This is the gloriously unedited version of an essay that appeared in Poetry Express, April, 2005 - SJ

Paul Murphy

DER VERGANGENHEIT

It was a windy afternoon in Autumn (Herbst), dead leaves blew down Karl-Frederich Strasse.

In the Guidebook, ‘between Freiburg and Baden-Baden, Emmendingen, Psychiatric Hospital.’

It is true that Emmendingen was a quiet village, but the Psychiatric Hospital held more devils for the writers of the Guidebook, than for the village’s inhabitants, who were mostly untroubled by the local population of mental patients.

On the train to Emmendingen from Freiburg one night, I sat down with a group of Punks and Anarchists, and reached for my regulation, well-watered alcoholic beverage, which I reserved for the train.  The young man beside me told me that his father was an Apache Indian, and that he spoke fluent Apache.  He arched his eyebrows, and said,

“I am Bond, James Bond….”

In the pub Zum Fuchs (After the Fox, or Off to the Fox, German prepositions were an immense problematic for me, the Germans said the same about English prepositions…) an old wino told me that the Bahnhof (Station) had razor wire raised above the crossing, to prevent the self-harm that the mental patients customarily tried to commit upon themselves.  I never went to the Hospital to have a look, but I knew that its presence lowered the rents.  I had also been told by the Freiburgers not to go near the village, because of the ‘mad house’.

The town also had the odd mad artist, in the Café Hinterhaus, a local sculptor, with a minor reputation, would customarily come in with leaves and branches in his hair, and a plastic bag over his head.  Behaviour like that is regarded as the eccentricities of genius, when a Mozart commits them, when it is a minor or unknown artist, the verdict is ‘insanity’, which is not to say that he wasn’t colourful.  I laughed at his banter with Frank, who served the coffees and ejected the unworthy.  

Der Vergangenheit.   That is a word with a multiplicity of possibilities, it sounds abstract, harsh and unrelenting, which is what I supposed most of all was the chief characteristic of the German language.  The words Heil, Achtung and Verboten came to my mind, mostly gleaned from war films, which peppered our small screens from time to time.  I discovered that the little ending ‘dom’ added to some English words was heit in German hence Freiheit is ‘Freedom’ in English and so on.  The word der Vergangenheit means ‘the past’ in English, I supposed it might mean ‘multi-storey car park’ or something else equally multi-part.  German has the facility to build up new nouns from parts, in English we can also fashion many new verbs, but many nouns enter our language through foreign languages rather than as fundamentally new coinages.

I attended many German classes in Freiburg, which was not so much to do with the history of language, as language used in common parlance, in everyday speech.  This diachronic view of language was only taught in University Linguistics Departments, the synchronic approach predominated in teaching German as a foreign language.  For instance, it was necessary that the students know that the German word Volk is ideologically loaded (with resonance of the Nazis, and their definition of the people as a White, Aryan racial group, as opposed to Semitic, Slav or Negroid racial types, who were classified by them as sub-humans) but that it simply means ‘people’ in English.  The conflict between a (diachronic) historically rooted view of culture and society, and a perception of culture and society as fundamentally ahistorical (summed up succinctly, in Henry Ford’s famous aphorism, ‘History is bunk’) coloured my stay in Germany.

I was in Emmendingen to discover the past, that is what interested me most of all, not the present which was altogether in an exponential falling off into banality, that is until September the 11th and the Terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, brought the contemporary back into focus.   At first the scare mongering and propaganda convinced me that this was Armageddon (Private Eye ran a copy soon after the attack with a cover depicting the President receiving news of the attack and his aide saying ‘It’s Armageddon Sir.’  And Bush replying, ‘Well Arm a gedden out of here,’ a satirical reference to the amount of time Bush spent away from Camp David and Washington after the attack shepherded by Air Force 1 out of danger, some leading American politicians and even his own staff felt that he spent too long in the air).   I imagined my call up papers being sent to my home in Belfast, well, I thought, I can hide out here, while the war takes its course.

In essence, Emmendingen was a very interesting place, with a great deal of history, its depiction by the Guide book as ‘a psychiatric hospital’ was most unfair, and a gross mis-representation.  The salient points of Emmendingen’s past were the village’s horse painters (Emmendingen, geburtsstadt des Pferdemalers Fritz Boehle, Emmendingen, birthplace of the horse painter Fritz Boehle), the first manned attempt at flight in Germany, which ended up in a dung heap (An dieser Stelle landete der Ingenieur Carl Friedrich Meerwein mit seinem selbstgebauten Flug-Apparat nach dem ersten Flugversuch Deutschlands, Anno Domini, 1784, at this site in 1784 the engineer Carl Friedrich Meerwein made the first manned flight in Germany with his self-driven flying apparatus) and the meeting of the poet, dramatist and novelist, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) with his sister Cornelia Schlosser-Goethe (1750-1777) in May 1775.  The villagers were clearly proud of their connection with Goethe, Germany’s greatest author admired Sage and creator, for many, of the German language and German national consciousness.  By the Station an alley Cornelia Passage, named after Cornelia Schlosser-Goethe, who died two years after the meeting, aged 27.  The Schlosser’s house is now the public library.  Her tragic early death struck me as strange, since her older brother lived for so long, and came through so many serious illnesses.   Her grave was also somewhere in the village, but having a dislike of graveyards I stayed away.  At the meeting of Cornelia and Johann Wolfgang was Cornelia’s husband, Johann Georg Schlosser, a local dignitary, a host of other minor officials, and the poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) a minor, tragic Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) poet, and subject of an unfinished short story by Georg Buchner (1813-1837) (the German playwright, who died at the age of 23 and left us the plays Danton’s Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzceck and an unfinished short story about the mad Sturm und Drang poet Lenz - Buchner was regarded as a scientist who wasted his life with the writing of plays and an interest and passion for revolutionary politics, which got him into trouble on more than one occasion...).   Goethe’s stay lasted for two weeks, he possibly went from pub to pub, listening to stories and local gossip, or walked into the forest for walks and tours.

Obviously, a central element of the past, debated more than any other past event, that was present by its absence in Emmendingen, the Holocaust, Endlosung der Juden Frage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question), Shoah (Hebrew for ‘annihilation’).  The Synagogue was in the centre of the village until the Nazis dynamited it in 1939, subsequently showing real Nazi contempt by billing the Jewish Community for the dynamite and work time.  The local Jews gave the German Government (the Nazis) the Synagogue and its grounds in payment.  After the war the ground was returned to them, but they were left with the task of re-building the Synagogue themselves.  Today, they are still short of the funds for re-building.  Beside the square where the Synagogue once was is a plaque, which ends gegen Rassenwahn und Faschimus  (against racial fantasy and Fascism).  Typically, in Germany, these lofty platitudes only appeared after the event.  There are now few Jews left in Germany, perhaps as few as 50,000.  As I walked around the square, I spotted a little Museum.  It was dedicated to Emmendignen’s Jews.  I went there one Sunday and looked at the exhibits, mostly objects of importance to the Jewish religion and potted history of the village’s Jews.  I conversed with the curator, an Italian, and one of the many foreigners (Turks, Kurds, Iranians, Poles, there were many Poles in the apartment block on Brunnenstrasse, where I eventually found an apartment).  The former Gasthaus Ochsen (at the corner of Karl-Friedrich Strasse) was originally a Guest House, then a cigarette factory, and finally the Deportation Centre for the village’s Jews, who were sent to Auschwitz in 1940.  Today it is a doctor’s surgery and apartments. (I was offered the top storey apartment when I first went to Emmendingen, I noted the irony that obviously none of the villagers wanted to live there, and bequeathed it to a foreigner to make what he could of it.  The apartment was clean, unfurnished and very large, too big for me to live in and heat successfully, so in the end I rejected the opportunity to live with the village’s past.  But as I stood outside Gasthaus Ochsen (Guesthouse Oxen) I contemplated the soft, limpid eyes of the oxen carved on the door’s lintel, gazing down at me as if from immemorable time, from out of the distant past.) 

The forest surrounded Emmendingen, the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), of course, famous for its Black Forest Gateau.  That is, at least, my only previous association with this place.  I had heard of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) formerly Rector of the University of Freiburg, where I taught a few creative writing classes.  Heidegger is rated as a Great Philosopher, at least for his impenetrable work, Sein und Zeit, his contribution to the now unfashionable Existentialist philosophy, and for his infamous connection with the Nazis who he had supported.  In brief, Heidegger had given a speech in 1933, in his position as Rector of the University, in support of Hitler and the Nazis.  His support wavered after this, and he ended up in 1944 being sent to the Rhine Dykes, as that ‘most expendable of University Professors’.  Martin Heidegger is at best a figure of controversy.  He was born in this part of Germany and had a hut in Todtneuberg, where he worked on his philosophical speculations.  Another famous person born in the Schwarzwald was Herman Hesse (1864-1947), who lived for the most part in Switzerland and India.  His fame had peaked in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, when the vogue for India and Buddhist Mysticism had been at its height, with everyone from The Beatles to Hesse, who was by then dead taking their cue from the East.  The point is that Hesse had been there a lot earlier than John, Paul, George (RIP), and Ringo, in 1911, when the Journey to the East was a decidedly bizarre preoccupation for any European.

But my chief interest in the Forest was its metaphorical significance.  What did it mean beyond what it was?  A forest, dim and spectral, with mysteries and secrets, where the rehearsal for the Future of Germany took place, where a primeval act of terror and violence took place, which was to overshadow the future, the present and the past.    The Forest represented the unkempt and wild places of the German Romantic temperament and imagination, as opposed to the well-ordered garden of the Enlightenment (in German the word Enlightenment is Aufklarung).  The two forces, the Enlightenment and Romanticism are summed up for me in the contrasting music of Mozart and Beethoven, the first mathematically sublime, the second elemental and passionate.  The historian Craig is very critical of the Romantics, and sees them as the forebears of the Nazis, with their emphasis on inspiration against reason, their cult of genius and eccentricity as a sign of genius, and their central metaphor of the wood, as against the orderly garden of the Enlightenment.  History for the Enlightenment was an orderly space of facts and dates, for the Romantics, history was adumbrated in the dream, the fairy story, the journey; history was a purely symbolic manifestation, a shadow to be deciphered by those who would or could.  The Romantics were closer to a Freudian account of the subconscious than we can know, but clearly the figures of Wagner, Nietzsche and Freud figure large in any account of the legacy of the Romantic movement in Germany.

One previous encounter with tales of the German forest had been through the stories of the Brothers Grimm.  Jacob Ludwig Karl, the elder of the brothers Grimm, was born in 1785, and Wilhelm Karl in the following year.  They both studied at Marburg, and from 1808 to 1829 mainly worked in Kassel as state-appointed librarians, Jacob also assisting in diplomatic missions between 1813 and 1815 and again in 1848.  Both brothers had been professors at Gottingen for several years when in 1837 they became two of the seven leading Gottingen academics dismissed from their posts by the new King of Hannover for their liberal political views.  In 1840 they were invited to settle in Berlin as members of the Academy of Sciences, and here they remained until their deaths (Wilhelm died in 1859 and Jacob in 1863).

Jacob, one of Germany’s greatest scholars, is justly regarded as the founder of the scientific study of the German language and medieval German literature.  His most monumental achievements were the Deutsche Grammatik (1819-37) and, with his brother’s assistance, the initiation of the great Deutsches Worterbuch, the many volumes of which were not completed by later scholars until 1961 and which has become the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Between them, and often in collaboration, the Grimms were responsible for pioneering work on medieval texts, heroic epics, legends and mythology, and for many other contributions to the study of ancient German culture.  One of their most remarkable publications was the Kinder-und Hausmarchen (1812, with many subsequent editions), which remains to this day the most famous collection of folktales in the world.

Germans have a great culture of ‘wellness’ (in English the word is ‘fitness’, ‘wellness’ seems suspect as an English adjective), with bicycles everywhere.  The trains are generally fantastic, but, for some Germans there is over-dependence on the culture of the car.  Thus, the Black Forest can be viewed from a car, but not as Goethe might have viewed it, as he walked on foot through the villages and their streets and lanes.  Of course, he may also have had a horse, or a carriage.  Thus I only ever viewed the Black Forest from a distance, in a train or car.  Distances were also a problem, getting to Kandel, the second highest peak in the Black Forest, took 45 minutes by car, there was an extensive ski-run at the top, and a hotel, closed in early December when I visited it.  The climate exhibited a schizophrenia of hot summers and cold winters that was not evident in my native Ireland, where, you might say, it was bloody cold and wet all the time.

If the rest of the Black Forest, apart from Freiburg im Breisgau and Emmendingen, was largely unknown to me, these two centres still afforded a great deal.  As well as the culture of the outdoors, there was also a culture of saunas and springs.  Saunas were literally everywhere.  Eugenkeidelbad had thermal waters bubbling up from underneath the Black Forest and lots of saunas, Schwimmbads (swimming pools), Freibads (open air pools, used extensively in the Summertime), and simply more and more saunas.  There were also many medical baths.  These aspects of German life are very important in informing any non-German reader of the German character (if any people really have a ‘character’).  At the baths I met many Volk Deutsch, Germans from Poland, the Baltic States and Russia, from as far away as Uzbekistan and Tajekistan.  The Volk Deutsch I found to be much friendlier than the local Germans.  Most of them had left Russia after the Wende (change) in 1989-90, and the Communist implosion.  Afterwards Russia had descended into criminality, mafia gangs dominated Russian cities with a plethora of violence and intimidation, and the incompetent leadership of Boris Yeltsin had only made matters worse.  I watched the new Russian leader Vladimir Putin (Der Spiegel - Germany’s cleverest and most erudite weekly magazine, now that Stern has become more topical and generalised in its focus - called Putin, Russland’s neuer starker mann - Russia’s new strong man) give a keynote speech before the German Parliament, his German was very good, and he made reference to and quoted from Kant, Schiller and Goethe.  The Germans were very impressed by Putin’s attempt to speak German well, and do honour to their glorious past, another sign of a thaw in Russo-German relations.  Obviously, relations between the West and the DDR (Deutsche Demokratik Republik), Russia’s puppet regime in Eastern Europe, had been icy in the midst of the Cold War.  I made friends with one Russian from the Baltic State of Latvia (in German, Lettland) who taught me Russian in exchange for English.  From him I learned that the word Bolshoi means big in English, that gorod is the Russian word for city, and that God means Bog.  The Russian alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, is based partly on the Greek alphabet, which is obviously of non-Latin origin.  I recognised some paralellisms between Russian and German.  Russian, like German, is an inflected language (an inflected language has a case system which determines word order, in German the cases are nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, Latin also has vocative and ablative cases.  Russian has two more cases than German, English has vestigial cases, but cases proper left English at the time of the Mayflower.  In brief, the nominative case is the subject, the accusative case the object, the dative the indirect object and the genitive is the possessive.)  He had come from Riga to do research in semi-conductors at the university.  To my mind semi-conductors were largely a mystery, a vast extension of my basic mathematics and physics.  He explained to me that he had read Herbert Wells, Robert Burns, both symbols for the former Socialist project, now in a very sad decline.  He also told me how sad people had been in Riga when Communism finally collapsed, a fact that surprised me, since I always presumed that the Baltic States were solidly anti-Russian and anti-Communist.  During the 2nd World War many men from the Baltic States and the Ukraine had joined the German army, and constituted some of the best SS Divisions that Hitler possessed, committing many atrocities in the East before the demise of the Nazi regime in 1945.  He felt that valuable aspects of the former Soviet system could be welded to the Capitalist system, to make a synthesis of two systems.  He explained to me that the strength of the Soviet system had been education, especially mathematics and physics, and that other aspects of these regimes could be models for new, projected Capitalist societies, which would benefit from a synthesis of values.  He spoke good German, explaining to me that his mother had been a teacher of German, but was now a Rentner (pensioner), and had given him the proto-typical Russian name, Igor, from the opera Prince Igor by Borodin.  His father had taught Russian at a State school, fought in the 2nd World War in the Russian army, and had ended up as a Headmaster, before retiring.  He told me a great deal about the Russian experience in Afghanistan (a combined Northern Alliance army and American airforce was currently fighting another war in that country), he had known a Captain of Paratroopers in the Russian army, who had told him that killing people was a messy and unpleasant business, a fact which it hardly took a genius to ascertain.  And also about Russian policy in the Balkans, describing the Kosovo Liberation Army as a bunch of murderous thugs and brigands who initiated a war against the Serbs.  The view in the West is that Milosevic, the Serb leader, initiated his paramilitaries in Kosovo to ethnically cleanse the Kosovo Albanians in Kosovo (some thousands of Albanians were placed in Kosovo after the 2nd World War, and grew to be a substantial minority).  The Russians do not recognise the Court in the Hague either, which is now trying the former Serb leader.  They see the Court as a puppet of NATO and the West and not as an independent Court.  A similar bifurcation of opinion happened when the KLA and its allies once again went to war in Macedonia (the so-called Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).  They claimed that they were fighting for more rights (Albanians are denied language rights in the FYROM, ie their language Albanian is not recognised as an official State language) and for representation in the country’s Civil Service and Police Force, whereas their enemies in Macedonia claimed that they were fighting for a Greater Albania, a region which would incorporate all the Albanians of Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo in one country.  In the end NATO once again had to intervene in this conflict and a compromise of sorts was brokered.  Today the region is still unstable, and it is perhaps just a matter of time before another war begins in the Balkans, even though Milosevic is now at the Hague facing impending trial for War Crimes.

We often strolled through Martinstor together, Freiburg’s central district.  Martinstor is clearly a Medieval city gateway.  I discovered a plaque on one side which commemerated the burning of three witches, drei Hexen verbrennt with the familiar platitudes urging us to think about Unmenschlichkeit (inhumanity).  Next to Martinstor is the pub Schlappen where it was possible to find good food, whisky and beer, the internet café, Ping Wing, and a vegetarian restaurant.  Igor found a picture of the witch burning in the museum in Martinstor,  but after persistent attempts to find it I gave up.  At the off-kino (a film theatre which exhibits alternative or arts cinema - there were four cinemas in Freiburg.  The Cinemax, a utilitarian cinema showing mostly Hollywood fare, with some oldies and classics on a Tuesday, the UFA film theatre, which was supposed to be an Arts Cinema, but which showed most of the Hollywood fare regurgitated at the Cinemax.  UFA originally produced films, and was Germany’s Hollywood in the 1920s, with directors such as Murnau, Fritz Lang and many other stars who subsequently left for America after or even before the rise of Hitler.  The UFA company was owned by the businessman Alfred Hugenburg, who also ran an extreme Right-Wing party, the DNVP (Deutschenationale Volkspartei; German National Peoples’ Party) which later allied with Hitler to give him his majority in the 1933 elections.  Many high street banks and chains allied themselves with the Nazis, still visible on the highstreet, they suffered only punitive damages after the war) I watched Shadow of the Vampire, a film dealing with Murnau’s earlier silent era classic Nosferatu.  In the film the vampire, originally played by Max Shreck, but replaced in this version by Willem Dafoe, devours the film crew at the end, with the exception of Murnau - played by John Malkovitch -  having the last laugh after all, as it escapes immolation by the sun’s rays at the end of the film.  Perhaps the vampire is an incarnation of Hitler, escaping final destruction to be reborn in a different place and time.  I mused at the title, is it the shadow of the vampire, or the shadow of Hitler?  At the same time Der Spiegel was running a historical retrospective on the Nazi era, entitled ‘Hitler’s Long Shadow’.  Of course, this was also another revision of the Nazi period, for obvious reasons Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany and France, so Der Spiegel’s account did not move far from the accepted version of events, as contrasted with the Revisionist historian David Irving, whose revision of the Holocaust was overturned in court in his action against the Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt.).  Watching it in German seemed appropriate, although I struggled to understand more than a few words, at this point I had only been in Germany a few weeks.  Later I saw Apocalypse Now Redux in the same cinema, a classic I have always admired.  In German it is even more fascinating, even though the studio was full of beer-drinking Germans (in Germany it is normal to drink alcohol at a public film showing, another contrast with English sobriety in public places outside the bar, and possibly a sign that the Germans had no fear of drunkeness and alchohol-inspired behaviour).  Another film which I watched repeatedly was Tim Burton’s Planet der Affen (Planet of the Apes) mainly for the gourgeous visuals, and the humour inspired by a pack of monkeys speaking German.  I went one night with a Korean friend who was similarly fascinated.  At Xmas the two children’s films were the main fare, the disappointing Harry Potter  and the better Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings).  Inbetween came Schokolade zum Fruhstuck (this was the German title of the film The Diary of Bridget Jones), which was lighter and funnier, again I was lost because of my lack of fluent German, but picked up the odd word and sentence.  Going to the cinema was a good way of becoming immersed in German, since many of the Germans spoke good English, and would prefer to practice their English with you, than give you practice with your German.  In any case, the local dialect Badisch, was supposedly impenetrable, although I understood it quite well after a while.

There was a definite culture of music in Freiburg, in fact the presence of music was everywhere.  Concerts were advertised all the time, and there was a training school for opera singers in the city, I met a trainee, Claudia, one evening on the tram.  I went to a Wagner opera, Der Fliegende Hollander, at Freiburg’s opera house in the Summer time, just before the Summer recess, and then a concert of Claude Debussy’s piano works, and a concert featuring works by two modern Japanese composers as well as a standard Mozart piano concerto.  The day after I was sitting in the sauna of the Hotel Dorint, which is beside the concert hall, when a diminutive Japanese man entered.

“Are you a performer with the orchestra,” I asked him.
“No, I’m a composer,” he answered.

This Japanese gentleman was obviously the composer of one of the suites of modern music.  He told me that the term ‘atonal’ (atonal music was pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) in the 1920s, although aspects of atonality can be seen in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and in Wagner’s operas, particularly the prelude to Das Rheingold .  These works pre-figured Schoenberg’s later experiments and his atonal system, prefigured in such works as Verklarte Nacht - Transfigured Night - the atonal system dispenses with the harmonic scale used in Western musical history) was no longer used, and that it is now just ‘modern music’.  He added that his opera King Lear would be premiering in Covent Garden after his stay in Freiburg.  At his concert a woman had remarked to me that this modern music was like science fiction to her, compared to the famliar work of the repertoire.  Later I met a German composer in Emmendingen and we agreed to begin work on an opera.

The autumn leaves blew down Karl Friedrich Straße.  The house fronts looked like blank, pious faces, eternally silent.  The house fronts a bare façade, rising towards me like the faces of pious pilgrims wending their way to church on a Sunday morning.

Emmendingen is a village (Dorf) on the edge of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest).  It is known as the Gateway to the Black Forest and it is here that the Black Forest begins.  The locals speak a dialect of German, Badisch, which is far removed from the Hoch Deutsch (High German) spoken in Northern Germany (the best Hoch Deutsch is spoken in the area around Hannover).  Many of the older people, especially in the little villages speak an even more archaic form of German, Allemanisch, named after a Germanic people who lived in this area at the time of the Roman Empire, but Allemanisch is dying out, (I didn’t meet anyone who spoke Allemanisch, but noticed that there was an Allemanisch Wortbuch (dictionary) in the book shop in Emmendingen.) as regional dialects become increasingly threatened by the homogenization of the German language as a result of encroaching American Imperialism.  In fact some Germans expressed their concerns that they now compulsorily speak English because of the predominance of America as a world power and American English as the language of business.  Is Germany now merely a colony of America?  A taxi driver in Freiburg expressed these fears to me one night,

‘We are merely a colony of America and we must speak English, our German language is secondary…American Capitalism is ruining the world...  Well, I hope I´m not here to see it...´

These concerns exist side by side with an apathetic acceptance of the world, and my feeling of a very limited political awareness.  I was very surprised how conservative people were, but perhaps that is because I come from Belfast which has been a war zone for thirty years of my life, and where people are naturally politicized by ‘the troubles’.  Of course, Southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria, have a reputation for conservatism.  In Switzerland, the Swiss equivalent of our National Front polls 25% of the vote, as opposed to less than 1% in Britain.  The same is true in Austria, as we have seen with the recent trouble over the election of Jörg Haider. 

But I was also told that Freiburg was a grüne Stadt (Green City), grüne as opposed to Rot (Red).  Old-style Marxist radicalism, as encapsulated in the DDR (Deutsche Democratik Republik) has little political purchase, in fact it might be said that the old Left-Wing project is now completely dead in Germany.  The SPD´s (Socialist Partei Deutschland, the equivalent of the British Labour Party) ´Socialism´ in alliance with Die Grüne (The Greens) is now in power in Bonn.  I met some students at the Stusi (This is an abbreviation for Student accommodation block) Bar who were members of Linksruck (Left Turn) the sister organization of the British Socialist Workers’ Party.  This party’s version of Marxism is derived from the life and writings of Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the 1905 and October 1917 revolutions in Russia and subsequently commander of the Russian army in the period of the Russian Civil War.  In 1939 he was assassinated by an agent of Stalin in Mexico City.  They told me that their organization, which was in alliance with the new anti-Globalisation campaign, had been criminalized by the authorities with the backing of Schroeder’s ‘Socialists’, although it also seemed obvious to me that their activities were open and legal, even though the police occasionally read their paper.

When I was in Freiburg I decided to buy some toy soldiers and try to find an opponent for a wargame.  This consists of two opposing armies of tiny lead or plastic soldiers ‘fighting’ each other, and melee and other decisions being decided by factors and the roll of a dice.  But when I asked if I could put up a little note in the model shop that sold the plastic figures and models I was told that this was not allowed.  Freiburg was a Green City, and wargaming was really just another rehearsal for the militarism that had blighted Germany’s past.  At the same time Schilly, the Green representative in Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder’s Cabinet, whose party had campaigned on a pacifist ticket, went along with Schroeder’s decision to support America in its war in Afghanistan, and America’s all embracing ‘war against terrorism’.  Surely this is an example of the schizophrenia inherent in Capitalism, as divulged by Deleuze and Guattari in their pioneering study The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: or as depicted by members of the Frankfurt School of Marxists, theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Adorno, Bloch and Horkheimer.  I was disallowed from playing a game with toy soldiers that could hurt no one.  At the same time a Minister and a Party that had campaigned for pacifism was embarking on a war of dubious legality in terms of international law, a war in which perhaps 20,000 or more people, both Taleban soldiers and Afghan civilians were killed, and many others mutilated, wounded, homeless and starving, and a war in which, as we have seen, the Geneva Convention was largely ignored.

Just after the September 11th attack I marched on a protest for peace through the center of Freiburg.  Banners with slogans such as Wir wollen kein Krieg (We don’t need war) and Krieg ist keine losung (War is no solution), as well as some banners expressing solidarity with the State of Israel, which, as we also know, is completely bound up with state terrorism.  Of course the Germans may have felt that they had to express solidarity with Israel as a result of Germany’s tainted past.

I think that these were chilling examples of those paradoxes that seem to be etched into the very fabric of Capitalism.  These bizarre and senseless conjunctions, so like the fragmented and nonsensical utterances of a schizophrenic and yet accepted by seemingly sane people.  I was also warned to stay away from a village described as a ‘psychiatric hospital’, but which was really very quiet, lovely, beautiful, and crammed full of fascinating history.  I would have been genuinely disturbed, but these paradoxes do not only belong to Freiburg, or to Southern Germany, they are everywhere, even in my native, Belfast.

Heaps of dead leaves, facades.

On Saturday Igor and I regularly went on trips to local towns in France.  One Saturday afternoon we left for Colmar, a town over the German border.  We took a bus and train connection, and arrived in Colmar in early afternoon.  I had only ever been to towns and cities in Northern and Southern France.  Colmar had a distinct flavour, not quite French and not quite German.  We set off to find a cheap restaurant at Igor’s insistence, despite my protest that we were tired and would only wander for hours through the town, looking for something that probably did not exist.  Eventually, tired and footsore, we arrived at a little café and bought quiche lorraine, but it was not really very cheap.  It was Igor’s first taste of quiche, he also spoke no French whatever, so it was left to me to order the food and drinks.  The quiche was very bad indeed, in spite of this it was still enjoyable, the red wine was sour, as dry red wine often is.