Spotlights on Germany and Europe

Tuesday, October 27

12 pm

Shapiro Campus Center @ Brandeis University

This past summer in Iran, a movement for more democracy was met with chaos and bloodshed. Come hear about a people power movement that in the end marked the finish of the Cold War without violence or bloodshed!

Did you know that the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall were the result of a bureaucratic mistake?

Did you know that for years, East German officials played their national anthem without texts because it discussed a unified Germany?

Come here what life in Communist East Germany was really from 2 historic figures who were there!

The Center for German and European Studies presents

Concert and Conversation with
Wolf Biermann
(singer and song writer, who became the most radical critic of the party dictatorship in East Germany)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Biermann
and
Marianne Birthler
(heads the government office that manages the archives of the former East German secret police (Stasi))
http://www.bstu.bund.de/nn_1137410/EN/Office/The__Federal__Commissioner/the__federal__commissioner__node.html__nnn=true

Here’s a Thomas Friedman column on the significance of Nov 9, the day the wall fell:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18friedman.html
“The most important difference between 11/9 and 9/11 is “people power.” Germans showed the world how good ideas about expanding human freedom — amplified by people power — can bring down a wall and an entire autocratic power structure, without a shot. There is now a Dunkin’ Donuts on Paris Square adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, where all that people power was concentrated. Normally, I am horrified by American fast-food brands near iconic sites, but in the case of this once open sore between East and West, I find it something of a balm. The war over Europe is indeed over. People power won. We can stand down — pass the donuts.”

http://www.brandeis.edu/cges/news/upcomingevents/index.html

Also more info at the Facebook Event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=161144713010

Tonight at 7 p.m. in International Lounge in Usdan in Brandeis.

More than 15,000 officials representing 192 governments will attend the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen December 7-18, 2009 in the hope to sign a new agreement on a worldwide reduction of CO² emissions.

Many are skeptical that an agreement is even realistic. But even if Kopenhagen succeeds to produce a Kyoto-Follow-Up Agreement: What do the signatories actually have to do to fulfill its obligations? At the current rate, the US, still the highest polluter with 19 tons of CO² per year, would have to reduce its carbon emissions to zero within six years. The participants in this workshop will explain what is at stake in Kopenhagen, and how an agreement would change the global order.
Participants:

Prof. Claus Leggewie
Director, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, Germany (KWI)
Professor for Political Science at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, Germany
Member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change to the Federal Government, (WBGU)

Moritz Hartmann
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, Germany
European University Institute, Florence, Italy

(also see his blog posts )

Bernd Sommer
Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, Germany
Research Analyst, German Advisory Council on Global Change to the Federal Government

(and his blog posts)

Charles C. Chester
Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. Author of Conservation Across Borders: Biodiversity in an Interdependent World (Island Press 2006). He teaches the courses International Environmental Conflict and Collaboration at Brandeis University and International Biodiversity Conservation at The Fletcher School of Tufts University.

Refreshments will be served.

For more information, please visit http://www.brandeis.edu/environment and http://en.cop15.dk/

On a visit to Germany, you would sometimes be forgiven for thinking that German is dying out. Many German companies use English in their advertising to appeal to younger consumers. But there’s a catch.  Der Spiegel recently reported on the third edition of a study which proves that these companies may not be getting their message across.

Bernd Samland from the German company Endmark has funded a study for the third time that demonstrates that many Germans don’t understand English in advertising. According to the article, even some German companies can’t offer proper translations of their slogans.

Der Spiegel also created a slideshow of some of the most egregious examples.  So for example, some Germans understood Youtube’s “Broadcast Yourself” as  “Brotkasten” or “Breadbox yourself”.  The chocolate company Magnum‘s slogan “World’s Pleasure Authority” was understood by some as “For an Authoritarian World”. And Levi’s “Live Unbuttoned” became “Life without Buttons”

Perhaps companies should stick to English in Germany.

In selecting  Herta Müller for the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Nobel Committee chose someone many Americans had not heard of.  The New York Times found that many New York booksellers were caught unprepared as they hoped to set up displays for the Nobel Prize Winner.  So who is Herta Müller? According to the Nobel website, while shaped by German heritage, like so many, her writing expresses her emotions about her absence from Germany.

“Her parents were members of the German-speaking minority in Romania. Her father had served in the Waffen SS during World War II. Many German Romanians were deported to the Soviet Union in 1945, including Müller’s mother who spent five years in a work camp in present-day Ukraine. Many years later, in Atemschaukel (2009), Müller was to depict the exile of the German Romanians in the Soviet Union.

The German network Das Erste conducted an interview with Herta Müller.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s surprise win evoked another precedent for the Nobel Committee. In an interview with the New York Times Thorbjorn Jagland, chair of the Nobel panel, brought up the comparison with German chancellor getting the Nobel Prize in in 1971:

“He likened this year’s award to the one in 1971, which recognized Willy Brandt, the chancellor of West Germany, and his “Ostpolitik” policy of reconciliation with Communist Eastern Europe.

“Brandt hadn’t achieved much when he got the prize, but a process had started that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Mr. Jagland said.”

One famous symbolic gesture of Brandt, a social democrat, was his “Kniefall von Warschau”, the Warsaw Genuflection, where the chancellor knelt in front of the Warsaw Ghetto where the uprising against the Nazi power had taken place, in an effort to thaw relations with Poland and the Eastern bloc. Obama himself made reference to the successful conclusion of this process in his speech in Berlin last summer.

For more on this, and to practice your German, check out this clip from the  well-known German documentary series 100 Jahre – Der Countdown.

A film clip about Brandt’s meaningful visit to Warsaw is here.

“Lost Jewish World of Shanghai”

The Center for German and European Studies presents a Jewish-German Dialogue with Ursula Mahlendorf

Today at 12 p.m. in Hassenfeld Conference Center – Levin Ross. Lunch will be served.

Ursula Mahlendorf will discuss her latest work, “The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood.” In writing the novel, Mahlendorf drew upon on her own experiences as well as her research in teaching students about how Germans and German writers deal with their Nazi past.

“Rare are the accounts of what growing up in Nazi Germany was like for people who were reared to think of Adolf Hitler as the savior of his country, and rarer still are accounts written from a female perspective, said Anna Kuhn, University of California, Davis. “This book is a compelling memoir of a girl’s experiences growing up in Nazi Germany that analyzes the lifelong implications of Nazi indoctrination on a sensitive, thoughtful young woman.”

Mahlendorf is a professor emerita of German, Slavic and Semitic Studies at the German department and Women’s Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

More info here:

http://www.brandeis.edu/cges/news/upcomingevents/index.html

This weekend Germany marked the Day of German Unity, “Tag der Deutschen Einheit”, for the 19th time since the official reunification in 1990, in the 20th year since the fall of the wall. This day is a national holiday in Germany, in some ways comparable to July 4th in the U.S.  But unlike Independence Day, it is less a day of unbridled celebration with fireworks or picnics. Instead, it is usually day in which serious ceremonies and some partying are mixed.

With the commemorations over, the winners of the most recent German election, the CDU with chancellor Angela Merkel and the FDP with Guido Westerwelle are beginning deliberations about their likely coalition. Even they intend to partner with each other, both sides do not see to eye on everything. Where in the States everything is either blue or red, or donkeys or elephants, German parties have all the colors of the rainbow. Assuming the coalition is successful, it will be a black-yellow coalition. In the same way the map of the German election results does not just have blue or red states, but red, green, purple and yellow.

FDP head Guido Westerwelle is widely seen as the new foreign minister of Germany – and he has already caused a ruckus by apparently refusing to answer a BBC reporter’s question in English.

Westerwelle Refuses to Speak English

However one British reporter did not see him in the wrong. Philip Hensher wonders “what did the BBC think it was doing, sending a reporter to a press conference in Germany on the German elections, knowing that he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak any German?” He goes on to say that “Dr Westerwelle was perfectly within his rights to tick off the reporter. A press conference in Germany, relating to a German election, held by a German politician; what language did anyone think it was going to be held in? The mere 100 or so million people who speak this language don’t have many weapons against the encroachment of English into their own affairs…”

Who would you vote for in the German elections, which take place this Sunday?  In the U.S.  comparatively, it’s relatively easy – usually you either vote Democratic or Republican. In Germany, you can vote for the CDU,  the Christian Democrats represented by chancellor Angela Merkel, the SPD, the Social Democrats represented by Frank Walter Steinmeier, the Green Party, the FDP, the Liberal Party, or Die Linke, the leftists.

Unlike in the United States, you can’t vote for Merkel OR Steinmeier themselves. By voting for a party, you determine which parties win the most seats in the German parliament, and they vote for the chancellor.  Perhaps in that way it even resembles the electoral college which Germans find exceptionally hard to understand. Germans will have two votes on Sunday, one for a party, and one direct vote for a member of parliament representing their district, who plays the role similar to Senators or  Representatives in the United States.

Even if you don’t understand German, taking a look at the campaign websites can be insightful. The CDU is banking on the persona of Merkel, the SPD has a video featuring citizens from all walks of life.

To help you decide, there’s the Wahl-Omat also available in English which recommends parties based on a series of questions.

By November 4 last year, Americans had seen seen over twenty Republican and Democratic televised debates, in addition to the three actual presidential debates. In Germany, the phenomenon of televised debates is still relatively new. This year there was one debate between Steinmeier and Merkel. If you would like to practice your German, you check out the video here.  For the most part, the press criticized the debate as dull.  The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted that “14 million Germans could have, without bad conscience, watched The Simpsons at the same time”. Still, among the early interesting and particularly German moments in the debate, Steimeier is asked whether he and Merkel, having worked together the past 4 years, now address each other using the informal “du” instead of “sie”. Answer? They still address each other formally.

Where can you find coverage of the German election on Sunday? Results should be coming in starting at 12 p.m. Eastern Time:

- NTV Livetream

- Tagesschau.de

- Heute.de