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, I caught the young bartender reading Mumia Abu-Jamal's We Want Freedom: Ein Leben in der Black Panther Party. Franziska studied media in college. I also chanced upon a Mumia sticker along the Karl-Heine-Kanal. He's bigger here than in his native Philly, apparently. Mumia was also made an honorary citizen of Paris in 2001.
Liebknecht, by the way, was a founder of the German Communist Party. After Reunification, most of the street names in Leipzig were left alone. It is curious that Kathe Kollwitz, a very minor artist, is given a busy thoroughfare, while Max Beckmann, among the greatest painters of the 20th century and a Leipzig native to boot, is relegated to a short, serpentining lane. Like other European countries, at least Germany does name its streets after painters, writers and musicians, even foreign ones. When you name a street after a cultural figure, you also educate the people, but in the States, we waste too many street names on trees, stones, animals or real estate promotional monikers.
On October 5th, I tried to observe a LEGIDA rally. Following a handful of Polish house painters walking home, I managed to pass through two police barricades, but still couldn't get close enough to see anything but the cops. Seeing me photographing, a group of giant men in black uniform approached my sorry ass. Maybe they were not Polizisten but the German basketball Mannschaft. I did as Dirk Nowitzki commanded and deleted his and his buddies' likeness from my camera.
With so many streets blocked and cops everywhere, Monday in Leipzig these days means slower or practically no business for many stores in the vicinity. As tension ratchets up, who knows if we will see street battles? America's accelerating collapse ensures that there will be more US-instigated wars, which will send even more refugees into Germany to exacerbate the already rancorous division within its society.
In small, depressed Saxony towns like Riesa, Trebsen and Bautzen, the National Democratic Party of Germany has made serious inroad. Its main slogan, "THE BOAT IS FULL--STOP THE ASYLUM SEEKER FLOOD." An extremely xenophobic area is also known a National befreite Zone [National Liberated Zone]. Since such a realm is not marked by fixed boundaries but by the mindset of its people, you won't know if you have strayed into one until you're suddenly greeted, say, by a highly unpleasant welcome.
There are those who say that these nativists, xenophobes and Neo-Nazis altogether are such a tiny minority, they're more noise than substance. A Leipziger in his 30's assessed, "I'd say 90 to 95% of the people here have no problems with immigrants. We need them since they will contribute to our economy. Many of them are highly educated. The LEGIDA and PEGIDA rallies are getting smaller and smaller, and they're not all local people. Many of these far right fanatics travel around to attend these rallies. Outsiders may think these rallies are a big deal, but they're really not. We're doing fine."
Sharply disagreeing with the above, a friend emailed me from Frankfurt, "Tensions are rising in Germany--while hundreds of thousands flee to us, Germans are beginning to understand that it will cause massive problems in the future ["]
Germany still is a rich country--but that doesn't mean, that all Germans are rich.
On the contrary, the number of poor Germans has been rising for the last 20 years--and the number of homeless people has doubled in the last five years (still only 400,000--but way too high in my view).
Now the little German worker with his shitty job or the poor pensioner, who can buy less and less with his money each year, because pensions are frozen and prices are rising, is seeing these thousands and thousands of mostly young men coming in--and they see them getting health care for free, having doctors treat them for free, that they all have these trendy smartphones, that they do not need to buy a ticket for the bus or the train, because they are refugees, while HE, the German, has to pay some extra money for the doctor and has to pay for the bus etc.
It is mostly well meant, what German officials and actors and ordinary people do, to help the refugees--but since nothing is done in the same way for German homeless people and since some Germans have to leave their apartments for refugees (there were some cases where people in social housing had to leave, because the landlord or the government wanted to put in refugees--in Munich, where my brother lives, they wanted to use a facility for coma patients, but backed off when the parents of these patients complained)--in short, it is a social disaster rising.
There are no jobs for these people. Most of them are not qualified for the labor market here. There are no houses for them. In fact, the German housing market for people with little money is down--so the poor will compete with the refugees.
At the moment most of them are in former military areas or even tents. When winter comes, the mood will get worse on both sides.
["]
Strolling by, a teenaged girl chirped "hello baby" into her cell phone. Olliver, "It's how they talk now. It's cool to insert English words into a conversation. They would say something like, 'Alles easy. Ich bin voll happy. Das ist nice. See you!'" Years ago in Iceland, I heard a woman complain that English syntax was creeping into Icelandic conversations. English was rearranging their minds' furniture, in short. The internet has accelerated this linguistic hegemony. HÃ ¶r auf bitching! Alles groovy!
Downtown, there are bars with names like Texas, Big Easy and Papa Hemingway. One night in Staubsauger [Vacuum Cleaner] Bar on trendy Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, I caught the young bartender reading Mumia Abu-Jamal's We Want Freedom: Ein Leben in der Black Panther Party. Franziska studied media in college. I also chanced upon a Mumia sticker along the Karl-Heine-Kanal. He's bigger here than in his native Philly, apparently. Mumia was also made an honorary citizen of Paris in 2001.
Liebknecht, by the way, was a founder of the German Communist Party. After Reunification, most of the street names in Leipzig were left alone. It is curious that Kathe Kollwitz, a very minor artist, is given a busy thoroughfare, while Max Beckmann, among the greatest painters of the 20th century and a Leipzig native to boot, is relegated to a short, serpentining lane. Like other European countries, at least Germany does name its streets after painters, writers and musicians, even foreign ones. When you name a street after a cultural figure, you also educate the people, but in the States, we waste too many street names on trees, stones, animals or real estate promotional monikers.
With so many streets blocked and cops everywhere, Monday in Leipzig these days means slower or practically no business for many stores in the vicinity. As tension ratchets up, who knows if we will see street battles? America's accelerating collapse ensures that there will be more US-instigated wars, which will send even more refugees into Germany to exacerbate the already rancorous division within its society.
In small, depressed Saxony towns like Riesa, Trebsen and Bautzen, the National Democratic Party of Germany has made serious inroad. Its main slogan, "THE BOAT IS FULL--STOP THE ASYLUM SEEKER FLOOD." An extremely xenophobic area is also known a National befreite Zone [National Liberated Zone]. Since such a realm is not marked by fixed boundaries but by the mindset of its people, you won't know if you have strayed into one until you're suddenly greeted, say, by a highly unpleasant welcome.
There are those who say that these nativists, xenophobes and Neo-Nazis altogether are such a tiny minority, they're more noise than substance. A Leipziger in his 30's assessed, "I'd say 90 to 95% of the people here have no problems with immigrants. We need them since they will contribute to our economy. Many of them are highly educated. The LEGIDA and PEGIDA rallies are getting smaller and smaller, and they're not all local people. Many of these far right fanatics travel around to attend these rallies. Outsiders may think these rallies are a big deal, but they're really not. We're doing fine."
Sharply disagreeing with the above, a friend emailed me from Frankfurt, "Tensions are rising in Germany--while hundreds of thousands flee to us, Germans are beginning to understand that it will cause massive problems in the future ["]
Germany still is a rich country--but that doesn't mean, that all Germans are rich.
On the contrary, the number of poor Germans has been rising for the last 20 years--and the number of homeless people has doubled in the last five years (still only 400,000--but way too high in my view).
Now the little German worker with his shitty job or the poor pensioner, who can buy less and less with his money each year, because pensions are frozen and prices are rising, is seeing these thousands and thousands of mostly young men coming in--and they see them getting health care for free, having doctors treat them for free, that they all have these trendy smartphones, that they do not need to buy a ticket for the bus or the train, because they are refugees, while HE, the German, has to pay some extra money for the doctor and has to pay for the bus etc.
It is mostly well meant, what German officials and actors and ordinary people do, to help the refugees--but since nothing is done in the same way for German homeless people and since some Germans have to leave their apartments for refugees (there were some cases where people in social housing had to leave, because the landlord or the government wanted to put in refugees--in Munich, where my brother lives, they wanted to use a facility for coma patients, but backed off when the parents of these patients complained)--in short, it is a social disaster rising.
There are no jobs for these people. Most of them are not qualified for the labor market here. There are no houses for them. In fact, the German housing market for people with little money is down--so the poor will compete with the refugees.
At the moment most of them are in former military areas or even tents. When winter comes, the mood will get worse on both sides.
["]
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