the end of a love affair...

source

As ARD had on their website (above), the Merkel-Sarkozy relationship was rare "love at first sight," like no other German-French relation. They were the "Merkozy" of politics among the "Brangelinas." And now? The Socialist Hollande replaces Sarkozy...[Funny joke: if "Merkozy" was the Merkel-Sarkozy duo, then the new duo (Merkel + Hollande) is called...Merde!] In the press, the big question has been how Hollande will work together with Merkel.  Hollande's first trip after the inauguration is planned for Berlin, May 16th.

Actually I noticed the "marriage" and "love" metaphors in the press a couple of times. The Irish Times writes, "Merkel and Hollande prepare to court each other for marriage of convenience" 

The Wall Street Journal writes that the  Merkel-Hollande Relationship Will Succeed:

But Ms. Merkel said she would "work well" with Mr. Hollande, whom she spoke to for the first time on Sunday night after his election victory. "German-French cooperation is essential for Europe," she said. "Germany will welcome François Hollande with open arms. And then we will work together."

"Hello Neighbor!" (Source)

Franco-German friendship (source)

source

halal meat or headscarves (or: non-American electoral campaigns)

Anna Maria Jakub/Getty Images, http://www.npr.org/

It's easy to forget with all the hullabaloo about the Republicans right now...but the US is not the only country that finds itself in the middle of an election year, and a big one. France's Nicolas Sarcozy is up for re-election this year, and is currently trailing the Socialist Francois Hollande, but it's close. (Remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn? who was a favorite to run against Sarkozy until his little hotel fiasco?)  In third, on the far right, is Marie Le Pen, from the National Front (like a smarter, but crazier Sarah Palin: a fresh female face for the far-right party). In France they have two rounds of elections. The first is in May, where they pick the top two candidates to move on.

France has some interesting politics... I am always interested in following this conservative, xenophobic strain in European rhetoric of "heritage" "[French]ness", "culture," national identity and the issue of immigration. In the last few years, these topics materialized in the form of the headscarf debate. And in France it's especially complicated because of their alleged separation of church and state (laicité), one of their founding myths as a nation, and their complicated history of colonialism, and growing Muslim population. Since April 2011, France has banned the burqa, under the rationale that they are protecting women's rights. (It is estimated that only about a few hundred women even wear the burqa, so it says something more about French fears than about headscarf-wearing in France.) Back in 2004, they banned all religious symbols from schools, in an attempt to remove the headscarf from schools (cross necklaces, for example, are seen as subtle and unproblematic). So with all this in mind I heard a story on NPR yesterday about how the latest issue in France is the butcher shop, or rather, halal butchering of meat.

Halal meat is meat that was butchered according to Islamic law, where the throat of the animal is cut and the animal bleeds to death. (According to European law, the animal must be dead before it is slaughtered.) So it turns out, in most French butcher shops around Paris, they don't want to lose their Muslim customers. So they have been slaughtering all their meat this way, and not publicizing this fact, but selling both "halal" and "regular" meat. You can imagine the reaction on the Right when this news came out...

Marie Le Pen

"I have the right as a citizen to know if I'm buying meat where the animal is slaughtered in horrible cruelty, taking sometimes 15 minutes to die," said Le Pen. "This is a moral point. Don't French people who don't want to eat halal have the same rights as Muslims who do?" [from NPR]

And then Sarcozy called for stricter meat labeling, and the Prime Minister Francois Fillon took it a little farther...  "Speaking on Europe 1 Radio, Fillon suggested that Muslim and Jewish ancestral ritual slaughter traditions were outdated. 'Religions should think about continuing to keep traditions that don't have much in common with today's state of science or hygiene,' he said." Article at NPR
 In reaction, French Jews and Muslims came together to protest the comment, and Sarkozy may have ended up losing some supporters.

Oops, this post got a little long...I just thought the issue was fascinating...I'm not going to comment too much, other than to say that although immigration is a topic in the US, in Germany, in France...it definitely manifests itself in different ways in our various countries, and I thought this was an interesting little window into French issues right now. Sarcozy has also spoken of tightening France's borders, which could be a whole different topic...

Rosenmontag - Karneval

Today is "Rosenmontag" in Germany, the day of the big Karneval parades. The biggest and most famous are in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Mainz, mostly in the Rhineland and also in the southwest. Not so much in Berlin. (Below is a map where they have parades, and what they are called - Fasching, Karneval, Fastnacht, usw.) I went in 2007, to Mainz, (post here) but that experience was enough for me. Germans are usually divided along a North/South divide about how they feel about Karneval. Some love it, the others can't understand it. (It's maybe comparable to how adults feel about Halloween. Some love the chance to go out, dress in costume and go crazy, others not so much.)  My favorite part about German Karneval: the political satire.

Facebook spinning its web around its victim, plus: did I ever mention German opinion of Obama?!

I just read an article about one of the artists who design the papier-maché floats. They are often very political and topical, and super-current (I'm sure people were working very hard in the last few days since the President resigned to make floats about this! See the Wulff floats below). I love this tradition, and I think it marks a big difference to our political culture. (But maybe I'm wrong? We have an awesome tradition of political satire, with The Daily Show etc, but it's not as mainstream.) The Karneval floats are crazy and vulgar, but in the context of Karneval it's all in good fun.  This one guy, Jacques Tilly, is famous for his floats. They are really critical, and he has been attacked by various politicians for his work. Notice how a big theme is always the US/Germany relation.

Merkel + Sarkozy = Markozy

2012, Merkel and the FDP, and leading the train with the European economy

2003, Merkel and Uncle Sam
 

http://www.zeit.de/2012/08/Deutschlandkarte-Rosenmontag

gegen den Multi-Millionär..."you can call this class warfare..."

 For the most part, the Germans love Obama.  Last week we were at a Turkish restaurant and the waiter effusively expressed his support for our president. Wow, you never got that five years ago. :) It's not the worst time to be an American. But anyways, it might be interesting to share some of today's headlines after the State of the Union speech (trying not to get too political...). Notice how in the US the term "class warrior" is negatively connoted, and in Germany it's portrayed positively:

"Obama verspricht gerechteres Amerika" [Obama promises a more just America] (ARD)
"Mit Gerechtigkeit gegen den Multi-Millionär" [justice against the multi-millionaires] (Spiegel Online)
"Obama fordert Fairness" [Obama promotes equality] (Berliner Morgenpost)
"'Amerika ist wieder da!' In seiner wichtigsten Rede vor der Wahl greift Obama die Reichen an" ["America is back!" In his most important speech before the elections Obama attacks the rich] (BILD)
"Wahlkämpfer Obama - populistisch und offensiv" [Campaigner Obama - populist and on the offensive] (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

not even commenting on this fascinating image they chose...

In this article in the Süddeutsche (above), entitled "In the Land of the Unequal", they say that Obama is a different man than four years ago, a "class-warrior [Klassenkämpfer, here in the positive sense] who stands for justice. They write, "Das ist eigentlich unamerikanisch, aber trotzdem nötig" [That is actually un-American, but still necessary.] "Denn angesichts eines extrem ungerechten Steuersystems, das schamlos die Reichen bevorzugt, haben viele US-Bürger das Grundvertrauen verloren: dass jeder die Chance habe, sein Glück zu machen." [Because in the face of an extremely unjust tax system, that shamelessly favors the rich, many US citizens have lost their fundamental belief: that everyone has the chance to make his fortune." 

Needless to say, the American press was not quite so positive. This Washington Post article does a good job "fact checking" empty rhetoric and statistical claims.

The discussion of taxes--which seems to be a huge part of this year's election as well--was brought up in most of the Ameircan articles I read, and the German press also focused on Obama's "attack on millionaires."  In Germany, individuals earning above EUR 250,731 pay 45% income tax. Additionally, there is a "Solidarity tax" (Solidaritätszuschlag) up to 5.5% in top brackets to help the costs from German reunification, and is paid in both (former) East and West. Also...if you belong to a religion, you pay 8-9% Kirchensteuer, church tax. So it's maybe not completely surprising that they find Obama's proposals fair and "socially just."

European Investment Prospectus

funny video:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

"Still True: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You. Ask What You Can Do For Your Country"

Tonight I went to hear the American Ambassador to Germany speak, Philip Murphy. He was giving the opening lecture to a series of lectures on "citizenship" at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The title of his talk was "Still True: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You. Ask What You Can Do For Your Country". He talked about what Kennedy's inauguration speech meant to Americans in 1961 (a lot), and argued that although among younger Americans this kind of patriotic "call to arms" doesn't really seem to resonate, it is still a worthwhile mantra. Overall, I found Murphy's speech interesting, although light and superficial, and also rhetorically fascinating. Nice, fluffy political speeches are humorously predictable: throw in a few founding fathers (Jefferson and Franklin were well-represented), a few impressive statistics, a couple of historical anecdotes (especially the Berlin connections were nice), and, of course, throw a few asides to the President (Obama embodies Kennedy's ideals). It was nice to be a part of this audience, and at one point the Ambassador asked if there were any Americans in the audience, and he was happy to have us there.

He started out the speech talking about "town hall meetings" and what participatory democracy means, and being an engaged citizen. He said that in his own travels throughout Germany he feels that he is often privileged to take part in such small-scale discussions and to hear about US-German relations through this smaller, bottom-up kind of discussion.


Then he went on to emphasize the importance of immigration to the United States, and how we are a "country of immigrants." I don't know about all of his statistics, but he said that out of the 311 million Americans, 3 million are native Americans and the rest are "immigrants," and that today as well as in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries it is because of the hard work, dedication and innovation of our country's immigrants that we have been so successful. He did mention that it hasn't always been a "nice" history--mentioning violence against various immigrant minorities, as well as our history of slavery--but he did refer to the "melting pot" vs "vegetable stew" metaphors (obviously preferring the latter) quite a lot. "You want to be able to taste the carrots!"

He said that recently, during two different public talks he gave in Germany, the first question he got from the audience was "what does it mean that anyone born in the US is an American citizen?" [In Germany this has long been a topic of debate; since 2001(!!) you get German citizenship if you are born in Germany, provided your parents have been here legally for 8 years.] Murphy talked about how in the US, 1 of every 4 people is a first-generation immigrant or a child of first-generation immigrants. (I guess in Germany it is 1 in 3).  This fit into his point about how the most important thing is "integration" (not assimilation, not "melting pot" but "stew") and how immigration is not only a challenge for immigrants, but is a question of "WE", also a challenge for the community to welcome them and help them feel welcome in society.


Although the general tone of the speech (I would argue) was "Germany can learn a lot from the US," he explicitly said that the US also has a lot to learn from Germany, and how similar a lot of the issues are that our countries are dealing with. Throughout, he definitely mentioned national citizenship as the starting point, although he did end by talking about "global citizenship" and what citizenship means in a world of globalization. 


(Interesting in this context is the second part of Kennedy's speech)
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." - Kennedy


Murphy also referred multiple times to the upcoming presidential elections (I guess his job is on the line, too...) and how debates will be centered around what concepts like "freedom" and "equality" mean to various Americans.

All in all, I'm glad I went, even though it was a rather flowery talk, that remained rather vague and idealist, rather than concrete about the challenges of the meaning of citizenship in today's world. What does "citizenship" mean when people want to build a double-fence wall (scarily reminiscent of the Berlin Wall) between the US and Mexico? Or when the "Occupy" movements demonstrate for the "99%"? Our country is so divided right now, over really huge issues. I am very interested to see what happens with the elections...

Citizenship can be an official definition, the belonging symbolized by the passport (national belonging), or it can be understood in the participatory sense, engagement. In German there are actually two words for these different senses: Staatsangehörigkeit, belonging to a certain state, and Staatsbürgerschaft, being a citizen of a state. The notions, the concepts of citizenship, are from the French idea of the citoyen and the texts of the French and American Revolutions.

And Kennedy's speech? Is it "still true"? To me it feels outdated to ask what I can do for my country. I feel like our allegiances all need to be far more global, our perspective wider than that, and at the same time more local, more small-scale community-oriented. The discussions about the challenges of immigration, for example...We not only need to work to promote equality and prosperity in developing countries, but also to promote integration and the kind of "welcoming" Murphy mentioned on a local level.

I welcome comments on this topic!

Bürokratie, continued, and to be continued...

So the bureaucracy checklist continues...
DONE - Registration at City Hall
DONE - Bank Account
_____ - Registration at University
_____ - Visa at Ausländerbehörde
 
This whole process of getting any official paperwork taken care of is constantly going from one place to the other, getting the necessary Bescheinigung, certification/paperwork. You get one administrative office to stamp a piece of paper, and bring it somewhere else. In fact, there are a whole bunch of "Beamtenwitze", or jokes about civil servants/government workers in Germany. "Beamte" is a bit difficult to translate, because it is much more common in Germany and has a slightly different connotation.

Beim Bürgeramt. "Wie viele Beamte arbeiten denn hier?" wird der Bürgermeister gefragt. Dieser überlegt eine Zeitlang und antwortet dann: "Knapp die Hälfte."

At City Hall. "How many government employees work here?", the mayor is asked. He thinks about it a while and then answers, "About half."

Auf einem Tisch liegt ein 100 DM-Schein. Am Tisch sitzen der Weihnachtsmann, der Osterhase, ein schneller und ein langsamer Beamte. Wer bekommt den Hundertmarkschein? Der langsame Beamte, denn den Weihnachsmann, den Osterhasen und den schnellen Beamten gibt es nicht.

There is a 100-DM bill lying on a table. At the table, there sit Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, a slow and a fast government employee. Who gets the 100-Mark-bill? 

Answer: The slow government employee, because there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or Fast government employee. 

In order to register as a student at the university, you have to have proof of health insurance. So today we went to the AOK office (public health insurance). It costs about 77 EUR/month for insurance.

Tomorrow, we hope to register as students (pay some fees and get our U-Bahn ticket), and turn in paperwork to start the long visa process. Wish us luck! The office where foreign students can register is only open three days a week, Mon/Tues in the morning, Thursdays for 3 hrs in the afternoon! It's so crazily inaccessible...

Church and State: the Pope comes home

photo from tagesschau.de

The Pope--who is from Bavaria--is going to be in Germany for three days, and will even be speaking in the Bundestag (congress) in Berlin. This is a bit controversial, because he's there as a political figure who is also a religious figure... Some of the representatives (about 100) are not attending the speech in parliament out of protest. Elke Ferner (SPD) had a good interview where she said that the parliament should be about dialogue and discussion, and obviously this will not be the case with this speech.  Very few foreign heads of start are invited to speak in front of the Bundestag. Nixon was the first in 1969, others include Nelson Mandela and Vladimir Putin.

Also, in Germany there is a strange relation between church/state. In Germany the churches get their money through a "Kirchensteuer" (church tax) that is automatically taken out of your income. When I registered, I also had to say whether I belong to the catholic or protestant church. I think usually you choose between Catholic / Protestant / Jewish / atheist (opt out). So far there is not an option for Muslims. (As a parallel, there is also still religion instruction in schools, where you can choose between Catholic or Protestant class, or opt out.) This means that churches in Germany don't have to actively try to get members like in the US, which also influences what churches do and what their communities are like. The churches get about 65-70% of their income from this tax, which is about 5-9% of someone's income.

Someone once said to me that a big difference between charity in the US and Germany is that in the US we don't pay as high of taxes, so it's more up to individuals to be engaged and support the charities they want to support.  In Germany they pay really high taxes, but they expect that this money is going to the right things. So paying a church tax is a way of supporting programs like "Brot für die Welt" that fight world hunger, or the German Red Cross and its programs. As a result, there is less volunteering and fundraising, and such things.

Addendum: Just saw the New York Times has a piece on this today: A Papal Homecoming to a Combative Germany

Politik: Wowereit gewinnt

results are in:

 "SPD leading, Pirates in Parliament, FDP at the bottom"
In Berlin the current mayor Wowereit will stay in office....the SPD could make a coalition with either the CDU or with the Green party. The Pirate Party won 8.5%, so they will have representation in a state parliament for the first time.

in the NYT: Berlin's Tech Scene

Article in today's New York Times: Berlin Hopes Growing Tech Community Will Lift City’s Economy

..."It was Mr. Wowereit who coined the famous catchphrase of Berlin as “poor, but sexy,” that has stuck to the city, which has an unemployment rate of 13.3 percent, the highest of any state in Germany and well above the national average of 7 percent. He chose to aggressively market the city as a creative capital, emphasizing fashion, art and music, hoping that the magnetic effect of the city’s popularity with tourists would rub off on the economy....

“With Depression, war, fascism, the wall and the mass migration of talent out of Berlin, it’s quite clear that the city was set back by historical circumstances,” said Richard Florida, professor of business and creativity at the University of Toronto, whose research has drawn a link between bohemians and economic growth. “Looking at the experience of other cities that remade themselves, like Pittsburgh, shifting to an open technology-savvy creative economy takes at minimum a generation.”

Politik

 On 18. September there are elections in Berlin, so the streets are full of these political posters. It's interesting to see how the various parties market themselves and what issues are important for them, and for this neighborhood. In Germany if a party gets 5% of the vote they get representation in parliament, so there are more third parties that we would never see in the US. Most of the posters are just the candidate's photo with the party name, but some are more interesting. Above, the "Pirate Party" tries to attract young voters, using facebook slogans: "847,870 voters 'like' this"; and the second poster says "Not sure why I'm hanging here, you don't vote anyways". The other two blue posters are for the PSG: Party for Social Equality, and they are advertising their international solidarity for  workers: against the "bank dictatorship", and "Gegen [against] Rassismus und Nationalismus". Die Linke (far-left party) has this very colorful, multilingual poster, and the Green Party has this alternative artsy poster with the woman with the trident. 

Klaus Wowereit (SPD) has been mayor of Berlin since 2001, so there are a few parties trying to oust him. The Green party has been doing really well in Germany (especially since the Japan nuclear catastrophe...) and the CDU is advertising their candidate with the slogan "Damit sich was ändert" (so that things change). Wowereit coined the slogan "arm aber sexy" for Berlin (poor but sexy), and is openly gay, which I think also says something about German politics/culture (compared to American politics) I just did some google-research to make sure I'm not wrong about this, and Houston is the largest city to elect an openly gay mayor, also Portland and Providence. Anyways, interesting.

Because so many of the posters in Kreuzberg have to do with multi-culturalism, I found this poster really interesting (left). It's from the FDP (center-right party, similar to libertarian in the US). It says: "What is the FDP's stance in regards to integration? We think it would be a nice gesture to ask for "Croissants" instead of "Schrippen" [a German roll] in Paris."  I find this argument (or the implied argument) a bit flawed...first of all everyone in Germany (like in the US) knows what a "Croissant" is, and French culture is (like for us) considered "high culture". The poster kinda makes you smile, because no one would go to Paris and order "Schrippen" or, in English, a "dinner roll," when they want a croissant. What is implied, of course, is that people living in Germany should speak German and "integrate" themselves. "Integration" is a big keyword (compared to "Assimilation") because it implies that you don't have to give up your own culture, but you just "integrate" into your new culture.
Below/right is another political poster for the FDP about schools: "Will the the FDP support Gymnasien or the Einheitsschule? [Answer:] We would also find the idea of one uniform/comprehensive soccer league silly." In Germany the secondary school system has tiers--so the students who want to go on to college usually all go to the Gymnasium, and students who want to go into a certain trade go to a Realschule or Hauptschule. After the 4th grade teachers decide which school students go to, and this often ends up being a question of who your parents are. Additionally, handicapped students do not go to the same school as their peers but a Sonderschule. The Einheitsschule is a proposed secondary school model that is more like the US high school, where children stay together from Kindergarten through the end of schooling. So the comparison to soccer suggests that it would be silly (doof) to throw all the kids--smart and not-so-smart--together in one school. I have strong feelings about this...the Gymnasium system is basically a class and prestige question,and it really disadvantages kids from lower-class or immigrant backgrounds. Parents want to be able to say their child goes to a Gymnasium.  And the SPD and the Green Party support the idea of an Einheitsschule, but, like I said, lots of voters are not so sure.

Below are the results from the last congressional election (Chancellor Angela Merkel is CDU, the blue bar below):