almost a diary

Der Spiegel titelt: “Die Lüge ist ministrabel geworden”. Das ist natürlich Blödsinn. Manche Lügen oder Auslassungen waren schon immer ministrabel, andere nicht.

Aber die Sache mit Karl-Theodor Frhr. von und zu Guttenbergs an der Universität Bayreuth verfassten und zunächst mit “summa cum laude” bewerteten Doktorarbeit “Verfassung und Verfassungsvertrag. Konstitutionelle Entwicklungsstufen in den USA und der EU” (Wikipedia) ist schon irgendwie anders gelagert, und zwar vor allem wegen der Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der er und sein so langsam verzweifelndes politisches Lager, insbesondere seine so gequälte Partei CSU, über die Sache hinweg gehen: Der Verteidigungsminister verzichtet auf den Titel und gut ist. Das ist eine seiner Popularität geschuldete Herangehensweise, die zumindest für eine Wisssenschaftlerin wie Kanzlerin Angela Merkel mehr als merkwürdig erscheint. Aber noch problematischer erscheint ein wesentlicher Grund für die Unterstützung der Kanzlerin: die Haltung von – Umfragen zufolge – offenbar so ca. zwei Dritteln aller Deutschen, die davon ausgehen, daß “wir alle ein bißchen Karl-Theodor sind”.

Klar, wer ohne Fehler ist, der werfe den ersten Stein, und eine gewisse öffentliche Zurückhaltung bei der moralischen (Vor-)Verurteilung ist sicher auch eine Qualität im politischen Diskurs. Was wiederum die Frage aufwirft: Welche Lügen genau sollen denn jetzt ministrabel geworden sein?

Ich vermute, die Antwort darauf sagt am Ende mehr über die deutsche Politk und damit die zeitgenössische deutsche Kultur und ihren Willen zur Selbsttäuschung insgesamt aus, als über Karl-Theodor.

Der Dr. ist weg. Die Diskussion fängt erst an.

Striking down state (Land) legislation from Nordrhein-Westfalia that allowed the use of trojan software to spy on individual’s computers, the German constitutional court (Bundesvrfassungsgericht) has derived from the fundamental legal premises of the German constutiton a new basic right to “privacy and integrity of information processing systems” (my quick and dirty translation). As a basic right, it can only be infringed given very specific circumstances – in this case, the court explicitly mentioned “specific” threats to the life and liberty of individuals, or “concrete” threats to the state.

It will obviously depend on legislative interpretations of the court’s ruling to see whether it’s possible to speak of a “loophole” in the basic right, as Spiegel Online English does. My guess is not, as politicians will not want to get slapped in the face by the Constitutional Court again, and the court will rule on two more privacy related cases soon.

While the court’s ruling will have to be studied in detail to understand its intentions more clearly, this is clearly a landmark decision with respect to the question of how to balance the state’s desire to gather information to protect its citizens and ensure the rule of law with the citizens’ right to privacy.

The Chaos Computer Club’s Andreas Bogk’s, who serves as an expert at the court, likenes the verdict to the census ruling in 1983, which derived a basic right to informational self determination and paved the way for privacy protection legislation.

Netzpolitk.org (German) has everything and then another link and quote regarding the verdict and the unfolding media coverage.

Some more links in English – BBC, WSJ, Bloomberg.

For those of you, gentle readers, who do not engange in in-depth analysis of Germany’s tabloid newspapers, here’s a transcript of the US President George W. Bush’s interview with Kai Diekmann of BILD - here’s the edited German version published by BILD. They met in the Oval office and discussed, among other issues, the rug-choosing dilemma every leader of the free world is facing. At least this one knows how to delegate.

Oh, and there’s a chance the US forces on German soil will have to do more than singing Karaoke in local Irish Pubs soon: Via SFGate, I noticed, that the President is not entirely sure about the state of democracy in Germany…

Zeroing in on the United States’ ties to Germany and recalling that German troops did not help attack Iraq, Bush admits: “I’ve come to realize that the nature of the German people are such that war is very abhorrent, that Germany is a country now that is — no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, Germans are — just don’t like war…. The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany [sic].” (The White House published its transcript with Bush’s glaring error and called attention to it.)

A part of the American blogosphere, on the other hand, was most excited to finally learn hrough the interview that President Bush’s best moment of all was

“when [he] caught a seven and a half pound perch in [his] lake.”

A little fishy, indeed.

I’m starting to wonder if we’re gonna miss him, after January 2009…

Es hat ein wenig gedauert, bis sich bei der vor der Verbreitung von PCs überaus wachsamen, aber schließlich durch den Umgang mit “bunten Bildchen”, bzw. dem WWW, in Bezug auf Datenschutz abgestumpften Zivilgesellschaft ein Problembewußtsein eingestellt hat. Aber – besser spät als nie. Nach dem gläsernen Bürger bei Maischberger wird sich nun auch Gerd Scobel heute Abend ab 21 Uhr in 3Sat Delta der Problematik annehmen.

delta diskutiert die Möglichkeiten und Gefahren von neuen Technologien und analysiert einige Netzwerke des Datenaustauschs. Welchen Wert hat das Selbstbestimmungsrecht in Zeiten der Globalisierung und der Terrorismusbekämpfung? Wie ist die Freiheit der Privatsphäre mit dem Informationsbegehren von Kontrollorganen zu vereinbaren?

Mitdiskutieren werden Claudia Eckert, Informatikerin, TU Darmstadt, Winfried Hassemer, Vizepräsident des Bundesverfassungsgerichts und Per Ström, Experte für Datenschutz.

Schon beim ersten Blick auf dieses Plakat habe ich mich gefragt, warum der Typ vom CDU Wahlplakat eigentlich eine Riesenknarre über der Schulter trägt. Oder eine Abschußvorrichtung für Boden-Luft-Rakteten. Da muß man sich doch Fragen stellen.

Aber es ist natürlich alles halb so wild: der gute Mann ist Handwerker und trägt natürlich nur seinen Hobel spazieren. Wer macht das nicht ab und zu. Und plötzlich macht das auch alles wieder Sinn: die CDU war schließlich schon immer die Partei der Hobelspazierenträger.

Seriously, Thuringia’s state premier Althaus, one of the most unpleasant “attention junkies” in German politics, has invited a proponent of intelligent design theory for a debate with an evolutionary biologist in a state-chancellory-sponsored debate called “Erfurter Dialoge”.

So, it can happen here, too, apparently. While declaring that the “prominent invitees” do not always (sic!) represent the views of the inviting state-chancellory , their press statement calls the debate a ” forum for high level discourse about questions of our time.”

Well, at least that’s debatable. Then again, as Mario Sixtus notes in his blog today, it’s good to have open minded politicians. Sixtus quotes an open letter to Mr Althaus from the German section of the recently founded Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, calling for an invitation to said debate, “as there is clearly more than one concept of Creationism.”

The Church’s Brother Bucatini, signing with pasta-esque greetings, also offers an inspiring explanation for global warming: There is a clear statistical correlation between the declining amount of pirates since 1800 and the rising average temperature.

More context (all in German): FR-Blog, Stern

Shopping from midnight to 4am, in Germany. It’s possible – at least for promotional reasons. Last Saturday, a couple of hundred of local retailers celebrated the “night of the senses”, during which shops were allowed to open. Apparently, the project’s revenue was satisfactory, as 100,000 people decided to postpone their shopping from Saturday afternoon to Saturday night. Interestingly though, the shop-closing-law exeption was one of the measures intended to indemnify local retailers for the loss of revenue suffered during George W. Bush’s visit to Mainz in February. So, even inadvertendly, the American government is advancing their economic agenda…

The German Embassy to the United States publishes a newsletter called TWIG (as in “This Week in Germany”), mainly aimed at the American public, that more often than not features little known gems, news that’s news only in the eyes of true connaisseurs – like you my gentle reades.

Last Friday, TWIG published a story about Germany becoming an important destination for nascent Chinese mass tourism – as Germany is the first Chinese-government-tourism-approved European country. A fact in itself somewhat contradicting the Financial Times’ Berlin correspondent who, according to another government sponsored article, can see Germany becoming

“‘the new France,’ a country where joie de vivre has not yet been unraveled by atrocious prices and the danger of airline strikes.

Claims like this always make me cite Elle Woods, the only person who can counter such statements on the appropriate level – “Whoever said that Orange is the new Pink was seriously disturbed”.

Now, Chinese masses tucking into Sauerkraut may not in itself be a sufficiently interesting subject for a mainly American audience. So no wonder, the article’s hook is something as famous in the US as it apparently is in China: the Geman Autobahn. I once had a vivid discussion with an American friend about the mythology of German motorways, while driving on an American one that is just as famous over here: Highway 66.

In the end, I wasn’t able to convince my friend that German highways are – for the most part – speed regulated. That most German cars aren’t Porsches, and that, while Michael Schuhmacher may be distorting the average, most Germans haven’t driven a car at 200+ km/h.

But then again, so much has been demystified about Germany that it might not be a bad thing to keep some legends alive… (whole story in the extended section).
(more…)

Usually, I’m less critical of the current state of the German academic reality than most people. This is probably owed to the fact that my experiences within the German university system were rather positive, for I attended one of its shining models, Mannheim University. But I probably have to face the fact that many, if not most students, certainly in the northern German states, are less lucky – as the following quote from the website “oekonomen.de” indicates.

Auf dieser Seite wird den Professoren und Lehrbeauftragten der Hochschule Bremen die Möglichkeit gegeben, ihre Skripten zu veröffentlichen. Dadurch haben die Studenten den Zugriff auf stets vollständige und aktuelle Unterlagen. Dies ist in der Bibliothek nicht immer möglich, da hier vielfach Unterlagen abhanden kommen.

It basically says that the website exists so professors at Bremen University can offer their complete (sic!) lecture scrips to students. The faculty’s or university’s library – for whatever reason – is apparently not able to provide this service.

Should you click on the link to the site, please note the recommendation of Stephen R. Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People“. Sarcasm – not usually a German quality, I’d say. So maybe even such a sad state of affairs is good for something… ahh, just reloaded the page and realised their recommendations are rotated by script. So – maybe not even sarcasm.

I’m still not writing much these days because of my broken elbow, but today I just had to say something. Today, Papascott links to Bill Dawson, a US expat, living in and blogging from Vienna, who has written a wonderful post about Sophie Scholl and others who lost their lives in the almost hopeless struggle for human decency during the Nazi regime. For all of you who might not know how and why Sophie Scholl died, I’ll quote from Bill’s post -

“A man lifted her small body and placed it flat on a platform, and a blade from high above came crashing down and severed her twenty-one year-old head from her twenty-one year-old body. Yes, she died on the Guillotine, as did her brother and a close friend on that same day. Her murderers are well-known to us: Die Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police, the Gestapo. Sophie Scholl was a young lady both of words and of action. She was arrested with her brother Hans on February 18, 1943, one day after that final letter of hers cited above. Their friend Christoph Probst was arrested soon thereafter, and all three were murdered on the same day, February 22, 1943. The Gestapo, though they didn’t know precisely who their prey was, had been hunting them for some time, because leaflets from a group calling itself Die Weisse Rose, the White Rose, had been distributed on multiple occasions in Munich and other cities since the second-half of 1942. On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were observed by a custodian of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich as they quickly distributed leaflets inside an otherwise empty hall of the university. This “loyal” janitor, Jakob Schmied, raised the alarm, and the resistance movement called the White Rose came to an end.”

Bill’s post comes as a reply to the least creative Kraut Bashing article I have come across in quite some time, written by a certain Ralph Peters for the New York Post, the newspaper which started the sophisticated “Axis of Weasels” campaign back in February. On the surface, Mr Peters is concerned with the bulls**t talk given on October 3^rd by soon to be former CDU MP Martin Hohmann, but the gist of his argument can safely be induced from the following statement -

“The whopping difference between the Allied occupation of Germany and our occupation of Iraq is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis welcomed their liberation. We had to force freedom and democracy on the Germans at gunpoint.”

Tell that to my mother and my father, who, just like millions of other German kids, took chocolate bars from GIs. Anyway, Mr Peters’ article is not worthy of any extended refutation, which is the only objection I have with respect to Bill Dawson’s otherwise great post – he tries to rationlize Peters’ article by explaining that –

“[i]t’s the disgusting mindlessness of anti-Americanism here in Europe that offends Peters, myself and many others and which makes us want to hit back. With this gargantuan post I simply mean to show that one can both express disgust and disapproval towards the mindlessness here in Europe and at the same time recognize that the condition is not entirely universal.”

Here I can’t quite follow. By putting his post in this context, by saying that there are exceptions to the “current mindlessness of anti-Americanism” in Europe just like Sophie Scholl was an exception to the appaling cowardice that held this country, and much of Europe, in grip during the Third Reich, he – I am almost certain accidentally – gives the impression that these two things were actually comparable – which could not be further from the truth.

Last Friday, ZDF tv broadcast “Unsere Besten” (“our best”), the local version of a BBC programme, that allowed tv viewers to cast votes for 300 “cultural Germans”, including celebrity PR nominations like “German Idol” juror Dieter Bohlen, who was ranked 30th, but excluding Hitler and those in his gang. Sophie and her brother Hans made it to the top ten shortlist from which “the best” German will be chosen, once more fulfilling Thomas Mann’s prediction that one day Germany would build monuments to commemorate the courage of these young people – although putting them on the shortlist of a meaningless tv show was probably not what they had in mind.

Just as the other nominees, from Albert Einstein to Johann Sebastian Bach, Sophie and Hans Scholl were primarily exceptional humans, not Germans. But there is something about them that stands out. Something that Bill captures rather well by saying -

“[W]e tend to learn about such people – who by all accounts seem fairly normal to their contemporaries – only via extraordinary circumstances. Were it not for the fact that she lived – and died – when she did, she may never have become so remarkable that we would know anything at all about her today.”

More than for anyone on the list, for Sophie and Hans Scholl, just as for those whom they represent in our collective memory, being exceptional humans meant being exceptional Germans. They were truly “our best”. So go and vote for them. I did.