Documentary: "Germany and the Cold War" (two parts).

  

It's another exemplary two-part Deutsche Welle documentary, focusing on the Cold War as experienced in the two German states that arose from the post-WWII settlement. 

For more than four decades, divided Germany was the epicenter of the Cold War. The border severing East and West embodied the animosity between the US and USSR. The smoldering conflict threatened to escalate and destroy both German states. The Cold War was persistently present in the two Germanys - both on the political and military level, but also in everyday life. On the one hand, there was the race for technical progress, the fear of bombs and rockets, the struggle for moral superiority over the other side: and on the other, doubt about each state’s policies, and those of their allies. 

How did Germans experience this Cold War? How did it shape attitudes to life on both sides of the Iron Curtain? 

This two-part documentary asks political actors and decision-makers in East and West, but above all contemporary witnesses from divided Germany, what experiences they had in the period between 1945 and 1991. Who were the winners and losers in this brutal stand-off between communism and capitalism? The demonstrations on June 17, 1953, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the major demonstrations in Bonn against Pershing missiles, nuclear strike drills, employment bans in West Germany on members of the German Communist Party, the opening of the Wall, the collapse of the Eastern bloc - all were events that shaped people’s lives. This is their story and the story of Germany in the Cold War.

German Unity Day.

We're just shy of 31 years since the Berlin Wall fell. That era, say 1988-1992, was as pivotal for my own life as for world history. I'll probably spend the remainder of whatever time I have left on this planet trying to explain why. I'll always be grateful for the opportunity to see East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the USSR in the summer of 1989. The experience altered the trajectory of my life.

Coronavirus mutes German Unity Day celebrations, (Deutsche Welle)

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Saturday paid tribute to the courage of protesters who led the peaceful revolution that paved the way for the reunification of East and West Germany 30 years ago. 

Commemorations to mark German Unity Day are underway in the city of Potsdam, about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) southwest of Berlin. Such a momentous anniversary would usually be met with fervor, but this year's festivities have been overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

"We look back with gratitude at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new era," Steinmeier said in a keynote speech at the official ceremony. "Today we live in the best Germany that has ever existed" ... 

Go All the Way.

Today's ride was for a short distance only, downtown to Pints&union, then walking the bikes up the city side of the rail embankment to reach the amphitheater. We rode down to Loop Island and returned on city streets.

They're baby steps, but it's been eight years, after all. The instincts remain, pleasingly so. The self-obsessed idiocy of most drivers bothers me when I'm sitting at home in a chair thinking about it; once outside and on the street, far less than I imagined.

It isn't that they're any better. It's about my game plan, feeling I have a measure of control in spite of it all, along with fairly sound fundamentals. I also never go for a ride without a mirror, something I wouldn't do in a car, either.

Seeing posts like this one sets me to salivating. It's 77 miles in all, easily broken into a leisurely three-day ride, with ample time for sightseeing along the way. Troisvierges is only 50-odd km from Luxembourg City -- but even more enticingly, a mere 15 miles from Achouffe (near Houffalize), home of the Chouffe gnomes.

I might be daydreaming quite a lot in the months to come.

Vennbahn: How a historic German train line became a popular cycling path, by Tamsin Paternoster (The Local DE)

Today the Vennbahn bike path is one of the longest cycle trails of its kind, running along disused railway tracks in Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium.

The path offers more than 125km of landscapes that stretch through Europe and encompasses three countries, as well as a distinctive history. The Local unpicks the story of the Vennbahn.

The Vennbahn wove through three countries, starting in the western German city of Aachen before making its way through Belgian territory and ending in Troisvierges, a small town in northern Luxembourg.

Along the way, the path winds itself in and out of Germany and Belgium, in territory which once wholly belonged to Germany before the borders were redefined ...

Learn about Käthe Kollwitz.

Outbreak.

On Sunday I posted a link to an essay in which the author, an American living in Germany, related (among other things) her visit to an art exhibit in Cologne.

Loneliness.

A bank in a mall was a weird place to find the largest collection of prints by the German artist, socialist, and pacifist Käthe Kollwitz, since her work is famously concerned with the agonies and struggles of the working class. In the old boardroom of the bank, Kollwitz’s work hung, some of it so blazing with grief and feeling it was hard, actually, to take.

Käthe Kollwitz is an artist we all should know.

SUMMARY OF KÄTHE KOLLWITZ

Fiercely committed to portraying the plights of workers and peasants, Käthe Kollwitz rendered the grief and harrowing experiences of both historical and contemporary wars in the first decades of the 20th century. Bucking usual artistic trends, Kollwitz adopted printmaking as her primary medium, and drawing from her own socialist and anti-war sentiments, she harnessed the graphic and expressive powers of the medium to present to the public an unvarnished look at the root causes and long-lasting effects of war. While her interest in printmaking and sometimes her subject matter coincided with the Expressionist painters in Germany, she remained independent from them, charting her own path in the burgeoning world of modern art.

In following the example of Goya's print series, The Disasters of War, Kollwitz's depictions of rebellion, poverty, and loss refuse the melodrama of war and sacrifice and instead concentrate on specific personal experiences that can be understood by many. In addition to her powerful visual legacy that still reverberates among graphic protest artists, her role as a recognized, leading female artist of the time ensures her place in the annals of 20th-century modern art.

I'm in New Agony, but this video documents "A Train Ride to the Czech Republic."

It kills me to watch videos like this. There are so many of my favorite things, rolled into one: train travel, Germany, beer with dumplings, the Czech Republic ... it yields a melancholy ache.

A train journey through the Elbe Sandstone Mountains between Germany and the Czech Republic. Peculiar rock formations and the river Elbe shape this beautiful region. Since the mid 19th century, a railway line has been meandering through its valleys.

In 2014, a new rail connection was completed: the National Park line connects the Czech Republic to Germany. It runs from Děčín to Rumburk via Bad-Schandau, Sebnitz, and Dolní Poustevna. The train conductors are all bilingual and happy to answer passengers’ questions about the area and its people. This film takes viewers from Dresden to Dìèín. It makes a detour on the National Park line through the rocky landscapes of Bohemian Switzerland. See the enchanted valleys that inspired romantic-era painters, and discover Edmundsklamm gorge on the German-Czech border, and its protected wildlife. The documentary also digs deep into the history of brown coal, which once brought the region industry and prosperity.

"Germany’s Iron Curtain is now the Green Belt, but turning the old border into a haven for wildlife has taken much more than just letting it be."

An absolutely fascinating outcome.

The Green Curtain, by Andrew Curry (Atlas Obscura)

Germany’s Iron Curtain is now the Green Belt, but turning the old border into a haven for wildlife has taken much more than just letting it be.

For most of its length in Germany, the Iron Curtain was actually a steel fence, and Kai Frobel could see it from his childhood bedroom in the West German village of Hassenberg. The barrier, more than 10 feet tall and made of a kind of mesh specially designed to offer no finger-holds to would-be escapees from East Germany, snaked through the Steinach Valley. It divided the landscape into the domains of documents. On one side, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On the other, the Warsaw Pact ...

 ... The 866-mile border was one of the most recognizable and politically charged changes to the landscape following World War II. But all of West Germany was transforming, too. As it had in many parts of the world, industrial agriculture was turning what for millennia had been a patchwork of pasture, fields, and forest sprinkled with small towns into a much more uniform landscape—a monoculture of barely distinguishable crops.

In a twist of fate that reverberates decades later, the land on the Death Strip and some areas around it were protected from the plow and the combine. “In the ‘70s, the landscape was drained, cleared, planted,” Frobel says. “The border was the last refuge.”

In the 30 years after the crumbling of East Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the border between east and west has transformed again, into the Grünes Band, or Green Belt, a swath of protected land that runs from the Baltic Sea in the north all the way to the mountains of Bavaria in the south. It connects more than 100 different types of habitat, from grasslands to marshes to forests. And the corridor—longer than the distance between New York and Chicago, but only about 50 to 200 yards wide; 68 square miles in total, a little bit less than Brooklyn—is home to a staggering 1,200 threatened species.

More trains, fewer planes? "A Modest Proposal to Make Air Travel Obsolete."

I'd settle for just one passenger train, maybe Louisville to Indianapolis and Chicago, or Cincinnati. Planes are one thing, but why the fuck did we decide driving would be obligatory? You people and your cars.

A Modest Proposal to Make Air Travel Obsolete, by Feargus O'Sullivan (CityLab)

To reduce emissions from air travel, Germany’s Green Party wants to eliminate the need for domestic flights by making big investments in trains.

When it comes to reducing the environmental impacts of the airline industry, you can shame people into avoiding air travel, or you can try to make air travel the transportation of the past.

That’s the approach Germany’s Green Party is adopting, proposing that the country should work to make domestic flights obsolete by 2035. A party document released last week imagines a future in which there is no longer any practical or economic reason to fly between places in Germany.

As the Green Party currently holds no role in national government, these plans are purely aspirational. But as Europe’s largest green political body—and a frequent participant in coalition governments—the agenda nonetheless has substantial power to shape future policy. Right now, that policy is about preparing for a future in which trains have totally supplanted planes, making flying within the country a distant memory.

Revisiting "Pissoirs for the People" -- or, will there be public restrooms in the new luxury Reisz complex, and if so, how much will Team Gahan charge us to use them?

The main text originally was posted on July 8, 2018; the bit at the end first appeared here on December 26, 2018. 

Current county councilman, city resident, regular reader and all-around good guy Dale Bagshaw posed an excellent question yesterday on social media.

Does anyone wonder why New Albany does not have any public restrooms in the downtown? The city is being reborn and we want people to walk, shop and dine downtown. The city council talked about restrooms in the farmers market expansion but took them out of the plan because of cost and purchased a restroom trailer. However, I drove by on Pearl Street today about 2:00 p.m. and it was gone. My wife and I go to other towns like Corydon, Madison and Nashville IN. They have public restrooms. Why not us? Just a thought -- think the city could put public restrooms in the new city hall, maybe?

Yes, the city might install public restrooms in the new luxury city hall, and there's one thing we know for sure: they'd be PAY toilets, with the credit card swipes plumbed directly to Jeff Gahan's re-enthronement account.

Nickels and dimes, people. Nickels and dimes.

Here's a reprise of NAC's public restroom coverage from 2016, because while Da 'Bune has two religion columnists, you don't see the newspaper tackling public pissoirs for the people, do you?

---

Not the late and lamented pissoir, but Germany has an idea to provide more public restrooms.

It's been a couple of years since public toilet mania in New Albany.

As April comes to an end, a reminder that public toilets are not dead.

A ringside seat for New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part Twelve.

Meanwhile, Germany's doing something about it ...

Germany Found a Cheap Way to Fix Its Lack of Public Restrooms, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Welcome to the “Nice Toilet.”

... In Germany, it looks like there may be one that really works. The country’s Nette Toilette (“Nice Toilet”) system has created a compromise between public and private restrooms that makes such obvious sense it’s hard to believe that other countries aren’t doing it already too. It works like this. German cities pay businesses a monthly fee of anything from €30 to €100 ($33 to $110) a month to open up their restrooms for the general public. These businesses then put a sticker in their window to let the public know they’re welcome to use the facilities even if they’re not buying. First launched in 2000 and now including 210 member cities (including some in Switzerland), the network is a private one that charges participating cities a modest fee to use their branding. Sixteen years in, it’s still on a roll. At the end of October, the network announced that it is expanding to Munich, which will be its largest urban area yet.

 ... as is our nation's capital.

Public restrooms are another beneficial project neither Jeff Gahan nor Develop New Albany is likely to pursue.

... Finding a hygienic and accessible restroom on the street is a necessity for many, including homeless residents, seniors, and pregnant women—and a challenge in many U.S. cities, not just D.C. But a nationwide movement is building to create “more spaces for people to do private things,” as Alexandra Goldman, a community organizer in San Francisco, told CityLab. And now—years after D.C.’s bathroom committee conducted their first informal survey of publicly accessible private space—the city has taken the most sweeping action in the nation so far, passing the first Public Restroom bill of its kind.

In Germany, "You can’t walk a block without running into missing middle homes."

I read this article, then walked to work past all the vacant lots downtown, musing to myself about the way Team Gahan continues to subsidize car-centric  development on the fringe as opposed to infill at the center, where heightened density might preface a measure of critical mass, walkability and other useful outcomes.

My conclusion, as usual, is that the problem of local numbskullism goes beyond the regime's need to monetize campaign finance (although this is a big part of it). Rather, it's because the majority of the people making decisions in New Albany identify as suburbanite, and literally cannot imagine living "near" enough to other people to be part of a civil society.

As the noted cultural analyst once observed, sad.

Abundant Middle Housing, by Mike Eliason (Medium)

Four weeks ago, I left Seattle to take a job in Germany ...

 ... The big take away is that there is no single family zoning here (Zero is, in fact, the correct amount of single family zoning — there is no single family zoning *anywhere* in Germany. Or Austria. Or Japan…), and more impressively, there don’t seem to be very many single family homes here, either. You can’t walk a block without running into missing middle homes. In fact it isn’t actually missing here, it’s absurdly abundant. What is missing middle housing? It is duplexes, triplexes, rowhouses, apartments, garden courts and similarly sized housing required for a minimum of density to enable walkable neighborhoods. And it is *everywhere* here.

From the Altstadt (historic core of the city) to the outskirts — 2-to-4 story multifamily buildings are the norm, and it feels quite comfortable. Schools and parks aren’t surrounded by acres and acres of luxury detached homes —rather, nearly all of the parks and schools are surrounded by multifamily housing. Sadly, this isn’t standard practice in US cities like Seattle ...

New Albany has a pro basketball player right now: Braydon Hobbs, playing in Germany for FC Bayern München.

One of the odd quirks of indulging in off-season travel has been the opportunity to attend European basketball games in Bamberg (2009), Porto (2018), Gdynia (2018), and coming up on December 21, Munich.

Or, as the city is spelled in German, München ... located in Bayern (Bavaria). Munich's pro basketball team is called FC Bayern München, same as its better known soccer/football squad.

As it turns out, one of FC Bayern's players is 29-year-old Braydon Hobbs, a New Albanian basketballer made good, who enjoyed outstanding careers at New Albany High School and Bellarmine University before heading overseas in 2012 to begin playing pro ball.

It's a tad bewildering to me, but many European teams of FC Bayern's stature participate in multiple, overlapping leagues each season. FC Bayern is part of Germany's top domestic basketball league, the Bundesliga, and also plays in the EuroLeague, which is comprised of Europe's top clubs.

Both these leagues have playoffs and championships, and then there's also the annual German Cup competition, which crowns its own champion following a tournament with German clubs from the Bundesliga and the domestic league beneath it. The game we'll be attending is a EuroLeague contest.

FC Bayern Basketball vs. Real Madrid
TURKISH AIRLINES EUROLEAGUE 2018-19
Round 14
Audi Dome, München, Bayern
December 21, 2018

FC Bayern Munich vs. Real Madrid: A new rivalry in basketball.

Despite having been major foes for many decades in football, Bayern and Real Madrid have just played each other four times on the basketball courts in official competition since 2000. The Spanish squad has dominated the series 3-1, to date.

FC Bayern's Twitter jokingly called this a pre-game shootaround. 

I've never met Braydon, but was casually acquainted with his dad when we both were at IU Southeast a couple lifetimes ago. We're hoping to at least say hello to him; mutual friend Steve Laduke contacted Braydon, who graciously offered to leave us comps at the will call.

Professional basketball overseas is a manic, mercenary world; since 2012, Braydon has played for eight different teams in various leagues and countries. He's in the second year of a two-year deal with FC Bayern. I'm guessing the future is uncertain, but as Steve said, he's done good for himself in Europe.

Here's added background.

Braydon Hobbs, FC Bayern Munich, by David Hein (Jan 23, 2018; at Eurocupbasketball.com)

Braydon Hobbs is garnering more and more international attention with each breath-taking no-look pass he delivers in the 7DAYS EuroCup. But the FC Bayern Munich guard should be warned there are pitfalls to becoming too popular. It may limit his career choices when his basketball playing days are over.

Hobbs, 28, had his heart set on a career in law enforcement when he graduated from college. "I was more looking into secret services, FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) or DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) - going behind the scenes stuff," Hobbs explained. But his great basketball skills and some good fortune put him on the path to stardom and now he has found a second home in Munich.

Hobbs's numbers may not jump off the page; he is averaging 8.0 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.6 assists for a Bayern team that went 9-1 in the EuroCup Regular Season and is 2-1 thus far in the Top 16. At first glance, he doesn't really stand out on the court – that is until he absolutely wows the fans ...

Pissoirs for the People -- or, will there be public restrooms in the new luxury Reisz complex?

Current county councilman, city resident, regular reader and all-around good guy Dale Bagshaw posed an excellent question yesterday on social media.

Does anyone wonder why New Albany does not have any public restrooms in the downtown? The city is being reborn and we want people to walk, shop and dine downtown. The city council talked about restrooms in the farmers market expansion but took them out of the plan because of cost and purchased a restroom trailer. However, I drove by on Pearl Street today about 2:00 p.m. and it was gone. My wife and I go to other towns like Corydon, Madison and Nashville IN. They have public restrooms. Why not us? Just a thought -- think the city could put public restrooms in the new city hall, maybe?

Yes, the city might install public restrooms in the new luxury city hall, and there's one thing we know for sure: they'd be PAY toilets, with the credit card swipes plumbed directly to Jeff Gahan's re-enthronement account.

Nickels and dimes, people. Nickels and dimes.

Here's a reprise of NAC's public restroom coverage from 2016, because while Da 'Bune has two religion columnists, you don't see the newspaper tackling public pissoirs for the people, do you?

---

Not the late and lamented pissoir, but Germany has an idea to provide more public restrooms.

It's been a couple of years since public toilet mania in New Albany.

As April comes to an end, a reminder that public toilets are not dead.

A ringside seat for New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part Twelve.

Meanwhile, Germany's doing something about it.

Germany Found a Cheap Way to Fix Its Lack of Public Restrooms, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Welcome to the “Nice Toilet.”

... In Germany, it looks like there may be one that really works. The country’s Nette Toilette (“Nice Toilet”) system has created a compromise between public and private restrooms that makes such obvious sense it’s hard to believe that other countries aren’t doing it already too. It works like this. German cities pay businesses a monthly fee of anything from €30 to €100 ($33 to $110) a month to open up their restrooms for the general public. These businesses then put a sticker in their window to let the public know they’re welcome to use the facilities even if they’re not buying. First launched in 2000 and now including 210 member cities (including some in Switzerland), the network is a private one that charges participating cities a modest fee to use their branding. Sixteen years in, it’s still on a roll. At the end of October, the network announced that it is expanding to Munich, which will be its largest urban area yet.

Meet the Pee Bed: "In an effort to clean up popular sites of outdoor urination, researchers studied the mind of the man who pees in public."

Kindly allow a "stream" of consciousness before delving into the article.

The album.

The song.

Anchor City's mobile pee bed.

All of this to introduce an academic study as part of seeking solutions for public urination.

Are ‘Pee Beds’ a Fix for Public Urination? by Feargus O'Sullivan (CityLab)

You may not like it, but stale urine is one of the defining urban smells across the world. Hang out around most sports events or festivals, or in any alley near a bar, and pretty soon your nostrils will be assaulted by the ammonia-tinged stench left by men—it’s almost always men—that couldn’t make it to the nearest bathroom.

Understandably, many people hate this. Police officers are mobilized to prevent it, businesses try to deter it with extra lighting or protective surfaces, and fines are levied. All of these measures still fail to halt the ever-rising tide.

But an interesting new proposal being researched at Munich’s University of Applied Science, focusing specifically on the peeing problem at stadiums, might finally show a way out. It could even create a new model urinal that could clean up popular sites of mass urination. There’s no point simply legislating against the rogue urinator, the research suggests: You have to understand his psychology.

That’s because there’s more to what Germans call “wild peeing” (“wildpinkeln”) than convenience alone, as the University of Applied Science’s Natalie Essig and her team have discovered. Conducting interviews with sports fans at Munich’s main soccer stadium, Essig found that location was indeed a factor in the choice of pee sites—drunken fans had a longish, toilet-free walk between the stadium’s facilities and the metro station. But, she says, “there are other factors.” People find the toilets dirty or smelly, and when they use the parkland around the stadium they can think “I’m ecological.”

Among drunken men, communal peeing had a social bonding factor and even, Essig suggests, works as a kind of territorial marking. The most common wild peeing sites men chose, meanwhile, were against an obstacle—a tree or wall—possibly to provide some cover, but also, believe it or not, because men that chose these sites liked the sound peeing against a barrier produced ...

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: The genuine meaning of ersatz, with a bonus Mencken digression.

Counterfeit, phony, bogus ... ersatz.

I used to be fond of saying that Miller Lite was ersatz beer, although strictly speaking, this isn't true.

Flavorless, boring and a insult to the palate? Yes, very much so (less so?), but not ersatz.

ersatz

[er-zahts, -sahts, er-zahts, -sahts]

adjective

1. serving as a substitute; synthetic; artificial: an ersatz coffee made from grain.

noun

2. an artificial substance or article used to replace something natural or genuine; a substitute.

Origin of ersatz

1870-75; < German Ersatz a substitute (derivative of ersetzen to replace)

Ersatz is a German word, one unlikely to have migrated into English if not for Germany's homefront experience during two world wars.

FAKING IT, by Christian Ford (Hogsalt)

Pity poor ersatz. In its native German, ersatz started out as a harmless word, connoting a simple substitute or replacement — a new part for something worn out. But two world wars and a whole lot of not-enough-food changed that forever, particularly on the lips of returning POWs who brought the word into English.

In a roundabout way, Ford's well-considered (not ersatz at all) thoughts lead to corn, American style. Click through to see how.

It takes a certain way of thinking to break open a spiffy packet labeled “ersatz pepper” and filled with a teaspoon of ash — and scatter it over your meal, however ersatz it may already be. Food, that most corporeal foundation of society, was becoming notional, the site of sustenance moving from the belly to the mind.

Not that this came without some cost. There was ersatzkrankheit, “substitute sickness,” which came from eating too many foods that weren’t really what they should have been or weren’t even food at all. But there was another, more telling, neologism that emerged. This was ersatzmenchen — “substitute people,” a uncomfortably sinister term that reflected the front line’s endless appetite for its own kind of substitutes.

Ersatzkrankheit seems tailor-made to describe the result of ingesting too much fake (ersatz) news.

Tying together "ersatz" and the Great War, and adding the opportunity to make mention of my hero H.L. Mencken, I conclude with a quote from Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South, by Hal Crowther

... It made Mencken a contrarian, a libertarian, and a political lone wolf. Do you have any idea how much courage – how much arrogance – it took for a 35-year-old newspaperman to sit in Baltimore and cheer for Germany in World War I, a minority of one flying in the teeth of one of the most poisonous spasms of jingoism America ever produced? It’s a true miracle he wasn’t lynched.

Risk life, limb and livelihood for a principle, for a prejudice? It’s impossible to place Mencken in a context the twenty-first century can understand, in our cultural cul-de-sac where the eloquent knights-errant of the editorial pages have been replaced by TV “news” shows geared to the depth and dignity of professional wrestling—tag teams of predictable hacks and eunuchs squealing in ersatz fury and quacking partisan platitudes. Seating Mencken on Crossfire would be like releasing a wolverine among neutered cats.

Achtung Baby: "This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts."

I may not have any children, but Germany's always been good to me -- and as usual, you're entitled to my opinion.

Volk Heroes, by Rebecca Schuman (Slate)

This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts.

In a memorable scene of Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, Zaske sends her 4-year-old daughter Sophia to her Berlin preschool with a bathing suit in her bag. It turns out, however, that the suit is unnecessary: All the tykes at Sophia’s Kita frolic in the water-play area naked. Later that year, Sophia and the rest of her Kita class take part in a gleefully parent-free sleepover. A sleepover! At school! For a 4-year-old! These two snapshots of life as a modern German child—uninhibited nudity; jaw-dropping independence—neatly encapsulate precisely why Zaske’s book is in equal turns exhilarating and devastating to an American parent.

Zaske argues that thanks in large part to the anti-authoritarian attitudes of the postwar generation (the so-called “68ers”), contemporary German parents give their children a great deal of freedom—to do dangerous stuff; to go places alone; to make their own mistakes, most of which involve nudity, fire, or both. This freedom makes those kids better, happier, and ultimately less prone to turn into miserable sociopaths. “The biggest lesson I learned in Germany,” she writes, “is that my children are not really mine. They belong first and foremost to themselves. I already knew this intellectually, but when I saw parents in Germany put this value into practice, I saw how differently I was acting.” Yes, Zaske notes, we here in the ostensible land of the free could learn a thing or zwei from our friends in Merkel-world. It’s breathtaking to rethink so many American parenting assumptions in light of another culture’s way of doing things. But it’s devastating to consider just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever adopt any of these delightful German habits on a societal level.

This is not just because Americans pride ourselves on eschewing the advice of outsiders, though that certainly doesn’t help. Our political and social institutions are so firmly entrenched that no amount of wise Germanic advice can help us. “We’ve created a culture of control,” Zaske laments. “In the name of safety and academic achievement, we have stripped kids of fundamental rights and freedoms: the freedom to move, to be alone for even a few minutes, to take risks, to play, to think for themselves” ...

This being America, of course auto-centrism plays its sad part once the family returns stateside.

For example, when Sophia starts first grade, school administrators remind parents that under no circumstances should they drop children off in an automobile. Could you imagine? I can’t. In the contemporary United States, even in larger cities (with New York being the only notable exception), school is so synonymous with the interminable “drop-off line” that its vicissitudes are the subject of bestselling mom-book rants.

In open defiance of this custom, I ride my daughter the 4½ miles to preschool on a bike—she gets pulled along the mean streets of St. Louis in a Burley trailer—only to get yelled at by moms in idling SUVs outside the school. A few weeks ago, all of us parents even got a sternly worded email from the director, chastising the few who do pick up their children on foot for blocking the valet-style “carpool line” with “pedestrian traffic.” This is unsurprising; most children in the U.S. do not walk to school, even if they live close enough to do so—to the detriment of their physical fitness, independence and joy, and of course also the environment. (Zaske experiences this culture shock in reverse when her family moves back to the U.S. and she makes the unheard-of suggestion of a solitary “walk to school day” at Sophia’s new San Francisco elementary.)

I really, really wish that stork would have been sober, and dropped me somewhere in Mitteleuropa as specified on the invoice.

Max Beckmann's prescient vision of the Gahanist inner circle is stunningly accurate. How did he know?

And how did that chihuahua get into Bird's Hell?

Vision of hell: Max Beckmann (The Economist)

​There’s a reason the German artist’s “Hölle der Vögel” (“Bird’s Hell”) is known as Germany’s “Guernica”. Painted in 1937-38, it has vicious plumed birds, huge loudspeakers, a screeching figure giving the Nazi salute and a desperate man whose naked back is being scored with a knife.

Great injuries to the soul can do this to a man.

Max Beckmann (The Art Story)

After enduring a "great injury to his soul" during World War I, Max Beckmann channeled his experience of modern life into expressive images that haunt the viewer with their intensity of emotion and symbolism. Despite his early leanings toward academicism and Expressionism, he became one of the main artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement and created scathing visual critiques of the tumultuous interwar period. In later works, Beckmann strove toward open-ended stories that juxtaposed scenes from reality, dreams, myths, and fables. Throughout his career, he firmly opposed the turn toward abstract art and maintained his desire to "get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting." Beckmann's prowess at subtly layering figures and signs, as well as color and shadow, allowed him to successfully translate his reality into mesmerizing narrative paintings throughout his prolific career.

I'd like to know more, and will.

"My heart beats more for a rougher, commoner, more vulgar art...one that offers direct access to the terrible, the crude, the magnificent, the ordinary, the grotesque and the banal in life. An art that can always be right there for us, in the realest things of life."-- Max Beckmann

Krautrock: "A forward-looking desire to transcend Germany's gruesome past."

Okay, okay. It's been a bit of an obsession lately.

"Yes, Krautrock. Can. Jaki Liebezeit. Rock without the radio god telling it to bow down and behave."

What fascinates me is the shared and overt aim of otherwise unconnected musicians to consciously turn away from foreign influences, producing distinct music designed to simultaneously refute the past and re-establish an ethos anchored in the German experience.

I'll make no claims to understanding any of this when I was 14 years old, and Kraftwerk's Autobahn broke in America. The song was played on WLRS, and I scraped together money earned baling hay to buy the vinyl.

I told you before; the stork made a serious error.

Documentary which looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war.

Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal - a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany's gruesome past - but that didn't stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.

Next, connectivity for all? "We are not only building bridges, we are biking bridges."

The late Kevin Richards, bridging the Czech Republic, 2006.

My old friend John (original designer of the NABC keg-aloft logo) recently has been writing about bicycling for LEO. His thoughts about bikes crossing bridges bring to mind my own merry band's experiences in Europe from 2000 - 2008.

Once you've seen what a rational bicycling infrastructure network looks like, the situation on the new East End Long Dead Overused White Guys Bridge (what, we ran out of assassinated presidents to name it?) is cast in sharp and sad relief. There, a multi-use path essentially leads to nothing on either side, a far cry from what I've observed in places like the Netherlands and Germany.

In these countries, transportation is far less of a zero-sum game, where anything "given" to a cyclist or walker is viewed by the intemperate among us as being "taken away" from autos.  Rather, especially in the Netherlands, space for cars, bikers and walkers exists side by side.

The horror!

Given that the most widely reported controversy on the new bridge to date has been complaints from walkers over lack of parking spaces (think about that), I feel like screaming that whatever the idiocy of the financing, we shouldn't build this or any other bridge solely as a means of carrying cars as they move back and forth to ultimate destinations. This notion of connectivity should apply to cyclists and walkers, too.

Where and how does one continue the journey, having reached the other side?

Why We Ride: Biking Bridges, by John Mahorney (LEO Weekly)

Unless you’re spinning away in your pain cave, or you’ve been riding out of town for the holidays, then you may have heard about the opening of the brand-new Lewis and Clark Bridge on Dec. 18. This beautiful piece of multi-modal infrastructure is the most-inclusive, publicly-funded road project I’ve seen in our area. It is the first highway and bridge project to receive an Envision Platinum Award from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. Among its sustainable construction practices is a wide, two-way bicycle and pedestrian path connecting Prospect to Utica, Indiana.

When I think about cycling to and from Kentucky and Indiana, I can’t help but remember all the other bridges we’ve crossed over the years. Adventurous, perilous, crowded, abandoned, remote and downright dangerous for the commuter and recreational cyclist alike. They are necessary. They are convenient. Some could be better. Some can go to hell. Some could just finally open someday.

Not the late and lamented pissoir, but Germany has an idea to provide more public restrooms.

It's been a couple of years since public toilet mania in New Albany.

As April comes to an end, a reminder that public toilets are not dead.

A ringside seat for New Albany's new slogan: "Truck Through City" ... Part Twelve.

Meanwhile, Germany's doing something about it.

Germany Found a Cheap Way to Fix Its Lack of Public Restrooms, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Welcome to the “Nice Toilet.”

... In Germany, it looks like there may be one that really works. The country’s Nette Toilette (“Nice Toilet”) system has created a compromise between public and private restrooms that makes such obvious sense it’s hard to believe that other countries aren’t doing it already too. It works like this. German cities pay businesses a monthly fee of anything from €30 to €100 ($33 to $110) a month to open up their restrooms for the general public. These businesses then put a sticker in their window to let the public know they’re welcome to use the facilities even if they’re not buying. First launched in 2000 and now including 210 member cities (including some in Switzerland), the network is a private one that charges participating cities a modest fee to use their branding. Sixteen years in, it’s still on a roll. At the end of October, the network announced that it is expanding to Munich, which will be its largest urban area yet.

Germany's Mittelstand: "Counterpoint to a singular focus on shareholder value and dispersed investor-orientated shareholding."

Bavarian Fairy Tale is a video by ABC Australia (2012). Though probably too good to be true overall, this assessment of the Southern German economic miracle offers a collection of useful points scattered among savory beer hall vistas.

The overarching point is the Mittelstand, which is an untranslatable concept referring to mid-sized manufacturers ... and, perhaps, a way of thinking.

German lessons: Many countries want a Mittelstand like Germany’s. It is not so easy to copy, at The Economist

GERMANY’S midsized manufacturers, collectively known as the Mittelstand, are often praised as a group for providing the backbone of the world’s fourth-largest economy. Individually, they are world leaders in hiding their light under a bushel. They tend to be family-owned, tucked away in small towns and familiar only to the businesses that buy their specialised machinery and components. “We are not digging for gold,” says Joachim Kreuzburg, the boss of Sartorius, a maker of laboratory equipment. “We are selling shovels to the gold-diggers.”

Campaign Diary, Chapter 10: Greenway news leads to bicycling flashbacks.

I'm the obsessive sort when I allow myself to be, and the past two years have been all about walking. However, today I got out the elderly bicycle and tooled around Midtown a bit.

When I say elderly ...

 ... that's the very same bike supporting my girth in 2004, along with my friends Bob and Tim, as well as a local horse trolling for apples. We're somewhere in the Ardennes hills of southeastern Belgium, in the process of visiting all the brewing monasteries in Belgium.

We called it the Tour de Trappist, and it was a blast.

The Ohio River Greenway has been back in the news the past couple of days, with work slated to begin on the third of four sections running through New Albany territory (from 8th Street to 18th Street). There is talk of the bridge across Silver Creek finally being started early next year.

It made me think of the forum Valla Ann Bolovschak hosted at The Grand in November of 2005. She'd been appointed New Albany’s recently representative to the Greenway Commission, and was soliciting opinions, suggestions and recommendations as to the future orientation of the project. Since then, we've finished the part from Silver Creek to 18th, and 8th to the Amphitheater.

Ten years ago, I prefaced my blog coverage of the forum with an anecdote about one of my own bicycling experiences in Europe.

Bob (pictured above) and I were bicycling in 2001 through the lovely wooded hillsides of the Franconia region of Germany, near Bamberg, and we stopped to soak up the countryside and look at a map. While doing so, we were overtaken by a group of five elderly men who we’d passed earlier in the day, before we had lost ground to them while pausing for a brief, restorative beer at one of the area’s many brewpubs.

All spoke English and were eager to exchange information about the immaculately signposted, maintained and dedicated bike route. In addition, as the precursor to a pattern we’ve observed so many times since, they were openly amazed to see Americans of any age riding bicycles in Germany.

It turns out that these well-heeled, multilingual and retired gentlemen were engaged in their 45th annual, several-hundred-kilometers-long bike jaunt in celebration of their university graduating class, and in this instance were making the trip from Frankfurt to Kulmbach – carrying light rear panniers loaded with the basics, traveling 25 to 30 mildly strenuous miles a day, then stopping for hearty meals, local beers and a good night’s sleep at an inn or bed and breakfast.

I looked at them, calculated their approximate ages, and thought, “that’s what I want to do when I get to be that old – but why wait until then.”

Even now, fourteen years later, I’m transfixed by the scene of these gracious, nonchalant, ruddy men enjoying a road trip’s worth of bicycling reunion time – and the five of them as utterly flabbergasted to see Americans riding bicycles for recreation as I was by the thought of my parents marking such an occasion by exercising in such a manner.

During the Greenway forum in 2005, it was revealed that in spite of the route's original stated intent as a roadway for automotive traffic, which in the 1990s took the form of a projected multi-million dollar vehicular bridge straight through the Loop Island Wetlands, common sense had at last prevailed, and the likely future form of the Greenway would be strictly limited insofar as motorized vehicles were concerned.

A senior citizen promptly interjected, somewhat indignantly, that to restrict the Greenway in such a fashion as not building it for automobiles would be to shortchange elderly residents (and their grandchildren) by denying them easy access to view from their car windows.

Dan Coffey, then as now the Wizard of Westside, later spoke about the critical need of making it easier for people to get across the levee from downtown to the river, noting that Scribner Place’s original design included a long ramp that would have eliminated the stairs currently required to gain a access to the river. He lamented the difficulty of climbing those stairs.

I kept thinking about the five elderly Germans on their bicycles.

There is no glib conclusion to these ruminations. As they say, it's a free country, and you can do as you please, but I'd rather keep exercising -- whether on foot or with a bike. I'm closer in age to those Germans than I was then, and I want to be like them when I'm 60-something, and beyond.

There's always mobile signboarding, too.