Disconnected and Reconnected in Germany

George Rebane

We arrived in Germany last Friday, flying British Airways from SFO to London to Munich.  There we rented a car and took off into the countryside heading for southern Bavaria to attend the birthday gathering of a longtime friend we have known for 50 years.  About 35 people, most of whom we know, from two extended families joined us in the spa town of Bad Wörishofen.  The Germans sure know how to celebrate such events, and our ears were thrown into full immersion in German within hours of getting off the plane.  Everyone seemed to talk faster than we could listen.

We were there for three days and took a lot of opportunities for extended conversations about what’s going on.  The German government is beginning to get more and more worried about the Muslim settlers in their country, or as they put it, the “non-assimilation problem”.  For the first time we saw severely covered Muslim women in some smaller towns.  Previously, they were only visible in the bigger cities.  On TV the Interior Minister was giving interviews talking about how the old assimilation programs have not worked, and that there is great urgency to come up with something that might put a dent into the growth of insular Islamic communities.

We found out that the problem was abetted from the start by the German bureaucrats themselves.  By far, most of Germany’s Muslims are from Turkey.  Some years back when Germans wanted to provide schooling for the Muslim children, the Turkish government offered to sell the German schools secular Turkish school books (Turkey has been a secular Islamic country since Ataturk overthrew the Ottomans earlier in the 20th century).  The Germans refused the books on account that they were not produced in the EU.  So the Islamic schools in Germany were taken over by the local imams who, of course, were of the ‘Islam will conquer the world’ ideology.  And since then the Turkish kids have been going to schools in Germany, funded by the German government, and run by radicalized imams.  No matter where one encounters it, government is government.

But here’s the rub on all this.  When we talked to young educated Germans who are in the heat of developing their careers and raising families, they showed little concern for anything beyond their immediate economic problems.  The Muslim encroachment to them seems to be an item they encounter on TV news programs, but is not something that concerns them when they talk among themselves or make plans for their families.  It is a future that the older generation is worried about while they are concentrating on the immediate now.  One wonders how different it was in the 1930s when another new social order was setting up in the middle of a difficult economy.  It was again those with the perspective of years who were the worry warts.

Another aspect of Germany (and the EU in general) that re-confirmed itself was how blinded to capitalism and entrepreneurship are these young and smart people.  Two couples in their mid-thirties educated in the biological sciences (one has a PhD in genomics and is a big pharma researcher), kinesiology, and sports sciences are happy to have teaching jobs in the public schools.  Through some byzantine government regulations, they are forced to make severe choices as to careers before certain time periods expire.

As we talked more about what their real passions were, it became clear that everyone had ideas and new approaches to push the peanut ahead in their respective fields.  In America, two out of the four would have been thinking about starting their own companies, but not in Germany.  When I pointed out the possibility of such new companies, they agreed but admitted that the thought had never crossed their minds.  They would not even know how to start putting together such a concept.  Why? because capital formation and its free direction is a strictly controlled activity in Germany and most of the EU.

And even if it were possible to have what we know as ‘angel investors’ and venture capital companies, the governments are determined to put every possible impediment in the way of starting up anything that could grow into a big corporation.  The European government-corporate-union (GCU) combine does not want to deal with spurious competition that arises when you mix money, minds, and creative energies.  And the bull crap that is given for such prohibitive regulatory environments is the same as that we are beginning to hear from our new breed of socialists.  As the young Europeans have demonstrated, it’s easy to breed out such entrepreneurial spirit in a generation or two.  In the meantime, everyone here agrees that the social programs are unsustainable and wringing out their economies.

The bottom line of all this is a feeling of hopeless inevitability.  There are plenty of circuses enabled and sponsored by the GCU combine to divert the attention of the young.  The sun has yet to set, let us be merry while we can.

Another thing that struck us even as we were landing in Munich was the number of photovoltaic arrays that have cropped up all over the place.  Large swatches of farmland have been converted into solar energy farms.  The same arrays are found on all sorts of buildings and private residences.  Many of them are pointing at obviously non-optimum directions for making very much electricity.  The optimum direction of the arrays is easy to see from the layout of the solar farms – these elevate to somewhere around 40 degrees and point in azimuth to a little west of south.  Then you look at a big barn a couple of hundred meters away and see a huge array on its roof pointing a little south of due east.  The wonders of government subsidized green power.

Also apparent are huge solo wind turbines now located in many unexpected and remote places.  These giant installations can be found by ones and twos in farmers’ fields miles from any population centers.  It’s not clear what the economics of these marvels of engineering are.  We even found three of them in the vicinity of Liederberg which we visited this Monday as we drove north from Bavaria into Hessen.

RR readers may recall that the Rebanes were in Liederberg when WW2 ended (‘The War Ends in Liederberg’).  Jo Ann and I decided to drive north on the famous Romantische Strasse or Romantic Highway through the center of Germany on our way to our Babenhausen reunion (below).  Since Liederberg lies a little to the east of that fabled route, we took a detour to visit the tiny farming village I last saw receding from the back of an Army ¾ ton truck in May 1945.

Liederberg today is pretty much as it was then.  A few houses have been added and its only street has been upgraded from dirt to a beautifully paved road.  The big house with our attic room (right hand window) is still there, and I confirmed that the street is still wide and straight enough to accommodate a P-47 on a third-floor eye level strafing run.

We drove across the fields to the woods where we hid from the German patrol, and also visited the site on the rise where the SS unit was shelled into oblivion the night before the Americans arrived.  The trees have grown back, but are still a bit more sparse there.  I tromped around looking for any artifacts, but 65 years is enough time for rust and rough weather to have put everything back to normal.  The Earth has ways of healing itself from what meager insults we can deliver.

Inspecting the actual site reconfirmed memories carried since childhood.  (Photo is from the village to the woodline at the left of which was dug in the SS unit.)  Jo Ann was amazed that even she felt as if she knew the place from having heard me describe the village and its surrounds for these many years.  The only thing of note today that may speak to that night when the war ended for Liederberg is the outsized crucifix that the locals have erected at the site where their soldiers died.

We continued our trek northward for the remainder of the afternoon, staying off the autobahns and bigger roads, until we came to Dinkelsbühl, one of the fabled little cities on Germany’s Romantic Highway.  The town was founded in 1295 as a farming and commerce center during the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire.  It is a typical medieval walled German town that looks today exactly as it did to the Brothers Grimm and the imagination of Walt Disney.  Dinkelsbühl (yes, that’s its real name) has the obligatory wall and moat (now mostly filled) to keep out or at least delay would be invaders from putting the whole thing to the torch.  It also boasts the St. George’s Cathedral, one of the last of such Gothic architectural marvels to be built.  The inside of that church is truly a marvel of construction engineering for that period.

Outside of having remained out of the way and intact, and looking like an illustration in a fairytale book, Dinkelsbühl had very little to distinguish itself.  In its 800+ year history nothing much has happened.  It neither housed nor sent anyone of note into the world.  It is a repository for no great work of art, literature, or statuary.  From reading the brochures and looking at the murals and paintings, the only thing that still seems worth celebrating every year is an event from the 1640s when the Swedes were about to raze the town (the wall wasn’t all that good).  As part of Plan B, the city fathers sent their children out to beg the Swedish king for mercy.  The king was so touched by the tearful pleas of the little darlings that he spared the town and, instead, accepted a ceremonial key to the city which duly changed its allegiance until the next army showed up.  For all I know, these towns had special rooms full of ornate keys whose periodic presentations kept real estate values more or less intact.

Jo Ann had booked us into the Deutsches Haus hotel right across the wide cobblestoned plaza from the cathedral (photo on left).  The building, built in 1440, was straight out of a Hollywood back lot set for a Renaissance movie, but then so was the whole town.  It was built without an elevator, and for the last five hundred or so years no has seen any reason to add one.  Our room was on the third floor.  After recovering from the Hauling of the Bags ceremony, we became typical tourists and took the usual gawking walk with camera and wallet firmly in hand and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.  We stayed there two days, great fun.

Yesterday we drove the remaining length of the Romantic Highway to Würzburg where Martin Luther hung out a lot during the Reformation.  There we headed west on A3, the big autobahn that connects Nürnberg and Frankfurt.  The whole freeway was being widened, and we were in a construction zone until getting off at Aschaffenburg.  I was disappointed because I had hoped to set a personal speed record in the great handling Mercedes sedan we had rented.  No joy.  The highest I was able to push was 130mph before traffic and the next speed zone forced me to regain my senses.  The European Mercedes and Opels (my only experience in these) handle the excellent German highways so well that Jo Ann no longer notices when I take her life in my hands.

From Aschaffenburg we took the familiar Hwy 26 toward Darmstadt that would pass through Babenhausen, our destination.  The route from Babenhausen – or Babenbush, or simply The Bush, as we GIs called it – and back was a milk run for Jo Ann getting groceries from the big Aschaffenburg PX.  The Bush is such a small town that it did not even appear on the road signs until we were 5 clicks (that’s kilometers for you civilians) from town.  But by gum, in it for the first time we have connectivity.

Babenhausen was also founded in the 1200s and still has its wall around most of the central city which has been converted to a pedestrian only shopping district.  The Hauptstrasse or main drag was so narrow that it provided excitement for everyone when we had to convoy our 155mm howitzers through town back in the early sixties.  Today we are here for a ceremony tomorrow during which we present and dedicate a big bronze plaque that will be affixed to the city hall.  The plaque commemorates the forty plus years that the US Army and the citizens of Babenhausen lived together in harmony during the Cold War.

The ‘we’ are a bunch of old(er) coots who were young lieutenants back then.  We belonged to different combat units housed in the sprawling old Hessian cavalry Kaserne at the edge of town.  My unit was the 2nd Battalion 5th Artillery, and our first battle positions were near the city of Fulda to guard the celebrated historical ‘gap’ of the same name on the other side of which the USSR had 80,000 main battle tanks ready to roll to Paris in less than a week.  We and the 14th Armored Cavalry were the first speed bump they would encounter on their way.

Today about twenty of us with wives are assembling for tomorrow’s ceremony.  Yesterday several of us walked through the old town and went to see the house where we all lived (‘on the economy’).  Everyone had a memory or two of what had happened here or there on a given night during an alert or a rowdy evening at a local bar.  Jo Ann is now having coffee with Frau Resch, our landlady who is still hale and hearty, and now speaks excellent English.  When I rented the first apartment from their still under construction 4-plex in 1963, it was all in German.  Tonight she will take us out to dinner, and tomorrow night we will include her in the ceremonious gathering with the city big wigs.

Comments

[Russ Steele]

Thanks for sharing your trip and observations with us, interesting insight to life in Germany.

[Martin]

George, another great snapshot of WWII and the warning about the “non-assimilation problem” associated with uncontrolled mass migration. Thank you! Bring home some photos to share of "the problem".

[D. King]

Thanks George.

I spent a lot of time in Europe during the Cold War.
Your words have dredged up some wonderful memories.

I would love to see a post on this, when you get back.

“As the young Europeans have demonstrated, it’s easy to breed out such entrepreneurial spirit in a generation or two. In the meantime, everyone here agrees that the social programs are unsustainable and wringing out their economies.

The bottom line of all this is a feeling of hopeless inevitability.”

[Dixon Cruickshank]

good stuff

[Mikey McD]

Bravo George.

[Todd Juvinall]

Really really interesting George. Keep the stories coming/

[Mike Sherman]

Your insights confirm what has already happened in England...the western migration will eventually arrive full force in the U.S.. We have already seen too many "home-grown" terrorists radicals in America. We are following the same pattern of the last 20 years....sticking our head in the sand.

[Paul Emery]

What a great journey George. I look forward to talking to you about it. And by the way, it's ok to be unconnected once in a while.

[Bob Hobert]

An excellent remembrance. Thank you George.

[Russ Steele]

Merkel says German multicultural society has failed. German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German"

Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

In a speech in Potsdam, she said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work.

Mrs Merkel's comments come amid recent outpourings of strong anti-immigrant feeling from mainstream politicians.

A recent survey showed that more than 30% of Germans believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners".

The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for the social benefits.

[Kim Pruett]

Thanks for sharing your trip with us, sounds like you and Joanne are having a wonderful time. Looking forward to hearing more.... have a safe trip and we will see you both when you return!