Dear Americans

Dear Americans,

in 1949 you brought Germany the first real democracy in our country. After the failed attempt during the Weimar Republic, which led to the election of Adolf Hitler and through him to the Third Reich and World War II, you brought us one of the most stable and efficient democracies in the world. We are very grateful for that (apart from a few right-wingers and a few hopeless people who live in the past).

With your 2016 election, you have, however proven that you are in dire need of a true democracy yourself.

You have been holding on to an old institution called the ‘Electoral College’ for too long, for one thing. An American friend I spoke to recently thinks it serves to make sure stupid people (or uninformed people, as it is put officially) don’t take too much influence on the election of your president. Well, that either means you’re wrong or it means even intelligent people voted for Donald Trump. I choose to believe the first one, because I can’t imagine any person who is intelligent would vote for a con-man who has no plans and will destroy everything his predecessor, one of the best presidents you’ve had, has built up in eight years in office. The bottleneck of the Electoral College means that a lot of votes go unnoticed every time. It doesn’t matter whether a party wins a voting district by a few votes or by several hundreds. If it wins, the other votes cast don’t matter for the rest of the electoral process. It also validates the technique known as Gerrymandering - a way to make sure as many voting districts as possible will go to the party the person doing the Gerrymandering favours. Get rid of the Electoral College and just count out all the votes. Overall, you might get different results.

You make the electoral process look like a huge party. You make it extremely focused on entertainment. And you make it extremely important that the candidates (and their parties) raise a lot of money. It’s no wonder the candidates in the end were both extremely wealthy. But how much do people with millions in the bank know about the struggle of the common citizen? Not much, usually. Yes, candidates should speak about their plans for the presidency. They should take a stand on political and social topics so the voters know where they stand and what to expect from them. They should not make a show out of it. The showman is close to the con-man (not all showmen are con-men, but all con-men are showmen) and will rarely keep his promises after the votes have been cast. Cap the amount of money candidates can invest. Like this, money isn’t that important for becoming a candidate.

Make sure the polling places are controlled. Not to avoid voter fraud as a such, but to make sure people are not bullied (for example by armed people standing outside and threatening those they think will vote for the other candidate) or are turned away, even though they have the right to vote. Having a system which gives every citizen the automatic right to vote might help. Make sure everyone has the chance to get a photo ID (meaning making sure everyone can afford one) and make the photo ID mandatory for voting. To get a photo ID, you need to be a citizen - which means a person with a photo ID is eligible to vote.

Many years ago, you brought a country you had just defeated in war the wonderful gift of democracy. Please do not allow things to go badly enough this country needs to be part of a UN mandate during the next elections to make sure America stays a democracy.

Catholic Scandals

People from Germany reading this blog (if there are any, except for my father…) might already have wondered why I didn’t write anything about the current scandal the Roman Catholic church is suffering in Germany. Namely: child abuse over decades in various Catholic schools.

I have not been writing about it before, because I was waiting for the high point of the scandal, the moment when it starts to ebb down. I’m not really sure if we’ve reached this point already, but considering the huge number of cases already in the news, I decided to write something about it.

I am Roman Catholic, but not really a very religious person. I’m more sort of an atheist who has forgotten to leave church. But, as a girl, I wasn’t really in any danger, considering the stories that have leaked out to the press. The abuses concerned boys in almost all cases.

I will not retell all the tales here, there’s more than enough material online anyway. I will, instead, tell you why I was not surprised.

I grew up in a somewhat divided household. My father is Lutheran and my mother Roman Catholic (thus I am Roman Catholic, too). None of my parents is very religious, but my mother is in the habit of praying before going to bed (no fixed prayer, rather a little chat with God) and my father has studied the bible himself (both testaments). My father is very interested in philosophy and has discussed his ideas with me since my later teens (when I was around 15). I was not an easy student for every teacher in this topic, either. I had – and still have – my own views of religion and how it should and shouldn’t intervene with peoples’ lives.

When I learned in school about the fact that Roman Catholic priests have to always been forced into celibacy, I was surprised at first. The argument that was presented to us in school always was “That way they only work for God and the parish”. Why had this changed during the medieval age? Had priests been better at multitasking before this time? And did Lutheran priests (not forced to live in celibacy) care less for God and the parish? Then I learned the real reason for celibacy: money.

Before the middle ages, Roman Catholic priests were allowed to marry and have children (in the Orthodox church, only a married priest is a priest…). But that presented a certain problem, namely inheritances. A priest lives on church grounds, is paid by the church and thus has nothing to give to his children. Today, that would not present all that much of a problem, because most people earn money in jobs and live in apartments. But in the middle ages, people handed everything down to their children. The sons (sometimes also the daughters) inherited the possibility to earn a living from their parents. When a man died, his wife and children usually split the grounds and everything else he left between them. But priests lived on church ground – they didn’t leave behind anything their children could live off. So the church had to step in and give money to those children (and care for the widow). To avoid this, the Roman Catholic church came up with the great idea of celibacy, officially telling people ‘it’s for the best of the parish’. No more children to take care of (and no more priest’s widows, either).

And that from a religion that demands from every believer to produce as many children as possible…

Young men start training early to become a priest, right after school or after university. And not all of them are saints. And a young man who is no saint will sooner or later long for company, that of a woman if he’s heterosexual, that of a man if he’s homosexual. Nothing really wrong with that, as long as it’s consent contact. In fact, the church silently pays for up to four illegitimate children. The logical course would be to drop the celibacy and allow the priests to choose whether or not they will marry. The logical course … but we’re talking about religion here, so there is no logical course.

A job in which you’re not allowed to marry and your boss (and I don’t mean God himself here) has the right to kick you out if you’re interested in your own gender? In every other job in Germany, the boss would be in big trouble. The Roman Catholic church isn’t. And is it so unlikely that a group that damns every kind of sex as a sin will attract people whose sexual interest is really sinful (because they like to have sex with children, for instance)?

I’m definitely not saying every Catholic priest is a child molester. There are men who freely decide to live in celibacy and serve only God and the parish. There are men and women who will even go further and join a religious order and only serve God for the rest of their lives. All of them deserve our respect. (And they definitely get mine.)

But if the church is so strict with marriage and still condemns homosexuality as a sin, it should also damn everyone who touches children in a sexual way – and deliver them to the worldly authorities. God may punish them later on whichever way he sees fit. They should only be punished by human law beforehand.

November 9th

You might have realized yesterday was an important day in Germany. While the day the Berlin Wall fell is not a holiday in my country (for historical reasons, you see, decades before the Nazis burned the synagogues on the same date), it still is a day to be celebrated.

I have my own story to tell about this day. I’ve never lived in the GDR (which basically ceased to exist when the Wall fell), but I have quite some relatives who did. When my father’s family fled from Eastern Prussia during the last year of the Second World War, some came to the northern part of Germany (close to the border to Denmark, where my father grew up) while others stayed in the eastern part (which later on became the GDR).

Anyway. One of my grandaunts was about to celebrate her birthday (her 65th birthday) in the middle of November and so we were organizing to get a visa for most of the older relatives living in the GDR. It was difficult and we didn’t expect that many of them to be able to come.

Then, about two weeks before my grandaunt’s birthday, the wall fell and suddenly all her relatives could come for a visit. It was a great party, as you can probably imagine.

But even for people without any relatives in the GDR it was a great day. Before it, nobody ever believed it would happen, the two German states would ever grow together into one. It was a dream, of course, for many people, but not one that could ever come true. (Very much like a dream in which you can fly – it can be great, but you won’t be able to fly any time soon in real life.)

Then, suddenly, people were climbing the wall, they started to tear it down. Within days the GDR ceased to really exist, because the border no longer existed. And not only did Germany grow back together into one country, Europe opened up to the east, countries like Poland or Hungary could become part of the European Union.

Today, Europe is much bigger than people ever expected it to be when the European Union was planned. In essence, it all started in the summer of 1989 when Hungary opened its borders, but the fall of the Berlin Wall became the most remembered situation connected to it.

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell and two German states started to merge into one. It’s still not done completely, but we’re getting there. And twenty years ago the Cold War ended for good. That’s a good thing all by itself.

9/11 and me

During the last days - due to the day coming up again - there were a lot of documentaries about 9/11 even in Germany. This made me remember where I was, what I did and what I thought when it happened.

I was at home then - only, back then it was my parent's home, actually, as I have moved out after that day. I was working as a free-lance editor and had a job to do, so I sat in the living room (my parents had gone for a walk) and had the TV running while I was working. Then the normal afternoon program (as Germany is several hours before the united states when it comes to time) was stopped for a news flash. A plane had accidentally crashed into the World Trade Centre, they said. I saw the pictures of the smoking tower and thought "what a tragedy" when I saw - on live feed - the second plane coming in. It actually did a turn to hit the second tower and the only thing I could think of at that moment was "there's no way in hell that was an accident". My work was forgotten, I switched to CNN and stayed tuned, following the news that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon and the passengers of a fourth had just managed to steer it away from the centre of yet another big city.

As I was born in 1974, 9/11 was one of the few major things that happened in my life time up until now (and I still was quite young when the Berlin Wall fell - although that surely had more of an impact on my personal life, with about 50% of my relatives living in the former GDR). And there I was, basically watching live an event that would, in years to come, change the world greatly. Afghanistan and Iraq, two major wars, were started basically because of 9/11. George W. Bush only got re-elected because of 9/11 (which I still see as a major mistake). Security around the globe has been heightened because of 9/11. Taliban, Al Quaida and Bin Laden have only entered the vocabulary of the Western World because of 9/11.

I do not really dig into all those conspiracy theories that have evolved around this date. I have read quite some of them, but most are just like all the other conspiracy theories. They sound interesting, but they can't really sustain themselves. (Although it is a strange coincidence that 9/11, the English way to write the date, comes terribly close to 911, the American emergency number.)

Yes, I do believe the American government might have had a hint something would happen, but I doubt they knew what it was. Yes, I know nobody would have thought it possible the impact of a plane - even a large passenger plane - could completely destroy a tower of the World Trade Centre, but static is a bitch to calculate and I don't think anybody really expected a plane to crash into the towers anyway. I don't think there were additional bombs in the buildings. I think even Al Quaida didn't know they would create such a heavy damage and actually destroy the building. There is such a thing as coincidence in the world.

I have not lost a member of my family or a close friend in the events of 9/11, but I feel with those who have. It's a traumatic and tragic thing. I do not live in a country which is constantly threatened by Al Quaida (although some people are supposed to have planned an attack on an American Air Force base in Germany not too long ago). Even if I did, I live in a small town which would be an unlikely target for a terrorist act.

I'm not easily scared by possible danger to my life or health. I think that, if I took all the possible threats to my life serious, I could just jump off a high building and be done with it. Life is dangerous, that's why it's considered life - as opposed to death which is static.

I hope I've not hurt anybody's feelings with this post. I know that as somebody living far from where the tragedy took place, I can't really grasp all the grief it has caused. But, due to both the impact on the world and the media reporting it immediately around the planet, I was affected by it to a certain degree as well - everyone has be. It brought to my eyes the fact that people will always find new ways of attacking, as nobody ever thought of crashing a plane full of innocent people into a building to destroy it.

Laughing about the monster

Currently a comedy about Hitler is discussed very heatedly in Germany. In essence most people think it's inappropriate to laugh about this man. I disagree.

One of those critics has pointed out in an interview that Hitler was a monster - and he thinks it's wrong to laugh about a monster. From my point of view Chaplin was right when he made "The big Dictator", to make Hitler laughing stock.

A lot of people might wonder about this, but I can explain. A monster is something you fear ... and surely the Nazis and especially Hitler were rightfully feared. But what most people either have never understood or have forgotten a long time ago, is this: to laugh about a monster is the one sure way do make sure it looses power. A monster gathers power by fear. Every person who fears it, will give it power. The best way to diminish this power is to fear the monster less. And the best way to do this is to laugh about the monster.

While the style of a comedy can always be discussed - as not everyone has the same sense of humour (and I sometimes have the feeling critics get their humour surgically removed at the beginning of their career) -, the basic question whether it is allowed to laugh about Hitler should be answered with "Yes".

While we should never forget about the Nazis and their crimes, we yet have to learn not to give them too much power over our lives … this is the one lesson from World War II we Germans obviously still have to learn.

Laughing about the monster

Currently a comedy about Hitler is discussed very heatedly in Germany. In essence most people think it's inappropriate to laugh about this man. I disagree.

One of those critics has pointed out in an interview that Hitler was a monster - and he thinks it's wrong to laugh about a monster. From my point of view Chaplin was right when he made "The big Dictator", to make Hitler laughing stock.

A lot of people might wonder about this, but I can explain. A monster is something you fear ... and surely the Nazis and especially Hitler were rightfully feared. But what most people either have never understood or have forgotten a long time ago, is this: to laugh about a monster is the one sure way do make sure it looses power. A monster gathers power by fear. Every person who fears it, will give it power. The best way to diminish this power is to fear the monster less. And the best way to do this is to laugh about the monster.

While the style of a comedy can always be discussed - as not everyone has the same sense of humour (and I sometimes have the feeling critics get their humour surgically removed at the beginning of their career) -, the basic question whether it is allowed to laugh about Hitler should be answered with "Yes".

While we should never forget about the Nazis and their crimes, we yet have to learn not to give them too much power over our lives … this is the one lesson from World War II we Germans obviously still have to learn.