Storch Heinar vs Thor Steinar: Battle of the Brands

There's been a new development on the neo-Nazi fashion front. It appears that the Thor Steinar brand ("the H&M of Hate") has thus far failed in its efforts to intimidate the anti-fascist "Storch Heinar" brand from mocking its dead heroes and satirizing its logo. Mediatex GmbH sued Storch Heinar for "disparaging" their own brand, Thor Steinar. A Nuremberg court suggested that Mediatex drop the suit, but it looks like they plan on pursuing a trial anyway. None of the publicity can possibly hurt Storch Heinar.

Site on Neonazis

Fine, I'm obsessed. Still...

Note the SS-style tactical symbol on the hoodie

This site provides a series of photos that illustrate the changes among young neo-nazis. You'll see the clothing they wear, and that not all of them bother to shave their heads. These two are wearing kaffiyahs--until recently, an accessory associated with the political left. Some right-wing extremists have created cells of "Autonome Nationalisten" or National Anarchists (in the USA). Don't let the name fool you--they're still racist fascists.

New Memorial in Berlin

In commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre (July 11, 1995), Phillip Ruch has constructed a tower of shoes just in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It serves as a warning to the United Nations that it should never again simply stand by as "genocide unfolds". In July, 1995, UN peacekeepers were unable to stop the massacre of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serbian paramilitary forces. Ultimately, he will use the shoes to spell out U.N. in the hills above Srebrenica. Today the shoes are in Berlin, you can see a video after the jump. In a New York Times story, Ratko Mladic's personal diaries from the Balkan Wars are in the hands of prosecuting attorneys in the Hague. At this point, the sources don't provide much information about Srebrenica, but they do serve to provide additional evidence undermining Serb claims that the Bosnian Serbs acted alone.

Endstation--Deutsches Currywurst Museum

Currywurst is more than just a sausage: it's one of life's experiences--in Germany, at least, where you can buy one practically anywhere at any time of day. A currywurst doesn't cost much and doesn't take long to eat. Just long enough, in fact, for a chat with other currywurst connoisseurs. Currywurst may be everywhere, but it is always special. This urban snack has cult status and econmic importance. Its place in German culure is eulogized in songs, films and literature. Our exhibition looks at this culinary institution from many sides (or should we say ends?)...

So begins the main exhibit at the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin. This was my final museum, and now I'm back in my hotel by the Tegel airport.

If you go to Berlin (or anywhere in Germany, really) you must eat currywurst. Even if you're not sure you like it the first time, it gets into your soul. I don't feel the same about Doener Kebabs or Turkish Pizza or Jaegerwurst. Currywurst, despite the fact that it's kinda disgusting, is uniquely deee-licious.

The museum itself? Inspired. It touches on all aspects of currywurst kultur. Jokes about currywurst, what the inside of a fast-food cart (Imbiss) looks like when it's properly tricked-out, how "green" currywurst is because it's served in a paper dish that breaks down in the environment. In fact, the only element that was missing was the spiritual one, and I imagine that the curators take it for given that any visitor--anyone who would take time out of a busy schedule and slap down $12--probably already has a spritual relationship to currywurst.

They only sell their t-shirts in sizes L, XL, and XXL.

Some folks think that currywurst is just katsup and curry powder on a brat, but that's just wrong. There are a whole set of ingrediants (and I got the recipe if you want it) that go into the sauce. The origins of this gastranomic triumph have long been disputed. Some argue that it was Hamburg's Lena Bruecker who accidentally "discovered" the sauce in 1947 when she tripped and fell while carrying a mixture of black-market acquired ingrediants.

The museum takes the position, however, that it was Herta Heuwer of Berlin who created the sauce in '49. She refused to surrender her recipe.

A moment of silence please for the Gnädige Frau Herta Heuwer. She has given a great gift to humanity.

Oh... here's a fun little documentary about currywurst. Guten Apetit!

My Own Private Plattenbau

There were certainly many other places I could have stayed here in Berlin, but I chose the Ostel quite deliberately. The entire conceit of the place is that guests will have a taste--however superficial and Ostalgic (East-nostalgiac)--of what it was like to live in a genuine DDR-apartment. Perhaps what I found most surprising was the feeling that the rooms weren't really all that terrible. I realize it would be absurd to pay money to stay in an uncomfortable place, like a medieval historian choosing to stay in a damp, drafty castle, but I expected I would notice some very specific weaknesses. I didn't. Wallpaper patterns (in both the rooms I stayed) are intended to provide depth, so that the rooms don't seem quite so small and flat. The bathroom had plenty of hot water. The most notable design choices had to do with furniture and appliances, which were, presumably, from the 70s or 80s.

Still, even though I was living in spaces outfitted to give me a feel for day-to-day East German "style", I knew that I would have to dig around a bit to learn more about Plattenbauten (panel-construction) apartments.

This is what the Ostel looks like from the outside. They've done a nice job of sprucing it up with a colorfully painted facade.

Plattenbauten buildings might best be described as "pre-fab". One of myvsources asserts that the Dutch created the technique, and the most common type of Platte in Berlin was the WBS 70 (Wohnbauserie 70). Following the war, there was an acute housing shortage in Berlin, and the Soviets had essentially looted all the heavy equipment in their sector. Simply put, there was no way that the GDR could rebuild without sufficient raw materials and enough heavy equipment. Even though the SED called for "National Building" in 1952, and although the next 20 years saw some impressive constructions (for propaganda and prestige purposes), the housing shortage remained an acute "political-social" problem, threatening the legitimacy of the regime.

Then, in the 70s, when the construction of public buildings such as the Fernsehturm or the Haus des Lehrers was completed, the regime initiated a large-scale housing program. There are entire areas of the city that consist almost entirely of Plattenbauten. In areas such as Berlin Mitte, near the wall, builders added appropriate mosaics or facades, in an attempt to retain the historical feel of the neighborhood, but they never really lived up to West German standards.

The bathrooms in these apartments have no proper ventilation. Mine had a series of holes in the base of the door to encourage air circulation. For that reason they were called "Wet-cells". Nonetheless, it appears that East Germans prized their apartments when they finally got them. Like their Trabis, they lavished individual attention on their new personal property. Unfortunately, because each apartment was built to identical specifications, and because all the available furniture was built to identical specifications, they usually looked almost identical. But, like so many things in the GDR, the differences were subtle.

Scholars described the GDR as a Nischengesellschaft or "niche-society". It was necessitated by the constant surviellance and pressure to conform. Individuals would express their differences in safe spaces with close friends and family. These "niches" would be their new, damp apartments, their "dachas" (garden-houses or larger vacation cottages), and their hard-to-come-by Trabant automobiles. Although the SED provided them with youth clubs and art and leisure centers, but the common people avoided them. Instead, them met in small groups at their "dachas". Individually, they would read world literature rather than watch state-controlled television.

So, it took me about 10 days and some reading to really appreciate my own private Plattenbau.
 
 

Berliner Hund-Kultur

Today (my last) I was going to sit around in Friedrichshain waiting to get pictures of Berliners walking their dogs off the leash. I noticed over the past two weeks how well behaved dogs in Berlin are. I can't figure it out. The dogs and their owners just saunter down the street, the dog a few feet behind. The dog never runs out into traffic, it doesn't chase other dogs. It simply follows obediently behind its owner. Joon and I saw this repeatedly.
The breed of the dog has nothing to do with it. Nor does the breed of the owner, as far as I can see. Here's a punk I caught with his dog near Alexanderplatz. It turned out to be the only photo I took. I decided that if someone caught me in the act of surreptitiously photographing people walking dogs, well... Haven't these people already put up with so much secret surveillance over the past century?

The Neue Wache

Under the Communist regime, this was the “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism”. Since 1993, it has become the “Central Memorial Site of the Federal Republic to the Victims of War and Violent Rule”. Inside the building is a re-creation of Käthe Kollwitz's Pieta.

In 1969, the remains of an unknown soldier and the remains of an unknown concentration camp inmate were laid to rest here, surrounded by earth from WWII battlefields and concentration camps.

Watching Flintstones in Krakow

Dzień dobry, Wilma! Dzień dobry, Betty!

Auschwitz






 On Sunday, July 4 I visited the remains of Auschwitz I and II. Both are well-preserved, even though the Nazis tried to cover up all traces of their enormous crimes. I didn't sleep well the night before, because I can't understand a word of Polish and was worried I would fail to catch the early train. Auschwitz has become a huge tourist destination, attracting at least 1.3 million people in 2009. Because it's so busy, the museum now refuses to admit anyone without a reservation after 10:00. I wanted to explore the camps at my own pace (which was certainly the right choice) and planned to arrive the moment the museum opened in the morning.
There's a train that leaves once or twice each hour from Krakow main railway station. It's a slow ride, so I had to board the 6:10 train. I'm relieved that I did, because by 10:00, when I finished the first part of my tour in Auschwitz I, there were a dozen busses lined up and groups kicking off at 10-yard intervals to walk the camp. When I was there it was quiet and uncrowded, so I didn't have to compete with other people. The same was true for Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Click to see this up close. The guard post is eerie.

I expected empty, delapidated buildings, but at Auschwitz I (a former Polish Army barracks) the buildings are almost all stone and in perfect condition. In some cases, you can make out names or images that inmates scratched into the walls. There is faded German signage and the original paint still shows. [For example, above is the central square of Auschwitz I--the base of the guard house has been playfully painted to look as though it has stones set in it.] Important locations are clearly marked and often an illustration (by a former inmate) accompianies each explanation. The museum is located in a series of buildings or “Blocks”. There is no “fat” in the main exhibition which is housed in Blocks 4-7 and 11--the “Death Block”. Althogether the remnants are a damning collection of evidence and present a compelling argument against faith in human goodness and historical progress. Simply put, it's horrifying and demoralizing.

I couldn't photograph any of the exhibits in the Blocks, which is just as well. It wouldn't do the place justice and it seemed inappropriate anyway. Block 4 established a basic history and explained the purpose of the camp. Sometimes, the layout of each Block is unclear, and I believe I skipped a few exhibit rooms. For example, I realized late that I missed the upper floor exhibit on the "hospital" and SS medical experiments.

This is what the Soviets found.

I also almost missed room 5 in Block 4. The room holds a single exhibit: a sea of women's hair. Sometimes braided.

The scope of the orchestrated cruelty at Auschwitz is hard to accept. I can't stop thinking about the hair. As I walked the rest of the museum, and then the grounds of the Vernichtungslager at Birkenau, the accumulated weight of human suffering and the calculated cruelty of the perpetrators was tangible. The Death Block is an absolute torture chamber. And there are pools next to the crematoria where the Nazis dumped the ashes of their victims. Outside of the camp walls, there are acres of soil saturated with ash.

Above is one of the few clandestine photos showing the process of extermination at Auschwitz. Prisoners are burning bodies in giant pits outside the wire of the camp. In the summer of '44, the crematoria couldn't keep up with the gas chambers.

This is what the same spot looks like today.

The SS dynamited the crematoria when they fled. This is Crematoria IV. The ash pond is to its right in the photo below:

At the same location, we see a group of Hungarian Jews in the summer of '44. They are standing in the vicinity of Crematoria IV and V and waiting to be gassed (they would be in the stand of trees you see behind the foundations of the destroyed Crematoria) . All children were sent directly to the gas along with their mothers. There was no need to shave their heads until after they were dead. That task would fall to the Jewish Sonderkommando.

The monument at Birkenau is huge, and I admit I never appreciated it before (as though it were my place to judge the choices of the generation who lived it). The abstract sculpture, unveiled in 1967, always struck me as the product of a modernist impulse that I found sterile and obtuse.

When I saw it up close and in context, however, I changed my mind. It is an attempt to commemorate, define, and make a collective statement about a place that reflects the greatest imaginable barbarism. In multiple languages, at the foot of a line of abstract shapes, are a series of plaques. Each says the following: “Forever let this place be a cry of dispair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children mainly Jews from various countries of Europe”. It was very moving.

I walked the extermination camp for about an hour. It was only busy toward the end of my stay, when the mobs from the museum arrived by shuttle. I walked past at least five student groups as I returned to the parking lot. Students from Israel had their arms around one another. Students from America seemed distracted by the heat.

The Legacy of Stalin: Karl-Marx-Allee and Treptower Park

In 1949, the SED determined it would be appropriate to re-name the Große Frankfurter Straße “Stalinallee”. The entire borough of Friedrichshain was destroyed during the war, and after years of neglect, rebuilding was finally underway. The East German regime built a massive, 2.3 Kilometer long boulevard to honor Stalin. Each block consists of “workers-palaces” built above shop-spaces on the ground floor.

It was along this street in 1953 that the June 17 uprising occurred. After Stalin died, the street was re-named Karl-Marx-Allee. It compares favorably to similar city-planning in the Soviet Union during the 20s, when the Communists transformed cities like Kharkov and Kiev into modern expressions of party power.

Treptower Park is yet another Stalin-era monument. The memorial site covers the remains of 5000 fallen Soviet soldiers. This monument was built, in large part, with granite from Hitler's former Reichschancellory. The most impressive element of the monument is the Red Army soldier smashing a swastika with his sword while cradling a child in his free arm. Allegedly, as the Soviets were trying to cross the Landwehr Canal at Potsdamer Bridge, this young soldier risked his life to race out into the crossfire and save a terrified child. It's the kind of story that builds myths—the myth of communist humanity in the face of fascist inhumanity, and the image of a paternal Soviet Union suffering terrible losses to free the decent people of Germany from a brutal regime.

Flakturm Adventure

During the war, Hitler had three sets of Flakturm (anti-aircraft towers) constructed in order to ward off allied air attacks. The idea was to pair up a set of 8 high-velocity anti-aircraft guns with a high-tech radar array, and then create “windows” of high explosive that would knock down any plane that flew into them. Any look at a postwar map of the city reveals how ineffective the monster structures actually were. The Berlin Underworld Association looks after the tower in Humbolthain and offers guided tours as well. The tower was the last of three built, and unlike the others, it was not entirely demolished after the war. The French brought down half the structure, but the remaining battlements overlooked an important S-Bahn route, so they're still standing. Rather than get into the technical specifications of the thing, I'll simply include some images from the war.

This is the Berlin Zoo tower at the end of the battle.

Here are soldiers drilling on the roof of the tower.

What is left of the tower is in bad shape. Standing at the entrance you can see that the facade was heavily shot-up by Soviet ground forces as they tried to work their way from the north into the city. By the time Berlin surrendered, there were thousands of civilians hiding in the tower, without access to fresh water or sufficient sanitation. Inside the tower, staircases are collapsed and there are holes dropping down 30 meters or more. On the tour we wore construction helmets and were carefully shepherded through areas that seemed less stable. The tour was first rate. Our guide combined terrific story-telling with clear explanations of the details of the tower's construction, capabilities, and demolition. I think this would be a great tour for our kids, but the tower is closed to the public during the winter months, as it serves as a bat sanctuary. If the bats are disturbed during the winter months, they won't return to hiberation and then they'll die.

 

Today, the face of the tower doubles as a rock-climbing wall.

A Day in Kreuzberg and Neukoelln

On the 27th, Joon (a visiting friend) and I met a local woman in her borough--Neukoelln. Joon and I had the morning to ourselves and he was still recovering from jetlag, so we walked the neighborhood just north of the Landwehr Canal near Görlitzer Park. Like Friedrichshain to the east acoss the Spree, it's a colorful, energetic neighborhood. We drank coffee across from a mosque and then visited the Kreuzberg City Museum.

I loved the exhibits--they were simple, yet very effective. I regret that I brought no camera with me. Kreuzbergers take pride in their migrant heritage. The first wave of migrants were Huguenots fleeing from religious persecution in France during the 18th century, the immediate postwar period saw an influx of Germans from Pomerania and Silesia, following the construction of the Berlin Wall there were Guest-Workers from Turkey and Vietnam as well. The most recent have been asylum-seekers from the war in Bosnia. The woman at the museum who led me around was muslim and wore a head-scarf.

The temporary exhibit concerned working class resistence to the Nazis during the war. Kreuzberg was a highly industrialized working-class district in the city. In 1848 rebelling workers actually smashed steam engines in a Luddite fury. This was an important year in the history of USM because it inspired Peter Engelmann to leave illiberal Germany for a more democratic America.

Kreuzberg was the center of Werner Siemens' (inventor of the Dynamomachine und Starkstromtechnik) business activities from 1847. The borough is also known for its breweries, textiles production, Bechstein pianos, and it's many publishing companies: Mosse, Scherl, and Ullstein (pubisher of All Quiet on the Western Front). During the 1919 Spartacist uprising, the Newspaper quarter was the site of heavy fighting between revolutionaries and the government.

Turks began to arrive in Kreuzberg as Guest-workers after the construction of the Berlin Wall. The first immigrants were young, professionally-oriented, secular women. Things have changed a great deal since then, and now many women wear some kind of headscarf. There is a general trend among young, born-in-the-west muslims towards greater piety (sometimes even Islamicist extremism) as well as ethnic nationalism. That is something that only really began in the 90s, and seems to reflect a widespread development throughout Western Europe. Ian Buruma analyses the causes and consequences of this second-generation “backlash” against assimiliation in his book Murder in Amsterdam, which focuses on the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2005. Only last week, a group of immigrant muslim youths attacked a Jewish dance troupe in Hannover, throwing stones and shouting epithets.

Neukoelln is no longer a manufacturing neighborhood, it is increasingly attracting young artists and other creative types. On Sunday Christina wanted to take us to "48 Hours of Neukoelln"--a gallery walk. Unfortunately, we sat down for a bite of lunch when we first met here, and there were only a few minutes to walk the neighborhood before all the galleries closed and the tattooed masses all sat down to watch Germany defeat England in the World Cup. The Germans set off fireworks whenever they score a goal, so it could get pretty noisy. Also, after this trip, I don't think I'll ever be able to imagine soccer without the constant, numbing buzzing of the massed vuvuzelas. We did what everyone does on a Sunday... lunch, Kaffee und Kuchen, Biergarten.

There's a Specter Haunting Germany...

National Pride. A Lebanese immigrant in Neukoelln is having difficulty keeping his giant German flag safe. Autonomen (left-wing radicals) are presumably to blame.
Nationalism is very complex for post-war Germany.

Adlon Hotel -- a Berlin Institution

I knew nothing about the Adlon until I began reading Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir series. His hero, Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) detective Bernie Gunther, worked there as a house detective. I had to go see it. Here I am enjoying a cool beverage on Pariser Platz. Unfortunately, only hotel guests can go into the Adlon for a look around. Listen to this interview with Kerr on NPR.

Stolpersteine and Geocaching

Two fun activities today. One is geocaching. People hide small boxes of stuff (worthless stuff, as trophies the contents aren't worth much) in locations all over the world. Then they post clues to the locations of their chaches online. Anybody with a GPS device (most of our cell-phones) can search for the cache. Once you find it, you pull a book out of the box and pencil in the date and time. Leave a note. Take an object or leave one. Then move on to the next cache.

In Friedrichshain and Neukoelln we looked for caches. Despite online photographic clues, we simply couldn't find a cache located at the Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn station. We were more successful in Neukoelln. At the site of the ruins of the first gas station in the city we found a cache. Joon made the point that geo-cachers often choose spots of historical or other interest. He pointed out that both sites we checked would introduce a stranger to some of the cooler neighborhoods in Berlin.

We also kept our eyes out for Stolpersteine (without too much success, I fear--I was always looking up). In 1992, Gunter Denning of Cologne came up with concept combining public art memorialization and collective memory. He has placed approximately 7000 "stumble-stones" throughout Germany. He began his project in the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg boroughs because they had previously been home to significant Jewish populations.

Stones (metal plaques) are laid in the sidewalk at the location of a person's last place of residence prior to deportation. Each stone includes the victim's name, birth-year, date of deporation and fate. Denning had the following to say about his project:

"The memory of this person will be called concretely into our day-to-day lives through the personal memory of this person, at the home where he lived until deportation. Each individual's stone goes on to symbolize the entirety of the victims, because it is impossible to actually place all of the stones."

These are not only Jewish victims, either. Sinti and Roma, political foes, homosexuals, Jehova's Witnesses are other groups included in the project.

Individuals can support the placement of Stolpersteine. Here's the site.

Madame Secretary

Hillery Clinton is in Krakow. Now.

This is the back of her head.

Here are snipers on the roof.

Enough. It is now time to go eat Kielbasa.

...take them bowling...

What's that I see? Neo-Nazi skinheads in Dresden, Germany? They certainly are! In fact, I saw skins on a number of occasions over the past few days--most recently in the main town square in Krakow.

You might think that picking out skinheads would be difficult, since German men of a certain age tend to shave their heads anyway. In fact, the clothing gives them away. While many skins have moved away from camouflage fatigue pants and combat boots, they still like to combine a certain color palette: red, white, and black. This is especially true now that many of them grow their hair out as a form of camouflage. One "lady"-skin I saw had long, goth-black tresses, that she then combined them with a black sweatshirt that said (in English) "Hate You" on the front. On the back was a small shield, with the gothic letters "HY" in it. Skins like to diplay symbols reminisent of tactical symbols used by the Wehrmacht and SS during the Second World War. If you're not familiar with their symbols, you'll just think they're punks, but the "coding" is not at all subtle if you know what you're looking at.

What I later learned was that there are a number of neo-nazi "brands", all with online shops: Thor Steinar, Consdaple, Masterrace Europe, Pit Bull (Frankfurt) and others, offer "nordic flair" for young, fashion-conscious hate-mongers. These hate-mongers are playing with their dogs on a warm summer evening.

This particular "Rudel" of Skinheads (that's my moniker, not theirs) was in high spirits. As they made their way north across the Elbe River, they were happy and joking and confident. They eagerly made eye contact, and I think they revelled in the fact that they would be recongized as toughs. As the sun went down one could find them playing along the beach. I can't help but wonder what they were talking about down there.

Other than its skins, Dresden was a sleepy town. There was a stream of tourists making its way from the Hauptbahnhof to the Frauenkirche and back, but the city didn't seem to offer much else. I scheduled eight hours there--far too much time. I filled it with eating at four different establishments by the time I boarded the train back to Berlin.

As for the architecture, it's a typically fascinating combination of tradition, destruction, and socialist-realism. Photos from 1945 reveal the extent of the destruction that Anglo-American bombers rained down upon the city. A decade later the ruins were cleared out and replaced with empty lots. The Frauenkirche itself remained a shell until the mid-80s, when the SED restored it. visitors can still distinguish the old from the new facade, as the old stones are stained black. The inside of the church was equally impressive, and drew a large crowd of admirers. Finally, I was in many ways more intrigued by the Socialist Culture Palace--the history of communism is still so immediate in my mind, and I find any tangible connection to it fascinating.