Die Zeit:

Spiegel:

»Wir haben eine hochdramatische Situation«, sagte Angela Merkel laut Teilnehmern im CDU-Bundesvorstand. Was bisher gilt, sei ihrer Einschätzung nach nicht ausreichend.

This is very much what Merkel was saying one year ago, when I was noting that Söder and friends were authoritatively assuring the country the lockdown would definitely, absolutely only be for the month, well maybe six weeks, but in no way would it extend through Weihnachten, well o.k., unfortunately it looks like this will extend through Weihnachten but definitely not beyond … let me assure you of that. Merkel was seen as too cautious, dour, and then a few weeks later all the media were carrying wry stories about how right Merkel had been. As with US media I am coming to find that what is interesting is not so much the content, but the fact that it is this content the media is publishing. The society’s stories about itself are as/more revealing than the substance, or perhaps better put they are a significant part of the substance.

Der britische Verteidigungsminister Ben Wallace kündigte an, „in den kommenden Tagen oder Wochen“ etwa 150 Soldaten an die polnische Grenze zu entsenden.

…

Die britische Regierung befürchtet, dass sich ein Teil der Migranten nach Frankreich durchschlägt, um von dort nach England überzusetzen. Die Zahl der über den Kanal kommenden Mi­granten hat sich zuletzt stark erhöht. Wallace besuchte auch britische Soldaten, die im Rahmen der NATO-Mission „Enhanced Forward Presence“ in Polen stationiert sind. London teilt im Wesentlichen den polnischen Blick auf die Bedrohungen aus dem Osten.

NATO partner Poland: protecting Britain from the Iraqi threat.

Found myself musing about this today. Reading German, trying to learn a bit of Czech and Polish. There is a world where this man’s t-shirt makes sense. I am very far from there, and glad of this. Passed a Polish co-worker a link to the Polish Wikipedia page on Jürgen Habermas, and would like to be able to read it myself.

Going onto the base we were searched because, you know, terrorists. An undifferentiated threat, but in a context where there was no need for further qualification, where in fact raising the question would easily mark one as a terrorist sympathizer.

Joseph Weisbrod, Berliner Zeitung:

Doch erst 1961, vor 60 Jahren, traten in der Bundesrepublik die ersten 340 Zivis ihren „Ersatzdienst“ an. Zwölf Jahre später, im September 1973, stelle ich den Antrag auf Anerkennung als Kriegsdienst­verweigerer. In einer Zeit des Kalten Krieges und des Vietnamkriegs, mit 1,4 Millionen getöteten vietnamesischen Zivilisten. Beim Massaker von My Lai, einem vietnamesischen Dorf, ermordeten am 16. März 1968 US-Soldaten auf Befehl des später frei gesprochenen Leutnants William Calley 504 Menschen, meist Frauen, Kinder und Alte.

This is the second paragraph of Weisbrod’s article about how he spent several years substituting civil service for Germany’s military draft. What struck me was reading his reference to Mỹ Lai, 50 years after the massacre, a week after I realized that while for many my age the place name immediately conjures photos of bodies, for the generation after mine the words have no resonance.

Demo gegen Militarismus in Bonn, 1980 | imago/Klaus Rose

Foreign Policy:

Sigmar Gabriel, Macron talk with Habermas at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin March 16, 2017

Europe is indeed “unhappy” if its future depends on intellectuals’ ability to coax elites into living up to values of heroism that they themselves despise.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

—James Joyce, Ulysses, (USA: Random House, 1961), 42.

FAZ:

„Die Lage in Deutschland hat eine äußerste Dramatik“, machte Habeck deutlich. „Wenn die vierte Welle nicht schnell gebrochen wird, droht das Krankenhaus­system im Dezember zusammenzubrechen“, warnte er.

December being three weeks away. Something that strikes me is how „normal“ this sort of statement has become over the past year. We live with this as background noise, rather than as sword over our heads.

On 14 February 1915, he wrote to Hugh Walpole that he was, after many months, returning to work. He wondered, however, whether it was possible to write under such alien circumstances:

The subject-matter of one’s effort has become itself utterly treacherous and false—its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of this—and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either— without putting into play mere fiddlesticks?

This volley of questions, as profound as it is desperate, touches on an his­torio­graphic dilemma latent in all realistic representation and anticipates the pre­dic­a­ment in which Joyce found himself two years later at the start of his own project of historical recreation. James wants to know how, if literature is supposed to reflect reality—and we should remember that, up until the war, he had been working on The Ivory Tower, a novel about the „present“—how it can do so without also acknowledging reality’s latent treachery, a treachery that had recently become all too overt.

—Robert Spoo, „‚Nestor‘ and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses„, in Joyce and the Subject of History, Wollaeger, Luftig, Spoo, eds., (USA: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 118.