Daily Dose of Dust
Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Sunday, March 28, 2004
Bruce Elder in Weekend edition of the best paper in the world, SMH, shares with readers the background to a book entitled Stasiland which like Schindlers Arch (List) is written by an Australian, this time by a woman called, Anna Funder. Funder was apparently confronted by an Argentinian viewer who wanted to know why the televesion station she was working for in Berlin did not do more stories on the Iron Curtain and the Stasi, the old East German secret police. The Argentinian viewer pointed out that it took Germany 20 years to start discussing and dissecting Nazism:
Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened in East Germany (or Czechoslovakia) is remembered?...
It’s generally believed that people want to forget about the past and move on—but I find it curious that they wouldn’t want to know about this when so much remains unresolved... Stasiland shine a dazzling light on one of the world’s most paranoid and secretive regimes, and its effects on contemporary German society.
(Some unkind soul suggested resently to this Slavic Dragon that 21st Sentury Sydney has SusSex Secret Police...)
What's Wrong With Germany?
If it is true, as Jimmy Carter once asserted, that nations can find themselves in a state of collective malaise, there is no doubt that Germany in 2004 would qualify as downright sickly, at least as far as its own residents are concerned. Strangely, when viewed from an objective standpoint, Germany doesn't seem to be any worse off economically, culturally, or politically, than most other European nations, but England and France do not seem to be in quite the despairing mood that Germany is in. Is the difference perhaps, as some have been saying, Germans just enjoy complaining? Or does it run deeper?
· Nations can find themselves in a state of collective malaise [link first seen at The New York Times 03/24/04 ]
· See Also Hamas: Gates of Hell, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
· See Also Interview: Alan Dershowitz
· See Also Bluntly Our Culture Through A Wagner Filter: The English like their mythologies to work out, to resolve themselves
· Did the Terrorists Win in Madrid? German Views
· A New Churchill Needed for Europe? Czech Views
· The EU's New Terrorism Czar [ via EuroSavant ]