Hidden

Peter Bradshaw thinks Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is one of the best films of the decade. He may be right. Few films resonate as this one does.

It's suggested that this deceptively simple photo by August Sander provides a link:


The subject's uniform and helmet grab the modern viewer's attention. But the background -- the specific context (perhaps his home village?)-- is also a vital part of the image. And the young face can be interpreted in many ways. As for the fate of this individual, what do we know?

Writing in 1931 -- some years before this picture was taken, of course -- Walter Benjamin dryly observed of the early stages of Sander's great project:

Work like Sander's could assume an unlooked-for topicality.

Benjamin also quotes Goethe:

There is a delicate empiricism that so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.

P.S. 30 Dec: In the NYT, A.O. Scott is sniffy about this film:

Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse. Or maybe by the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings.

But the film allows for, indeed encourages a more complex view: not a case of either (historical determinism) or (human weakness), but both.

Prussia and Israel

Uri Avnery sees similarities

So it goes

...All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture?

Evidently, there are none.

-- a report from Dresden

C&C, German style

It cannot be that nations that make big cars are punished more than countries that make small cars.

-- Angela Merkel.

(It has been said that the Chancellor has embraced contraction and convergence.)

P.S. UK government approach is not much more promising. See Ministers challenged over backing for coal-fired power station.

P.P.S. Dieter Helm has a fiery commentary on current European and U.S. approaches in a letter in the WSJ titled Sins of Emissions:

The U.S. and Europe refuse to acknowledge that halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will take a significant slice out of economic growth. It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our -- and the planet's -- means.

This is not a welcome message for politicians to give to their voters. But it happens to be what is required to tackle this global crisis. Not since the late 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, has such a massive restructuring of major economies been required. Nobody told the British or American people then that the challenge of creating a wartime economy was going to be cheap. They should stop pretending that the enormous challenge of decarbonizing the major economies can be done on the cheap, either.

La Casta Europeana

Clemente Mastella, who resigned as the Minister of Justice on January 16th, after it was revealed that he was under investigation for several crimes, including extortion, has been in parliament for thirty-one years, as a member of four different political parties. Mastella has denied any wrongdoing. Last week, he withdrew his party, the Udeur, from the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, a move that, on January 24th, after a no-confidence vote in the Senate, led to the fall of the government.

-- from Beppe's Inferno by Tom Mueller.

If, as a result of the fall of Prodi's government, Berlusconi makes a comeback, then his holiday-buddy Tony Blair, who is said to already have Sarkozy's support, could make a comeback as Presna Yurp. It may be that only Merkel, Zapatero and few others stand in the way.

Life, not fate

One of the most successful acts of resistance in the Third Reich is not well known. In 1943, when the Nazis were undecided about whether to deport and murder Jewish spouses of non-Jews, they tested the waters by rounding up nearly 2,000 Jewish men whose non-Jewish wives had already withstood considerable government pressure to divorce them. These wives spontaneously gathered in front of the building in the Rosenstrasse where their husbands were being held. For one long week they refused to leave the little square in central Berlin, despite the Gestapo machine guns trained upon them.

...[And] the police backed down. The men were released. They and their families survived. And in a country that devotes so much time and energy to commemorating the victims, these brave women remain anonymous; all that really marks their story is a small clay-colored memorial in a park that few Berliners know. Seeing it moves many to tears. But what’s tragic are not these heroes, but the fact that there were not more. Others were deterred less by the Nazi terror than by a much older message: heroic action is futile, and mostly ends in death, besides.

After all these years, isn’t it time to send a message to Germany’s children — and everyone else’s — that will help them to stand up against present evils as well as mourning past ones?

- Susan Neiman, who argues that Germany has chosen the wrong resistance heroes.

Old-new troubles

It may be ludicrous for politicians to describe plans from a pipeline to run from Russia to Berlin as a new version of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which secretly carved up half of Europe, but it’s probably true that Poland is being deliberately left out in the cold.

-- Mark Mardell (23 Oct).

P.S. 25 Oct: Tim Garton-Ash starts from the remarkable election results in Poland to write an interesting article on the strange fate of political parties across much of Europe. [It's a good piece and it seems churlish to point to small lapse: Garton-Ash writes that the new Poland "will not be driven by anachronistic, 19th-century fears of Germany". Anachronistic, maybe. But 19th-century? As Tom Lehrer sang, "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that wouldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in nineteen-eighteen, and they've hardly bothered us since then."]

Ostpolitik

Dieter Helm is characteristically sharp:

To meet [a] series of new challenges, Europe needs more than a set of national responses, however much these might be in individual member-states's narrow interests. That Germany is in the driving seat, both as Gazprom's hub and with the presidencies [of the EU and G8], provides a timely chance to prepare Europe for its future energy dependency, and to better align its internal energy market reforms with the external challenge.

But at stake is much more: if Germany fails to go down the European path, it will be a break with one of the deep political objectives of the EU, and it will show the sceptical voters of Europe that the EU cannot deliver in an area of such vital interest. Energy is where a significant part of the case for greater European integration may be won or lost.