Scary or funny Halloween faces carved into large Middle European root vegetables such as mangelwurzel, sugar beets or turnips. After darkness falls, children carry the illuminated Rübengeister in a festive parade around their neighborhood and/or display them in their windows, depending on local custom. Wikipedia notes that Rübengeister are part of regional autumnal traditions of light, warmth, thanksgiving and, I would add, a nice evening walkabout with your neighbors.
(ROOO ben guy ster.)
Yet another cute German abbreviation, this time for “Spurensicherung,” the “evidence securers” crime scene specialists.
(SHPOO zee.)
“Other journalists aren’t doing that.” “Other journalists aren’t taking that attitude.” Spiegel-Online reports that this was the CSU response in late May 2011 when asked for a written statement on the Bavarian government’s position in the ongoing German search for “final storage” (Endlager) locations for nuclear waste. At the time, the CSU indicated that Bavaria might reverse its position and become a candidate for permanent nuclear waste disposal. The state’s environmental ministry did not respond to Spiegel’s follow-up questions, even though the government “is legally obligated to provide information.” Finally, they agreed to a phone interview but no written statement, because “other journalists weren’t” demanding written statements. CSU party spokesperson Ulrike Strauß told der Spiegel that written statements weren’t normal.
Spiegel emailed Strauß their versions of her oral statements for her approval, and she called the top editors’ secretary (Sekretariat der Chefredaktion) to complain. Instead of the senior editors, the business editor returned her call, repeating that the magazine was going to insist on written quotes. Ultimately, nine days after Spiegel’s initial query on 23 May 2011, the state environmental minister announced that Bavaria would not be used for permanent nuclear waste disposal.
Spiegel goes on to report that, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in March 2011 CSU spokesperson Ulrike Strauß phoned the Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian {Public} Broadcasting, BR) news department to complain about a critical report about a CSU politician. The critical report was then replaced in subsequent news programs; it aired only once. BR says no pressure was exerted. Strauß says she acted entirely alone, on her own. The report in question was about environmental minister Markus Söder (CSU)’s contradictory statements before and after the Fukushima nuclear disaster regarding whether the Bavarian nuclear power plant Isar I was entirely safe. Before Fukushima it was safe. After, not so safe.
(ON derr eh journaLIST en SHTELL en zichh nichht zoh ON.)
“The Strepp Affair,” “The Case of Horst Seehofer.” The Bavarian state branch of Angela Merkel’s CDU party insists on remaining separate from the general CDU and calls itself the CSU. Horst Seehofer is in charge. The CSU has been posturing in national politics for an upcoming state election. Last Sunday, CSU spokesperson Hans Michael Strepp called the public broadcasting ZDF television station and said he’d heard they were going to broadcast a news report about the rival Bavarian SPD’s recent festive nomination of their top candidate, Christian Ude. Strepp told ZDF that neither the public broadcasting ARD nor the public broadcasting news and documentaries channel Phoenix was planning to report on the Bavarian SPD’s state convention and far be it from Strepp to want to tell them their business but he wanted to give them food for thought that there could be discussions afterward if ZDF went it alone. ZDF interpreted this as exerting influence and broadcast the report anyway. Then they broadcast a report about Strepp’s phone call.
At first, the CSU said nothing bad had happened. At noon on Thurs. 25 Oct 2012, Horst Seehofer announced that Spokesperson Strepp had resigned because Strepp had said he hadn’t exerted any influence on ZDF and the ZDF disagreed with that statement and Seehofer could not clarify this situation. The CSU’s position is now that Strepp acted entirely alone. In a lively parliamentary discussion after Seehofer’s announcement of Strepp’s resignation, Bavarian M.P.’s cast a lot of aspersions. CSU General Secretary Alexander Dobrindt has now been dragged into it because he obfuscated rather than clarified and because people find it credible that he might have given Strepp the incredible order to make the call. The Bavarian SPD demanded that Seehofer and Dobrindt resign their seats on ZDF management boards (!).
German Green party member Jürgen Trittin has demanded that all politicians holding government office resign from public broadcasting channels’ supervisory boards. Trittin said the Greens have been demanding this for years, and that a gray zone forms where government and media entangle. Trittin also said this is what you get when people have been in power longer than Fidel Castro.
(COW zah SHTREP, COW zah Horst ZAY hoaf er.)
The “burghers camp,” the “middle class position,” was being invoked in Stuttgart’s recent politics much as the “center” is in the USA. After Stuttgart’s mayoral election on 21 Oct 2012, the Green candidate had 52.9% of the vote and the “nonparty” (CDU, Merkel-supported) candidate 45.3%. The Green party is now in charge of Stuttgart for the first time, with an absolute majority (!), after 40 years of CDU mayors in various coalitions. Part of the voters’ general anger was in response to last year’s “Stuttgart 21” controversy in which the CDU insisted on going through with expansion of the main train station at the cost of parts of its historic building, trees in the castle park, public access to the castle park for ten years of construction, public land sold for development and cost overruns exceeding the originally promised price of EUR 200 million to the current estimate of EUR 4 billion and possibly even EUR 18 billion because a 2003 report found the area too unstable for an underground train station. I also wonder about the archeological losses incurred by digging next to a castle site that’s over a thousand years old.
New Oberbürgermeister Fritz Kuhn (Green Party) said, “This assumption that the burghers camp is the CDU and FDP is ~[as dead wrong as it’s possible to be wrong in a very wrong way]. We too are in the burghers camp, but with a progressed understanding of the middle classes. And today’s success is actually the success of a long-term strategy that’s been ongoing for years.”
Update on 12 Dec 2012: Stuttgart 21 is now estimated to cost 6.8 billion euros (but only if it finishes in 2021 as planned, &c.). The head of Deutsche Bahn, the German Rail operator, has now alleged that canceling the project will cost 2 billion euros. But, says Spiegel-Online, he has also said for some time that Stuttgart 21 would only be worth carrying out if its costs did not exceed 4.7 billion euros.
Update on 21 Nov 2013: An expert opinion report found that ex-governor of Baden-Württemberg Stefan Mappus (C.D.U.) overpaid by ~780 million euros when he bought into private energy utility company EnBW in 2010, negotiating a shares purchase package for 4.7 billion euros. The report was commissioned by the Stuttgart prosecutors’ office.
Update on 07 Mar 2014: Stuttgart prosecutors are now investigating ex-governor Stefan Mappus for his role in the police beatdown of the Stuttgart 21 protests. They are examining whether Mr. Mappus lied, while not under oath, when he told the state parliament’s investigating committee that he’d never exerted any influence on the government’s counterprotest measures, that he merely gave police moral support during visits and meetings. Top police officials and their documents have now indicated that the governor made “rigid instructions” during the protests, including telling police to use water cannons. ~130 demonstrators and ~30 police officers were injured during the events that ensued on 30 Sep 2010. Mr. Mappus’s hands-off claim was supported by the head of police at the time, Siegfried Stumpf, who said he alone bore responsibility for the decisions and their consequences. Now other top officials have said Mr. Mappus told police, “Bring the bulldozers in. If you won’t do it, I’ll get police from another state.” Mr. Mappus denies this and has filed a lawsuit for defamation [üble Nachrede].
Update on 05 Aug 2014: The castle park is gone. Digging started on the huge Stuttgart 21 underground train station even though experts say a canal running through the site will cause problems. Deutsche Bahn will have to pump out groundwater but only has a partial permit to do so. Also, Deutsche Bahn still doesn’t have an approved fire protection concept. The latter issue ended up costing the Berlin-Brandenburg airport years and billions of euros, with still no solution in sight.
ZDF heute journal reported that a new fire safety concept had to be developed for the underground train station after requirements were set higher in 2010 and after a stress test showed more passengers would be using the facility than the planners had calculated. Now what looks like fire escape stairs will be built, three on each platform. One problem there is that there will be only 2.05 meters of space on either side of these sets of stairs, bottlenecking masses of rail passengers. The founder of a “Wikireal” fact-checking portal told ZDF that Deutsche Bahn has said two meters isn’t enough space even in small train stations. Deutsche Bahn’s Stuttgart 21 spokesman said there were no bottlenecks in the planned train station.
The new fire safety concept was supposed to be approved in June 2014 but the authorities had questions, said Deutsche Bahn’s Stuttgart 21 spokesperson.
(Doss BERR gur lichh eh LOG er.)
“When each person does a little bit less, it’s no longer enough.” One attempt to explain how Germany could be beating Sweden 4-0 after 60 minutes on 16 Oct 2012, and yet the match could end in a tie. That WC qualification match was the first time the German national soccer team ever wasted a four-goal lead. (Four elegant goals.)
Swedish headlines the next day included the epic “DANKE! DANKE! DANKE! DANKE!”
(Venn yay der eye n bissell venniger lye stett, don rye kt doss nicked mare ow! ss.)
Thieves’ cant or argot, used by marginalized groups in Germany for at least 700 years. From Eric Hobsbawm’s excellent book Bandits.
(ROTE velsh.)
“Voting law.” The Bundestag is debating an overhaul of Germany’s electoral system. On 17 Oct 2012, Spiegel reported one issue was that the reforms currently under discussion might increase the size of the Bundestag to 700 M.P.’s (Spiegel-Online, “Bigger Than North Korea,” saying Germany would have the world’s second-largest parliament after China). Electoral reforms were necessitated by the Federal Constitutional Court’s decision in July 2012 that parts of the current law were unconstitutional, particularly with regard to Überhangmandate (which will be balanced out by proportional extra seats for the other parties). If a final agreement is reached rapidly, the new law could be in effect by Christmas 2012.
Update on 21 Feb 2013: The Bundestag reached an agreement on the new election rules. Überhangmandat seats will be canceled out by Ausgleichsmandat, compensation mandate, seats.
(VALL wrecked.)
The German Interior Ministry, headed by Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU), has called for the EU to take a “regulated self-regulation” policy with regard to data privacy.
(RAY goo leer teh ZELBST ray goo leer oong.)
“Transparent parliament members.” What the CDU/CSU wants to avoid, which is why they oppose full disclosure of Bundestag members’ supplementary income. The CDU/CSU is concerned that full disclosure of supplementary incomes would make it more difficult for middle-sized businesspeople to become M.P.’s. The FDP is worried about protecting lawyers’ privacy.
(GLAY zer neh OB geh ord net teh.)
“Side incomes,” translated by dict.leo.org as ancillary or auxiliary income; casual, incidental earnings or discretionary earnings; emoluments and perquisites. On 16 Oct. 2012 the Bundestag debated the SPD’s proposal to have Bundestag members disclose all incomes in addition to their M.P. compensation. Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU party was opposed, as was their coalition partner the FDP, who said their primary concern was that working lawyers would have to disclose their clients. Greens and Leftists said they were ready for full transparency.
The debate was triggered by attacks on a vulnerability of the SPD’s challenger to Angela Merkel in the upcoming election. Peer Steinbrück, who was called the Bankenschreck (terror of the banks, banks’ bane) when he was Finance Minister under an SPD government, has since then been receiving high speaking fees from banks and e.g. hedge funds. Calls from rival party members for Steinbrück to disclose these fees have turned up opportunities to improve the laws regulating extra-parliamentary compensation. The SPD’s proposal suggested disclosing the type of work, amount paid and payer’s name, because apparently that’s not required now. Violations would be punished by a reduction in the M.P.’s salary.
Tagesschau.de reports that Peer Steinbrück (SPD) is the top earner in the Bundestag, followed by mostly members of the ruling conservative CDU/CSU and FDP parties (nine of the top ten, yet because of the nature of the old system these are minimum incomes and not accurate numbers).
Update on 25 Oct 2012: The ruling coalition CDU/CSU + FDP finds themselves in a bind because while they wanted to attack Steinbrück, they never wanted transparency for supplementary M.P. incomes, reports Spiegel-Online. The ruling coalition has now agreed to a reform plan that changes the disclosure system from three steps to ten steps. The three-step scale was up to EUR 3500, 3500 to 7000, and >7000, monthly. The ten-step scale will be, either monthly or annually (hasn’t been decided yet), EUR 1000 to 3500, to 7000, 15000, 30000, 50000, 75000, 100000, 150000, 250000 and >250000. With the old scale an M.P. who earned e.g. EUR 150,000 for a speaking engagement only had to disclose EUR 7001. The SPD is concerned that under the new system an M.P. could take ten EUR-900 fees without having to disclose, so they have proposed disclosure of fees exceeding EUR 10000 in one year. The SPD and Leftists (Die Linken) parties remain committed to full transparency. The Greens have proposed two models: full disclosure or a thirteen-step scale. The frequency of mandatory reporting is also still under debate; AbgeordnetenWatch.de points out that with modern technology this useful information can be made available very rapidly to voters.
Update on 22 Feb 2013: Today the Bundestag agreed on a new 10-step plan to disclose M.P.’s supplementary incomes.
(NAY ben eye n coon fteh.)
“Loss of mud flats.” One of many environmental concerns cited in a recent environmentalist lawsuit to halt the project to deepen the shipping channel in the Elbe river between Hamburg and the sea. Litigation of the dispute will take years, so in order to keep irreversible faits accomplis from being created in the interim, the court has temporarily stopped the dredging. Hamburg is 130 kilometers from the ocean and still trying to compete with Rotterdam.
The plaintiffs say previous deepening of the Elbe’s shipping channel caused visible environmental damage that included loss of mud flats, increased current, lack of oxygen and loss of habitat.
(VOTT fer loose t.)
What German university students complain become the main preoccupations of the rare few who are lucky enough to become German college professors, in a process not unlike deification. No one can check you or make you work after that rapture, students said, and the money is great. In the 1990’s physics students told me there was a tendency for new professors to buy an ultralight aircraft, cancel their monthly office hour and the lectures they promised during the interviews, and spend their days circling high above the countryside, looking down on everyone. I’m sure the situation has improved since then.
I shall regret this terrible post but it’s too funny. The insight into university institutions new and old provided by the controversy around Annette Schavan reminded me of this old joke.
(COOM you loose oond COON ee ling goose.)
Bloated, swollen, such as one’s face after a long riotous night, or this post.
After investigating for five months, the anonymous blogger who posted instances of Schludrigkeit that he found (on 92 of 326 pages) in Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan’s doctoral thesis has now been confirmed by a report published the next day by the University of Düsseldorf’s expert evaluator. The university report’s author found 60 questionable citations (on 351 pages?) and “recognizes ‘the characteristic pattern of a plagiaristic approach,’” reported Spiegel-Online, which also noted that the anonymous blogger’s report is a “triumph of the plagiarism hunters.” Some political folks said Schavan’s doctorate shouldn’t be taken away because e.g. “there are clearer cases that haven’t been revoked.” Others say if the University of Düsseldorf decides to rescind the 32-year-old degree, then Annette Schavan must step down as federal Education Minister. The media can’t help reprinting statements in support of academic rigor that Schavan made when the doctoral thesis of young charismatic aristocratic Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (FDP) was discovered to contain plagiarism. A Spiegel-Online comparison of the two cases certainly generates some sympathy for Annette Schavan. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s family is worth ca. 400 million euros and he grew up in a castle. He took a long time to finish his doctoral thesis (in law) and said later he didn’t have enough time for footnotes. Grade: summa cum laude. Annette Schavan was the first in her family to go to university and finished her doctorate quite early, magna cum laude. Guttenberg was working during the cut-and-paste Internet era with search engines; Schavan had to find her texts in underfunded German university libraries and wrote her thesis on a typewriter. On the other hand, the Guttenberg situation is indicative that a deeper institutional problem exists.
The anonymous blogger who published first faxed reporters that “The facts are the facts. Even verschwiemelt Schavanesque excuses won’t change that.”
On 16 Oct. 2012 the responsible University of Düsseldorf committee met for three hours, but Annette Schavan unleashed lawyers and the university has been forbidden to make any information about this public without her permission. The university’s rector announced this and apologized. He also said they only advanced as far as the preliminary investigation (Vorprüfung). The university announced that it will take extra time to check Schavan’s thesis because it was interdisciplinary, its age means more of the sources will only be available on paper (and will have to be ordered from Germany’s amazingly cash-strapped university libraries and their interestingly historic systems), and evaluators are going to have to make sure they can be fair in “thinking themselves back” into the state of knowledge that prevailed thirty years ago.
I think German universities are state-funded? Surely though they must be susceptible in some ways to financial pressure from federal ministers, particularly the Minister of Education and Research. Crowdsourcing evaluation of politicians’ plagiarism seems like a very good idea in Germany right now.
(Fer SHVEE melt.)
Sloppiness, can be personal or professional. In the crowdsourced investigations of German politicians’ doctoral theses for plagiarism, a certain amount of overlap is said to be mere Schludrigkeit, more can cross a line though. Currently under investigation: the doctoral thesis of Germany’s Minister for Education, Annette Schavan (CDU). One anonymous blogger has posted that she didn’t include enough attributions in her section on Freud and that otherwise she made the mistake of identifying citations from secondary sources as text from primary sources. Not as bad as the plagiarism found in the crowdsourced Guttenplag and Vroniplag, in other words. I’m still waiting to find out about Helmut Kohl’s doctoral thesis.
Update: The anonymous blogger’s assessment was confirmed in an evaluation done for the University of Düsseldorf. More tomorrow!
(SHLOO drick kite.)
Giant container ship that mysteriously but apparently spectacularly caught fire and/or exploded. Then, also spectacularly, she was towed across the ocean with a giant hole in her middle yet didn’t sink. According to her manifest, and manifestly, the Flaminia had been carrying hazardous materials, so many ports refused to allow the damaged ship to dock for repairs. Finally she was accepted by the new JadeWeserPort in Wilhelmshaven, where cleanup will be long and difficult.
Sheet piling walls, which can be used as retaining walls to hold back earth and/or water. They are what suffered the Schlosssprengung (“lock popping”) failure during construction of the new JadeWeserPort.
(SHPOONT vont.)
Type of wall failure that caused one of the more serious and expensive (EUR 75 million) delays in the construction of the new JadeWeserPort. Basically, the lock pieces connecting the retaining wall sheets were popping loose.
(Shloss shprrrreng oong.)
A planned new largest Maersk “Triple E” class of oceangoing container ships, which will be nearly 400 meters long.
(“Triple A” closs eh.)
The Jade-Weser port, which recently opened in Wilhelmshaven. Jointly built by Bremen and Lower Saxony, this is Germany’s only deep-water port (18 meters deep) and will be accessible to giant oceangoing container vessels even at low tide. This is the first entirely planned German port that didn’t grow and accrete for hundreds of years.
The true competition, Rotterdam, has a port that’s 20 meters deep.
(YAH deh VAY zerr PORT.)
According to Wikipedia, Asse, a.k.a. “Asse 2” because of an original Asse shaft dug there in 1906, is an old salt mine in Lower Saxony that was turned into a West German research mine in 1965 and also used as a permanent storage site for nuclear waste between 1967 and 1978. Politicians assured the public the mine’s known water problem could be reliably stopped forever, and lawsuits to prevent the project failed in court.
Low-level radioactive waste with particularly long-lived isotopes and medium-level radioactive waste with short-lived isotopes was stored there, in metal drums that were supposed to be used as transport, not permanent, containers. In the first phase of the experiment, the drums were stacked on one another. In the second phase the drums were stacked horizontally, like a woodpile. In the third phase, drums were dumped off an underground cliff and then rock salt debris was dumped on them. It is now known that metal drums last only a few years to decades when exposed to salt water, and these metal drums may have been further damaged by how they were placed into storage. Hydrogen is possibly forming.
No fees were collected for nuclear waste delivered between 1967 and 1975. In 1975 the law changed—“permanent storage” was not defined in German law until 1976, for example—after which Asse collected a total of about 900,000 euros in fees until the research program on permanent nuclear waste disposal ended in 1995. Asse’s remaining open caverns were carefully filled in with trainloads of rock between 1995 and 2004.
In 2008 it became known that Asse 2 was in danger of collapse due to water seepage and cracking, not surprising due to its history and the fact that its salt ceilings have been deforming by up to 15 cm/year for many years now. A state investigation was started and found, among other things, that radioactive salt water was first detected in the mine in 1995. Two billion euros are now budgeted for the cleanup, though experts estimate the cost will be closer to six billion. The site’s recent budgets exceeded 100 million euros/year, used for maintenance and public relations, reported ZDF heute journal, which broadcast disturbing photos of the damage in this report from 05 Oct. 2012. ZDF says the plan is to drill a new tunnel and remove the nuclear waste through it, though that might not be possible. It has been estimated the ceiling rock will start to fail in early 2014, and that cleanup can’t be started before 2036.
Update on 04 Mar 2014: New environmental minister Barbara Hendricks visited Asse for the first time. About twelve thousand liters of water are seeping into the nuclear waste storage site there each day, said ARD tagesschau.de, which is why the Bundestag voted one year ago to move Asse’s nuclear waste as quickly as possible, to protect local groundwater from radioactive contamination. During her hard-hatted and overalled inspection of the underground chambers, Minister Hendricks said she didn’t think the work could be easily speeded up because more than <120 people cannot be in the old salt mine at a time for safety and technical reasons. Local people are demanding that a second shaft be built immediately, to finish the cleanup before the old tunnels collapse.
(OSS eh.)
To slosh, swash. Topic of a recent Ig-Nobel Fluid Dynamics prize for a paper entitled “Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?”
(SHVOP en.)
The microphone professor.
(SMOO dough.)
“A successful attorney.” Interesting recent story about the North Rhine-Westphalian Pirate Party, summarized from Spiegel-Online’s article. Two neighboring Pirate Party groups in the region were having a bitter dispute. The Gelsenkirchen group finally wrote to the state Pirate Party complaining that their foe group had neonazi propaganda materials in its possession. (The German Pirate Party voted at its last national meeting to be against right-wing stuff, despite their core interest in freedom of opinion.) The state party confronted the foe party, which “credibly” refuted the accusations. And hired a lawyer. The lawyer asked the state PP for the original correspondence, including all names. The NRW Pirates voted not to share this information. Spiegel says that, according to the German Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz), the Pirates also should not have shared this information because no government offices are investigating the matter and because they don’t have permission to share it.
Klaus Hammer was the political director (Politischer Geschäftsführer) of the North Rhine-Westphalian Pirate Party. He is a 45-year-old IT worker who’s been involved with the PP for several years and has run for office. Last weekend he told the NRW state PP board of directors that despite their decision not to share the information, he had felt “pressured” by the lawyer. He then panicked, he said, and reached an agreement according to which he placed printouts of the emails in a trash bin outside his building. The next day, the printouts were gone.
Klaus Hammer has now been relieved of his political directorship.
(Eye n err FOAL g rye Cher WRECKED s on vault.)
“Halit Square,” in Kassel, Germany. Named after a man allegedly killed by the neonazi serial-killer cell. Halit’s parents were at the dedication ceremony and unveiled a memorial explaining what happened and listing the names of all ten victims known of thus far.
The street sign says, “Halit Yozgat, 1985–2006. Kassel victim of a right-wing terrorist series of murders.”
(Hall EET plots.)
The wonderful Michael Ballack is ending his career as a soccer player. For years he stitched the German national team together, always managing to be where he was needed at both ends of the field. The crucial pass, the defensive assist. He was amazing. The most impressive player. I’m just waiting and biding my time until he becomes the national trainer.
Obsession, mania. “She has a Fimmel for Joschka Fischer in his marathon years.” In the beautifully tailored charcoal three-piece suits with a light pinstripe and big buttons, speaking to voters as if they were adults.
(Fimmel.)
German WOTD 