Photo:Winfried Rothermel, AP

A seasonal display by a farmer at Hartheim-Feldkirch in southwestern Germany.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

George Friedman, at Stratfor, discusses the fundamental contradiction of the current European Union.

How do you have multiple sovereign states within a single central bank? How do you reconcile national sovereignty with a multinational monetary system when it is impossible to create a single monetary policy that satisfies the policies of multiple sovereign nations? Someone must always be hurt. What is of great significance is that Sarkozy has made it clear that it is France, one of Europe’s founders, that is being hurt — to the benefit of its partner, Germany.

This leads to the more immediate question: If Germany and France undertake fundamentally different approaches to economic development, how can both of these strategies be contained in a single European structure? In a way, it would have been simpler had there not been a euro. Multiple economic strategies can be reconciled with a customs union, or even a multinational regulatory system. But reconciling multiple economic approaches with a single currency cannot happen.

The United States confronted this question in the past. In the 1850s, some states wanted a radical revision of social, economic and monetary policy that would benefit them but leave other states at an enormous disadvantage. The industrializing part of the country wanted policies that would protect its interests. The agricultural part of the country, heavily dependent on exports, wanted a different policy. A conference was held in 1863 at Gettysburg. Both sides made compelling arguments over three days, but in the end it was decided that not only would the policies of the industrializing states be followed, but no one would be permitted to withdraw from the economic, political and social union of the United States. State sovereignty was to be limited and federal power was to be paramount.

It was the Union Army that made the most convincing argument at Gettysburg. There is no Union Army in Europe. There is no sovereign center that can hold dissidents in the monetary or economic union. And there is, for that matter, no power on Earth that can keep France and Germany within a single system if they do not want to be there. Sovereignty, without the slightest shadow of doubt, rests with the nation-states of Europe — and the European institutions will last only as long as they reflect the interests of all of these nations.

George Friedman has started blogging.

AP reports that Cold War rivalries survive in the breeding of German Shepherds.

As the country celebrates 17 years of reunification on Wednesday, some animosities between the formerly communist East and capitalist West remain — and few are as doggedly contested as the fight over whose shepherds are superior.

One thing nobody denies is that in the more than four decades of Germany’s division, the dogs did develop different looks: Eastern shepherds are mostly dark gray or black, while the Western dogs have the better-known yellow-and-black appearance.

West German shepherds also have a characteristically sloped back, while their East German counterparts have a straighter back — which their proponents claim is less prone to the hip problems that can plague the breed. …

Because of this, the claim for the better dog at times sounds more like a battle over moral superiority between the East and the West than breeder rivalry.

Grube called the claims from the East German breeders an “obvious case of Ostalgie” — a sentimental nostalgia about life in former East Germany, which went out of existence at reunification in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.

East German breeders get particularly upset when confronted with the widespread assumption that most of their dogs were used at the border to keep citizens from fleeing to the West.

“The army and the police only got the scum — the best ones went to dog lovers,” said Werner Dalm, the former government official for shepherd dog breeding in communist East Germany. However, he acknowledged that the East German army asked particularly for those “that could really bite well.”

Today, Dalm, who is still breeding shepherds at age 81 and is also convinced of the East German dogs’ superiority, believes that pure East German bloodlines are all but extinct.

“Since the unification in 1990, we’ve been mixing bloodlines,” he said. “Even my dogs don’t have pure East German pedigrees any longer.”

Whatever the truth, it does seem like the East German shepherd is making a comeback among the 75,000 members of the German Shepherds’ Club and even abroad.

“We get so many requests for our dogs, there’s an international wait list of several years,” said Schultze.

Patrick Lakey, Heidegger: Hut, Todtnauberg, Black Forest, Germany, I, 2005.

My old Philosophy professor, the late John N. Findlay, would bristle with patrician scorn at the very mention of Heidegger’s name, and would proceed to explain to students in a tone of wearied contempt that Heidegger was unworthy of serious attention, having promulgated a false philosophy which systematically confused human emotional states with metaphysical entities. Others would probably be more indignant over Heidegger’s purging of the University of Freiburg, his expressed ambition of providing the philosophic basis for the National Socialist Movement, and the continuing ability of Heideggerian thought post-WWII to inspire murderous totalitarians.

Harvard English professor, Leland de la Durantaye visits the famous hut on the mountain in the Black Forest in the spirit of a pilgrimage to a sort of shrine, and meditates on its former owner and his sinister and influential oeuvre.

In philosophy, as with the martial arts, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. My little bit of knowledge about Heidegger’s philosophy told me that Heidegger’s final collection of essays bore the modest title Wegmarken. Wegmarken means “Path-Markers,” and was a simple enough title for a collection of essays. But when it came out, it reminded his readers of his most influential collection of essays and lectures published eighteen years earlier: Holzwege. Holzwege proved a disarmingly difficult title to translate, or even understand: Holz means “wood,” and wege means “paths.” Thus: “Paths in the Forest”—but Holzwege are not just any paths. They are paths made not for the forest but the trees; paths for finding and carrying wood (back to your hut), not for getting from point A to B. And when you are on one, you are, proverbially, on the wrong path. They are thus a special kind of Rundweg. And they can be dangerous if you do not recognize them for what they are, as sooner or later it gets dark and the animals come out. The French translated Heidegger’s book as “Paths That Lead Nowhere”; in a sign of Anglo-Saxon sobriety and pragmatism, the English translation is Basic Writings.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Daniel Hopfer (c.1470-1536), Old Women Thrashing the Devil
Etching, 22.3 x 15.6 cm (8.8 x 6.2″), purchased at a recent European auction

“Gib Frid (Let me go!),” cries the devil, held to the ground, his pitchfork broken, by three old women pounding him with what I take to be bread boards, as four of his demonic auxiliaries hover nearby in the air, impotent and looking on in alarm.

Artists of the Northern Renaissance apparently viewed the variety of the forms of Nature with considerable suspicion, picturing the devil as an amalgamation of animal and avian forms: with head combining lion, goat, and dragon; limbs of lizard; birds’ heads for knee and elbow joints; and a boar’s head for a phallus.

Hopfer is attempting to convey the moral that life’s labors, the wife’s domestic chores symbolized by the bread boards, pursued with assiduity, may prove a weapon which can effectively defeat temptation.

Who knew that the German Army had such strong feelings about the followers of L. Ron Hubbard?

Reuters reports:

Germany has barred the makers of a movie about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler from filming at German military sites because its star Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, the Defense Ministry said on Monday.

Cruise, also one of the film’s producers, is a member of the Church of Scientology which the German government does not recognize as a church. Berlin says it masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientology leaders reject.

The U.S. actor has been cast as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Nazi dictator in July 1944 with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.

Defense Ministry spokesman Harald Kammerbauer said the film makers “will not be allowed to film at German military sites if Count Stauffenberg is played by Tom Cruise, who has publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult”.

“In general, the Bundeswehr (German military) has a special interest in the serious and authentic portrayal of the events of July 20, 1944 and Stauffenberg’s person,” Kammerbauer said.

Here in America, we expect movie stars to be members of strange cults.

Washington Post:

In 1934, top Nazi party official Hermann Goering received a seemingly mundane request from the Reich Forestry Service. A fur farm near here was seeking permission to release a batch of exotic bushy-tailed critters into the wild to “enrich the local fauna” and give bored hunters something new to shoot at.

Goering approved the request and unwittingly uncorked an ecological disaster that is still spreading across Europe. The imported North American species, Procyon lotor, or the common raccoon, quickly took a liking to the forests of central Germany. Encountering no natural predators — and with hunters increasingly called away by World War II — the woodland creatures fruitfully multiplied and have stymied all attempts to prevent them from overtaking the Continent. …

Raccoons have crawled across the border to infest each of Germany’s neighbors and now range from the Baltic Sea to the Alps. Scientists say they have been spotted as far east as Chechnya. British tabloids have warned that it’s only a matter of time until the “Nazi raccoons” cross the English Channel. …

The Germans call them Waschbaeren, or “wash bears,” because they habitually wash their paws and douse their food in water.

ABC reports that US air marshals are currently “flooding” flights from Germany and Britain.

As many as five or six U.S. air marshals are now assigned to each U.S.-bound flight from airports in Frankfurt, London and Manchester, England, because of fears terrorists might attempt a coordinated series of mid-air explosions, law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

“We’re afraid someone in the back is going to mix something or light something up, so air marshals are being placed strategically through the plane,” said one senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the stepped-up security.

The stepped-up security on flights out of Britain’s Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports began about two weeks ago, based on intelligence reports that another al Qaeda hijacking plot was in the making, the officials said.

Following the public execution of Don Imus for racially insensitive remarks last week, the ever-vigilant watchdogs of the media have found yet another speech crime worthy of international attention: a video of a German sergeant using uncomplimentary images of hostile urban African-Americans in training one of his soldiers in the use of a machine gun.

AP.

The existence of the video was first reported on the home page of the German news magazine Stern on Friday and excerpts were aired on the news television channel n-tv on Saturday.

According to Stern, the 90-second clip had been posted on a Web site used by soldiers to exchange private videos. A soldier who used the site alerted his superiors, the magazine reported. …

The clip shows an instructor and a soldier in camouflage uniforms in a forest. The instructor tells the soldier, “You are in the Bronx. A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African-Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother in the worst ways. … Act.”

The soldier fires his machine gun several times and yells an obscenity several times in English. The instructor then tells the soldier to curse even louder.

1:32 video

In Germany, trompe d’oiel advertising on delivery trucks is used to atttract the attention of consumers.

But Japanese girls attract other kinds of attention with skirts silkscreened with trompe d’oeil images of lady’s undergarments.

Hat tips to Karen Myers and Frank Dobbs.

The Daily Mail reports a story proving that old age and treachery really can overcome youth and inexperience.

A 70-year-old former British soldier who fought guerillas in Aden and Triad gangs in Hong Kong showed four muggers how it doesn’t pay to mess with the SAS.

Douglas O’Dell is past retirement age but the moves he learned as a volunteer in Britain’s toughest regiment half-a-century ago stood him in good stead when he was ambushed near his home in Bielefeld, Germany, by four local toughs.

The former Provost Sergeant put paid to the danger on the street like he once took out bandits in hotspots across the globe.

THWACK! The first mistake came when one of the teenagers grabbed him around the throat and said in German: “Give my your money, grandad, if you don’t want to get hurt.”

“Bad move,” said Douglas. “The only part he got right was grandad. If you’re gonna grab someone from behind take their arms and pin them to their waist.

“This joker, I was able to grab his elbow, crouch down and throw him over my shoulder. He landed on his back on a fence and squealed like a stuck pig.”

CRASH! As one went down another moved in and Douglas thought he saw him reaching for a knife. The Birmingham-born divorcee, who has a daughter and three grandchildren, said: “I had the measure of him but I slipped on some wet leaves as he came for me and bashed my face badly on the concrete.

“I saw his boot coming towards my face and I thought: ‘No you don’t, sunshine.’ I grabbed his leg and twisted it until he too was screaming out in agony.

“Then I got to my feet and kicked him in the chest.”

With two down the two remaining would-be muggers had enough. One peeled his groaning pal from the fence, the other picked up his crippled accomplice from the pavement.

“The last I saw of them they were limping down the pavement like a WW1 trench raiding party who got clobbered,” said Douglas.

People in Savannah commonly point out that Sherman burned Atlanta, which proves there’s good in everybody.

The recent frequency of angry Islamic mobs pouring into the streets, mullahs making death threats, and hirsute ruffians demanding apologies has made Islamic rage awfully tiresome, but at least in the case of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper production of Idomeneo by vandalizing Opernregisseur Hans Neuenfels, they may be on to something.

One can tolerate anachronistic settings and surrealistic stagings, but if some blithering nincompoop transmogrifies an opera’s plot into the precise opposite of the original’s, I feel a modicum of intolerance myself, my own hand itches for a sharp Khyberee.

When today’s liberal cultural elite want to praise one of their favorite pieces of artistic bogosity, they usually apply terms like “transgressive” and “courageous.” It is instructive to observe how rapidly artistic “courage” vanishes and “transgression” retreats, when the whiff of an actual threat is in the air.

Time reports:

Neuenfels’ production, first staged in 2003, is intended to be a symbolic gesture about the dangers of fanaticism. Although the production caused barely a ripple, except to impress the critics in its earlier showings, the climate has changed since then.

In July, Germany’s state police in Wiesbaden said they received an anonymous telephone call from a woman expressing concern that the opera, due to be staged this fall, could offend Muslim sensibilities. A subsequent study by Berlin police found that it could not “exclude the possibility” that something bad would happen, noting that decapitation could be associated with the videos distributed by militant terrorists. Berlin senator, Erhart Körting telephoned the Deutsche Oper’s artistic director Kirsten Harms to recommend that she cancel the show because he did not want harm to come to the opera house. Harms agreed, hastily convening a press conference this week in the cavernous lobby of the modernist Deutsche Oper to announce that future performances would pose “incalculable risks” to the public.

Today, Germany’s Chancellor and Interior Minister, and Berlin’s mayor are all decrying the surrender, and demanding the production’s restoration to the Berlin Opera’s schedule. It will be interesting to see just how long their courage lasts. And it’s a such a pity that the object eliciting the uncharacteristic display of European backbone is not something more worthy of defense.