So Done. My MIind. My Brain is Slithering Out My Ear

                This is being written in the aftermath of an 11 page research paper.

                All hope of survival has been lost.

                And sanity is no longer in the equation.

                Tonight. WE RIDE.

 

                So after that little loss of brain cells…Welcome to the German Culture final. Tonight we’ll be focusing on something I happened to stumble upon on Tumblr (which is legitimately the best website ever. EVER.) Naturally since Tumblr is only a blogging site I had to go a look for the source (Here you go: http://news.yahoo.com/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-155155175.html  ) Pretty legit. To summarize, German police only used 85 bullets against people this year and only 6 people ended up dead in the end. That was then followed by the story of the U.S. cops who shot 90 bullets at one unarmed murder suspect. Really guys? Really? Moral of the story: Likely to do with gun control.

 A few nights ago I spent 15 minutes explaining to my parents what the RAF was and what they did. It’s nice to know you can take things learned in class and use them in real life. Especially now with the type of world we live in and the fact that they were basically the first modern day terrorist group. Even though there’ve been like four posts (or what feels like four posts) on the RAF, the evolution of their group through the different time periods is fascinating as it get s more radical and violent towards civilians as it goes.

However, unlike the people who keep killing here, they did it to make a point and create change. Mass killings here are done by people who find that killing others is the easiest way to get their names into people’s households. American’s have an almost sickening obsession with becoming famous and coupled with a terrible mental health system and easy access to guns. We’re sorta asking for it.

Which leads into something I sorta wish we’d gone through in class. How the healthcare system works and what they do for people with mental illnesses because the only thing to go off of really is what we saw in Berlin Calling and that had more to do with addiction than anything.

While looking into the story on the police, the comments the people made on the article became the most fascinating part. Some people were saying that because Germany has laxer restrictions on drugs, it is less necessary for them to take out the dealers in the fashion that the American’s do. Another said due to the fact that America’s population is 4 times larger than that of Germany’s it’s somewhat expected. Then there was a whole bunch of really not politically correct jokes that naturally would show up where they’re not wanted.

Someone then dropped in to talk about how the German police force was trained. They’re better at hand to hand and riot control and apparently very good with a night stick. If you’re good with that and the subject is unarmed, it’s unnecessary to shoot. Here it seems as if that’s the only thing the cops know how to do. If you can’t make them go quietly, pull a gun on them and hope they understand it’s a real threat because they don’t know who has weapons on them and who doesn’t.

I’m honestly running out of things to talk about and I have a good 300 words to go. Usually I’m so good at this. Dragging things out until they’re just ridiculous. 800 words isn’t even that much. MY MIND IS EXPLODING. MAKE IT STOP.

Ah-Ha! We should have gone over some recent German pop culture. I mean really. Who’s famous there that we don’t know about here, who’s big there besides Hasslehoff. Though I guess we kinda did but not really. There were some people mentioned during the states presentations but didn’t really get to learn a whole lot about it. Pop culture is necessary to a thriving society. Seriously. Pop culture is whatever people are talking about. Shakespeare would have been pop culture at one point. What are German’s talking about right now?

Also a quick dive into the learning of foreign languages there. Here we sit down and we have a class on it and that’s all we learn. There (and I was talking to a girl who actually lives in Germany) they have English integrated into other subjects so it’s like learning the language in real time which is awesome and for the most part would probably be easier. Wouldn’t you think?

I really enjoyed this class for all I got behind on my posts (whoops) and I’ve already been able to take the stuff I learned from it and share it with other people. Yay German Culture! Yaaaaaay.

Everything Makes Sense Now

German's certainly do like their breads, to the point where expats are most likely to complain about the lack of bread where they relocated than anything else. Which isn't surprising seeing as the German's actually have a veritable natural rainbow of bread colors ranging from the black (technically dark brown, but no one follows technicalities anymore) Schwarzbrot to the average white bread that we know and love here and every shade of brown and gray in between.

Let's take a moment to check in on Rye.

"Hello, Rye. Tell me, what's your story?"

"Well, funny story really, no body used to take me seriously because they said I tasted terrible and had to be mixed with other grains to make my existance as a food tolerable. Now I laugh because I'm one of the most popular grains in Northern and Eastern Europe because I'm damn good with the cold and snow doesn't kill me like the overrated wheat that's grown everywhere else. Also, I grow so fast that weeds can barely take root. I'm just that awesome I guess."

"How many different types of breads are you in?"

"Well, I'm commonly used in pumpernikel and crisp breads as well as Weizenmischbrot, Mehrkornbrot, Roggenbrot, Sonnenblumenkernbrot, Kürbiskernbrot,  and Zwiebelbrot. As you can tell, people actually love me."

"Well as a bread lover myself I can honestly say that I don't love you."

And that concludes our interview with Rye.
And this post.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cuisine#Desserts

I ACTUALLY DID THIS ON TIME.

 The first generation of the RAF was relatively careful with what they did and I believe they were relatively certain they’d lose people along the way. Their very first attacks were robbing banks and only taking the money from the very rich and then the ever present ‘escalation’ appeared. They started growing out and attacking American military bases in Germany. Things then started going awry after the attack on The Springer (or whatever that newspaper thing was called). In that case they had called the company to tell them there was a bomb but the company didn’t do anything and therefore innocent civilians were killed.

At the beginning of the movie the RAF seemed to be doing justified activity against the government because things needed to change and peaceful protests weren’t working.  As the RAF grew further and further away from the first generation they seemed to grow further and further from their original cause and much less approachable because things were starting to change and their cause seemed less viable.

He acted like the ultimate teenage rebel and as if he’d never grown up honestly. This was good from the group perspective, he was there to give them a vision and the attitude the group needed to succeed even though it alienated Ulrike, especially towards the end. It was bad when dealing with people in positions of power who do not treat kindly to those with that kind of attitude.

That Moment When You Recognize Someone But It Ends Up That They Just Look Exactly Like An Actor.

The first thing I’d like to comment on is David Brühl. Why? Because he’s a fantastic actor and there’s a whole little crack in the Tumblr wall dedicated to him. He’s also going to be in a movie with the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch somewhere within the next couple of years. Also, he knows how to speak like five different languages proficiently which is a lot a lot.

Also worthy of mention is Burghart Klaussner, he is also a good actor. I was just wondering if this genre of movies does as the BBC does and constantly reuses the same actors over and over? No? Must just be me then…

Well, it’s not letting me watch the second half of Goodbye Lenin, which is really, really depressing because I liked that one much more than The Edukators. Goodbye Lenin had a much better style of storytelling and honestly learned a lot about the reunification of East and West Germany. The Edukators on the other hand, whilst telling a different story, still had no excuse for moving so slow that it felt like a week’s worth of movie watching.

In both movies however, the same theme remains; the same theme in Baader-Meinhof, and Berlin Calling. The theme of escalation. In The Edukators it is when they end up kidnapping the man instead of just doing the rearrangement of furniture and in Goodbye Lenin it is Alex getting so caught up in lying to his mother that it becomes easier to unravel it.

Take a moment to also compare and contrast the two characters that Daniel Brühl plays. Alex, a much more innocent character trying to do his best to make up for giving his mother the heart attack that put her in a coma and Jan, the relatively stoic activist who breaks into people’s houses but doesn’t steal anything in the hopes that they’ll become completely paranoid about their money. In both movies money does play a big part. Remembering in Goodbye Lenin when East Germany was crossing over to the DM from the currency they were using before and Alex’s mother couldn’t remember where she’d stashed her savings and both the kids look disappointed. Money in The Edukators is slightly self-explanatory. Jan, Peter, and Jule are basically broke and are fighting for better working conditions and pay for people in Asia, so they go into rich people’s villas and rearrange everything until they end up kidnapping one.

Concerning The General Public

One cannot incite social change through violence. Its only result is fear.

When people fear each other and themselves, the general population no longer longs for revolution, but for the safety that a secure government provides.

In the case of Baader-Meinhof, it started out as a protest gone very seriously wrong. The Persian Shah hired his own people and they attacked when the student protesters (protesting for equal rights in the Middle East). The police didn’t do anything. That’s what ultimately pissed people off. And when they did do something, they attacked the protestors not the first acting aggressors. This caused the general public to start fearing the government, believing it was a police state rather than the government it was supposed to be. This prompted rebellion and it escalated quickly. It died off a little and then the RAF reemerged in full force. And people were happy with it. They liked that they were doing something. And then they started getting violent. Really, really violent. And the RAF lost the support of the public because the public began to become afraid of them. They didn’t know where the bombs were, didn’t know who was going to die next. And they welcomed it when the government cracked down on them, they were okay with being man-handled to find the RAF members.

Because they were afraid.

Afraid that maybe next time they would be in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

Afraid that their family members could be next.

The general public does not handle fear well.

Finally Berlin Calls

Drugs are ultimately Ickarus’ bridge from reality into a world where nothing matters. He’s so sick of not being at the rest of the world’s standards whether it be music or with his family that he desperately wants to escape it. There is also the fact that most of his fans do the same thing for basically the same reason, rebelling against the force that had restrained them. It also does not help that they feel as if they have no other way to control their own futures. The drugs they take are generally hardcore and/or hallucinogenic to make them feel as if they have truly escaped the world, with the addition of when they take them (generally listening to music (techno, rave, or trance)) adds to feelings they get. From the movie you can see that there and here have almost the same standards (with them likely being more lax on the restrictions). We both have a section of young adults who have generally ceased to care and have begun to do what they want. Then there’s the portion who do what the others are doing but only on their off time so it does not affect their work. In the case of Ickarus’ work ethic, he’s good at what he does, but until he went to rehab it wasn’t as exceptional as it was after he was clean. Alice was also good at what she does; however most people who do what Ickarus did do not get second chances. I also don’t think she was German…either that or she had an impeccable English accent. And industrial nation though, is dependent on its youth. With an aging workforce that’ll eventually get too old to work and thus the opening of jobs that require focus and discipline. The youth at the moment will not be able to step into their shoes and fill the rolls. As for cult movies, I don’t really know of any as it’s not really my area of movie watching.

 

 

I really enjoyed the film. Engaging storyline, good acting, and excellent music. I particularly liked the doctor and Ickarus (though he got really frustrating at points). Of course the film was different from American films, it’s supposed to be. As high tech as Hollywood is all the good actors come from Europe as they tend to put more stock in art forms than Americans (most of whom seem to only be in it for the triviality of fame and money, not all, but a good portion). Also, because American culture has a stick up its ass, it ruins a lot of things that could become excellent plots. This movie in the U.S. would have been at the very least rated R if not higher due to the sheer amount of hardcore drugs and nudity. Hell, they put a warning if someone is smoking at any given time. This creates curiosity in the children the parents are being so overly protective of and makes them want to go out and see what they’re missing. In class we’ve talked about how nudity isn’t that big of a deal in Germany and most of the rest of Europe but lo’ and behold if someone is missing an article of clothing in America-There is a comic, made by a Danish woman, that portrays America’s allowance and lack of sensitivity to violence and its over-sensitivity to  nudity.

Here is the link: http://satwcomic.com/anything-but-that

Though it is not in the form of film, but a videogame, it still proves the point.