Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 11:50:14 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Murphy <clitophon-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Remember the Gothic Dom...


GERMANY'S HEART OF DARKNESS - NOTES ON A JOURNEY INTO
THE PAST
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor
without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The
flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being
bound down the river, the only thing for it was to
come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
	The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like
the beginning of an interminable waterway.  In the
offing the sea and the sky were welded together
without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned
sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed
to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply
peaked, with gleams of varnished spirits.  A haze
rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in
vanishing flatness.  The air was dark above Gravesend,
and farther back still seemed condensed into a
mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest,
and the greatest, town on earth.
(Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness)

I had walked through the security cordon.

"This is Frau Kurtz," I was told, by a bespectacled
and rotund security guard, "she will give you a
briefing on personnel arrangements."

In the train back to Hannover later that day every
moment of my meeting at Sennheiser flashed and flashed
through my brain.  I stopped at the station for a
cream cheese bagel and dandered off to the pub. 
German cuisine is not most excellent, but at least
they do not take vinegar on their chips, a normal dish
was lambsalat und bratkartoffeln (lambsalad and
scalloped potatoes).  

In the pub I spoke to the barman in my meagre German. 
The German language has unravelled some of its
mysteries since the days of Mark Twain's journey
through Germany, but it still may be the world's most
difficult language, possibly harder than Mandarin
Chinese, or so Frank, the barman assured me.  The
reason for this is the amount of agreement between
cases and genders, there being three genders and four
cases.  German is a noun-based language, English a
verb-based language, in German the verb usually goes
to the end of the sentence, rather as in Mayflower
English.  German, like English, Latin and Greek are
all related to Sanskrit, an ancient language which
flourished in India.  For instance, Sanskrit Pithar is
rather like German Vater and English Father .   This
is because all of these languages grew out of one
language, Indo-European, which is related to an even
older language called Nostratic which flourished in
Ancient Mesopotamia.  Most of the vocabulary of
Nostratic is related to the behaviour of
hunter/gatherers.  Many Germans speak fine English,
the two languages being very inter-related.  

Hannover is an unattractive business city with a fine
opera house.  The city was entirely reconstructed
after the 2nd World War, there are the remnants of the
old city, including the house where the philosopher
Liebnitz once lived.  Many people hoped that the EXPO
would re-invigorate the city, but this turned out to
be a dead duck, rather like the Millenium Dome. 
Liebnitz is a famed philosopher and mathematician, but
he didn't spend all his days in Hannover, this was
rather where he spent his latter days.  Another famous
name linked with Hannover is the poet Giebel (hence
Giebelstrasse, one of the main tubestations running to
my stop, Dohrenerturm).  Hannover's metropolitan
ugliness is transcended by its suburbs which are
wonderful.  Hannover is above all a Mittelstadt, or
middle-sized city, Germany itself is a country of
Mittelstadts and Dorfs (villages), there are no huge
cities like London or New York, Berlin itself only has
4 million inhabitants.
Local Hannoverians were very touchy about the Nazi
past.  
"The Hannoverians did very well at Waterloo," I said
to Frank, but was immediately stopped by:
"When we talk of history to us this means the Nazis."

There would then follow some kind of nagging mea culpa
which I thought to be unnecessary.  Apart from this
apologetic, many Germans I met were convinced that
Jorg Haider was not a threat, some maintained that all
auslanders (foreigners) should be expelled from the
country, but that I was alright, being white, and
therefore not a Turk.  Hannover had many minorities
and gastarbeiters (guestworkers), the biggest problems
came from the Russians and other East European
immigrants, especially in the redlight district
Steintor, the Turks were good workers, and the Chinese
mostly stayed within their own communities and were
very quiet and industrious.  Hannover's Jewish
community had dwindled since the end of the 2nd World
War, some of their shops destroyed on Kristallnacht
(an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938).  In Germany, the
Turks were the modern equivalent of the Jews,
traditional divide and conquer tactics had been used
by the German bourgeoisie to alienate the German
working-class with lies about Turks and other migrants
taking German jobs.  There was also a visible black
community, on one hoarding a trendy black guy
announced Mach hinne honey! (Hurry up honey!) on
another besorgs dir baby! (start wanking baby!).  Both
of these are local Niedersachsen idioms (Hannover was
in the German lander - county - Niedersachsen - Lower
Saxony).

On the Saturday Hannover's football team was playing
Braunschweig (Brunswick, in English, another small
German state which allied itself with Wellington at
Waterloo).  A team of mounted policemen looked set for
trouble, the atmosphere was very unsettling and
permeated with the threat of violence.  I walked onto
Hannover's main leisure centre, but the swimming pool
was closed.  A harrowing wind, as if pouring off the
Eastern Steppe whistled and groaned, I eventually made
it back to HildesheimerStrasse and the warmth of the
Vierjahrszeiten  (Four Seasons) Pub.  Frank served me
a couple of glasses of the excellent German beer
brewed locally.  This and German bread, sausage and
motorcars made Germany a wonderful locale.  On the
Thursday I took the company car for a spin and missed
the turning to Hildesheimerstrasse, ending up half way
to Berlin, I turned back and was then lost on the road
to Hamburg, a harrowing experience being lost on a
Continent bigger and better than me.  The wonderful
jugend in the pub made my life bearable, Frank, Astrid
Kuhne, Fabian and others, all serving the beer in the
strangest possible way, by leaving it to settle for
ages and ages, seemingly.  I made other friends, some
University Lecturers, businessmen, students, muesli (a
German slang expression for anoraks).  

DENKERS UND DICHTERS

Germany is traditionally the land of denkers und
dichters (thinkers and poets).  An unbelievable
panoply and list comes to mind, Goethe, Schiller,
Marx, Kant, Nietszche, Liebnitz, Rilke among many
others, and in Austria, Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein,
the world's finest philosophers, poets, composers. 
Kant may have been the greatest philosopher since
Plato, Nietzsche is one of the fifty greatest
philosophers of all time, and Marx has every right to
be thought of as the most important person of the 20th
Century.  Amazingly, many of these people were Jews. 
The Jews were Germany's bete noire, a brilliant, but
illegitimate son, or a doppelganger (double)
reflecting back German inadequacies and fears in a
distorting mirror.  On my journey through Germany I
met no Jews, but many Turks and Greeks, all of whom
spoke excellent German.   The Jewish community is now
very small, many Jews having returned to Israel after
the 2nd World War, but some are now coming back to
Germany.  German attitudes are obviously conciliatory,
but it must be said that the de-Nazification programme
maintained in East Germany was not ratified in West
Germany, rather people paid lip service to it.  By
1970 many members of West Germany's minor officialdom
had been in power in Hitler's Germany.  Even today,
Hitler's Germany   is still maintained, it may be a
very long time before the shadow of the Nazis is
finally laid to rest.  But the greatness of Germany,
its language and people, its philosophers and poets
will go on and on, and this essentially civilised
people will learn by their example, rather than by the
brute mastery of Hitler and his band of gangsters.  

SPRACHEN SIE DEUTSCH?

German has many regional dialects.  In Niedersachsen
people predominantly spoke HochDeutsch or High German,
other dialects, such as PlattDeutsch and Frisian are
closer to English.  In Southern Germany an entirely
different dialect, rich in localised vocabularies,
idioms and phrasal verbs was used.  People said Gruss
Gott (Great God) rather than Hallo, as in
Niedersachsen, and German spoken in Ostrreich
(Austria) is also very like Bayern (Bavarian) German. 
Bavaria and Austria are also very much wealthier than
Northern Germany, maintaining a very high standard of
living, 1 and a half times greater than that of the
UK.    On the borders with Italy, people speak a
version of Italo-Deutsch, German is also spoken in
Switzerland (a very strange dialect), Southern
Denmark, the Sudetenland in the Czech Republic, the
three Baltic States, and beyond, as well as many
speakers in America, where the German language may
have had a profounder influence on cultural and
linguistic standards than English.   Many mercenaries
were brought over by the British to fight in the
American War of Independence, but these 'mercenaries'
were slaves sold by the Despots of petty Princedoms
and Fiefdoms to the British.  The German language was
spoken in Africa, in the few colonies the Germans
managed to conquer in that Continent in their bid to
win a 'place in the sun'.  Other related languages are
Yiddish, a mixture of German and Hebrew, giving us
words as 'schmuck', and Afrikaans, spoken by the Dutch
(Boer) settlers of South Africa.

Frau Kurtz had returned to the office.  I rolled
around in my chair, gazing with that quality of
innerlichkeit   (inwardness) so beloved of the
Germans, at the frayed carpet.  This was not, after
all, Mistah Kurtz, but Miss Kurtz, times had changed
since Joseph Conrad wrote his great novella of
colonial exploitation and human damnation.  But my
journey through Germany was a journey into a 'Heart of
Darkness', it had an immensity of effect and a tragic
scope, the past it seemed impinged on everything, and
the past had been magnificent and sordid.

EPILOGUE

After the 15th glass of cold beer an eery silence
overcame the lighted public house, with a sudden roar,
and immense brennschluss it rose through the aureate
air and nosed in the direction of Pluto.  Everyone
held onto the edge of their seat as the pub careered
at the Speed of Light through the enmeshed galaxies. 
On the way it seemed that we observed the explosions
of bloodredrunnyegg Stars and their Planets, both
being born and dying.  The pub came to a rest on a
desert shore, limp, palm trees, and an immense
crystaline, blue sea.  As we clambered out, the glare
of 20,000 suns blinded us, the first, crashing bars of
Strauss' 'Also Sprach Zarathustra', and standing in
front of us, the monolith, black, absolute.  And as
the haze cleared we clambered forward, and out of the
dust, the form of the monolith, a statue, for Christ's
sake, I screamed,
"Is it not the Iron Chancellor himself, Klaus Von
Nietzsche..."
RIGHT TO REPLY 
The essay 'Germany's Heart of Darkness' was sent to
various correspondents in Germany in the spirit of a
right to reply.  It must be noted that this essay is
polemical, every fact is verified, except the
viewpoint is extreme, and is now amended with the
following comments.

When you write 'Hitler's Germany is still maintained'
you can't be taken seriously, the war generation has
almost died out, the small very right wing parties
like the 'Republicans' are totally insignificant to
Germany's democracy, the neonazies are no real problem
- there are so many anti-demonstrations of the
democratic and leftist parties.  We have a lot of
freedom in this country (e.g. In schools - much more
than in Britain).  Of course there still is racism to
a certain extent towards minorities, we have special
anti-racism programmes in schools though.  Not like in
Britain, for example, where I had a very appalling
experience when I was sitting quietly in the school
library working on a project when a group of English
pupils would come to the door and insulted us calling
us 'Bloody Nazis' etc etc.  The de-Nazification
programme was mainly held in Western Germany in
Nurnburg and Frankfurt and it was not a mere lip
service at all.  I saw a very good play at the theatre
a week ago: Der Fall Furtwangler (The F case), the
famous composer, never actually a member of the NSDAP
who had  helped a lot of Jewish people to leave the
country, had nevertheless (more or less
involuntarily?) contributed to the Nazi regime. He had
(wrongly) thought that artists can remain apolitical.
- He should have left the country as many
intellectuals and artists did, but he didn't for the
reason that he had so many prerogatives etc...  

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