Asked in 2007 to describe what his influences were, he said: “I remember that, when I started studying, I was living between a madhouse, a prison and a cemetery. The location alone explains everything, I think.” Lexicographically, he will be remembered for introducing into German the term ‘yodel diploma’ signifying a worthless degree — what in Britain is known as a ‘mickey mouse degree’.

Loriot fans will miss his knowing eyes peering out from behind those familiar reading glasses. R.I.P.

The Advent poem about the forester being murdered by his wife.

November 2003

The Viennese weekly Falter interviewed Vicco von Bülow — better known as Loriot — in November of 2003. In part of the dialogue, Loriot explored the Prussianness of his family and upbringing, musing upon some aspects of what it is to be Prussian, turning away from the simplistic categorisations. Via Günter Kaindlstorfer.

…

Loriot: I am committed to my Prussian roots. I was born a Prussian, I have Prussian, so to speak, in my blood. That this defines you for yourself is not new. One is born there, so one has to accept it.

Prussian vices have caused too much harm over the past 150 years.

Loriot: That’s right, I will not deny it at all. Nevertheless, I am proud of my native town of Brandenburg; I am also proud of my country of origin. Here I will not deny, however, that I have been occasionally affected by the disaster that this country has done throughout history, time and again. Only: Which country has, over the centuries, not caused many evils? I will not have the Prussian reduced only to its negative sides.

Where do you see the positive side?

Loriot: There are also advanced aspects: Frederick the Great, for example, was the first to abolish serfdom and torture. These were big and bold reforms for its time. In addition, the Prussian State has developed an exemplary civil service. Against bribery and corruption, the Prussian officials were immune for centuries. Such a thing was not self-evident. So, the Prussian state was in some ways quite exemplary. But only now have the Prussians just gotten off the fence about war, and the legendary Prussian discipline made governance easier for the Nazis, one would have to say. If people in the Nazi era had been, attentive, critical, and aware, if they had been less obedient, then the world would have been spared much.

You can start with the soldierly virtues of the old Prussian something?

Loriot: I am, like everyone, influenced by my upbringing. My father came from an old Prussian military family. Prior to joining the private sector, he was a police officer. Such a thing certainly leaves some traces in the personality of a person.

What must be thought of your father? As a man who constantly banged his heels together?

Loriot: No, but he was undoubtedly a man of controlled and disciplined. One must keep his emotions under strict control he has drummed into me and my brother. I could not kiss him, for example. Men do not kiss, that was one of his maxims; he was adamant.

And your mother, you were allowed to kiss?

Loriot: My mother died when I was six years old. I grew up with my grandmother.

As you can see the character of your Father which is in retrospect?

Loriot: I’ve learned a lot from him about the vital importance of manners, for example. Through and through, he had a respectable appearance. As a virtue, self-control was central to my father. He never let himself go. I’ve rarely seen him without a tie. At the same time you could die laughing with him, he also had incredibly funny sides. However, it must be said: the time of militarism, which my father embodies in some ways — those days are over, thank God. The war doesn’t play in people’s minds the same role it once did in Germany.

Herr von Bulow, you represent your whole habitus produces the ideal type of conservative gentleman. Are you really a conservative man?

Loriot: Terms like “conservative” and “progressive” I try to avoid as a rule. Whether one likes it or not, these words are always politically connoted. I strictly keep out of party political matters.

How did you vote last time?

Loriot: One doesn’t tell.

You are a man of the center?

Loriot: Sometimes I sympathize with the political positions of a party, then again I like more the views of others. The truth is never on one side. Each direction has its positive aspects, which should be acknowledged.

I remember a Spiegel article, which must have been in the late 1980s. It said something like: “The West German intelligentsia is left-wing. Basically, there are only two right-leaning intellectuals in the country: Ernst Jünger and Loriot.”

Loriot: This can only be a joke.

It was actually printed.

Loriot: Me as “Rechtsintellektueller”? I can only laugh! So, in this attribute I fail to recognise myself yet again.

Are you addicted to harmony?

Loriot: I am convinced that most conflicts can enclose in a considerate and atmosphere characterized by mutual respect. One mustn’t shout like a madman to enforce one’s point of view.

They seem very calm, very calm. Do you know something like stress?

Loriot: In order to have stress, I have too little time. It may, so far, just not have come, that I feel stressed. If one is stressed, you have done more than you can afford. This one must not allow.

Do you suffer from the aging process?

Loriot: Yes, certainly.

How do you handle it?

I rush myself less than before. In recent years, I have occasionally been an opera director, made a few drawings, and prepared a film; such a programme I now no longer have the audacity for. That mustn’t be. At my age it is safer to take things a little more quietly, don’t you think?

DISCORDIA GERANT ALII, tu felix Namibia reconciliant! Peace and reconciliation are amongst the noblest of earthly aims, but the deluded establishment that rules most of what used to be called the Western world often seem convinced that peace among peoples can only be achieved by erasing the differences between them. Yet it is precisely those differences — the unique characteristics of tribe, clan, and platoon that separate us from some and unite us with others — that make us who we are: human beings, created by God in time and place and circumstance. Without them, we are rootless citizens of nowhere, easily abused and manipulated by the powerful. (How flimsy is even the thickest oak when its roots have been severed). It is the acknowledgement of differences, rather than the erasing of them, that leads to true respect and understanding between and among peoples. While the racial grievance industry thrives in America and Europe, an entirely different attitude exists in happy Namibia.

A case in point: the events surrounding the German quashing of the Herero uprising in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904–1907 are often considered the first instance of genocide in the twentieth century. While the circumstances were greatly exaggerated for British propaganda purposes during the Great War, the historical evidence suggests the Germans were responsible (directly and indirectly) for the slaughter and deaths of many more native Herero and Namaqua tribesmen than can possibly be justified by the colonial authority’s responsibility for keeping order in the land.

One hero of the rebellion’s suppression was German officer Victor Franke, who defeated a Herero force vastly superior in numbers at Omaruru in 1904. Four years later, out of respect and admiration for the man, a round stone tower was erected at Omaruru and dedicated to Franke. In 2008, the Franke Tower was restored and rededicated with great solemnity. The old Schwarz-Weiß-Rot flag of the German Empire and the blue-red-green of Namibia flew side-by-side for a ceremony in which Namibians both of the German tribe and of the Herero tribe came together in a spirit of mutual respect and reconciliation.

“The 88-year-old Irma Stenger, daughter of a former Schutztruppe sits peaceably alongside her friend, the wife of a Herero chief,” reports the Allgemeine Zeitung, Namibia’s eldest daily. “Nothing seems to stand between them, and together they sit in the sun.”

The mayor of Omaruru, a Herero himself, rises to say a few words, and stakes claim to the stately monument for Namibians of every tribe: “The Franke Tower is a heritage of all Namibians. A landmark for the whole country.”

“That was a good speech,” the elder German says. “We should all live in peace.”

“The children of German and Herero have to come together,” agrees the chief’s wife, dressed in the quasi-Victorian garb of Herero tradition. “The time of the war is over.”

A similar ceremony takes place every year at the German Navy Memorial in sunny Swakopmund on the Atlantic coast. The Governor of Erongo (above) attends and thanks the Traditionsverband for organising this commemoration in which the living show their respect for the dead. Tribe addressing tribe as friends, neighbours, fellow countrymen — as real people, not as make-believe “citizens of the world”.

Though sparsely populated, Namibia is a land of many peoples: Ovambo, Kavango, Herero, Damara, Coloured, Baster, German, Afrikaner, Portuguese, Nama, and so on and so forth. And, while it’s as beautiful as a paradise, Namibia is no utopia — like any other land it has its fair share of problems and struggles. But, trite as it may sound, Namibia is a free country where different peoples have managed to come to some type of respectful accord with each other while maintain the peculiarities of their difference.

My old Latin teacher in high school suggested the existence of an international conspiracy of “monotony monitors” who patrol the world ensuring that anything interesting, peculiar, or just plain different would eventually be levelled and destroyed. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we, the vive la différence crowd, surrendered the noble task of peace and reconciliation to the monotony monitors? If we don’t strive to enjoy the peace of peculiarity, we will be guaranteed suffer the peace of banality.

Ewald von Kleist is the last surviving member of the circle of Wehrmacht officers who participated in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. Der Spiegel has translated its interview with him into English, and all four pages feature interesting insights from this brave old man.

And if you read German (I don’t), you might be interested in this article on China & Carl Schmitt.

IT’S A CRACKING photo; the sort of thing guaranteed to irk the puritanical and bring a smile to the good-humoured. The thirteen-year-old Princess Yvonne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn takes a swig from a bottle while Prince Alexander, just twelve, sits with a half-smoked cigarette. Taken aboard the yacht of Bartholomé March off Majorca in 1955, the photographer was Princess Marianne “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn — the mother of Yvonne and Alexander — who’s known by her photographic soubriquet of “Mamarazza”.

Princess Manni was born in Salzburg in 1919, the daughter of Friedrich Baron Mayr-Melnhof and his wife Maria Anna Countess von Meran. The eldest of nine children, she received a camera from her parents in 1935 and began a lifelong love of photography.

Studying at Munich during the war, she met Prince Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein who was on leave from the front, and the pair were engaged within days. Married in 1942, their daughter Yvonne was born in December of that year with Alexander following a year later. When the war ended the castle at Sayn was severely damaged by bombs, and the family considered emigrating to Brazil before they decided to stay, rebuild, and put their farms back in order.

Prince Ludwig was killed in a car accident in 1962, and Manni had to manage the family affairs until Prince Alexander came into his majority. From the 1970s, her photographs began appearing in magazines, and from 1991 has been shown at exhibitions in galleries. Though 92 years old, the Princess is still going strong, as is her son Alexander Konrad Friedrich Heinrich, Furst zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, who now serves as vice-president of Europa Nostra and president of Europa Nostra Deutschland.

Car accident after the baptism of Prince Albrecht of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, 14 May 1950. The driver Prince Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein with Princess Beatrix zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, Hella Princess of Bavaria, and Princess Clementine von Croy.

Baroness Teresa Thyssen with Count Ivan Batthyani, 1950.

Prince Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein sunbathing, October 1956

A winter picnic in the forest.

Potato harvest at Sayn. Prince Ludwig (left with hat), Princess Yvonne (on horseback), Prince Alexander and Princess Elisabeth of Sayn-Wittgenstein, Hans-Carl Baron and Baroness of Marlies von Friesen, Hanna Merl, Maria Fiedler, Luzia Dietz and others.

“I created the first one in 2009 because at that time there was an energy crisis in Europe,” Mr. Tsvetkov said. “I just created it to amuse my friends but when I put it up on my website so many people liked it that I decided to really focus on the project of mapping the stereotypes based on different places in Europe. I was surprised by the reaction because I never really expected it to take off like this.”

Europe according to the French.

Europe according to the Germans.

Europe according to the Italians.

Europe according to the British.

Europe according to the Americans.

Bombing cities is just wrong – even when the planes are ours

Can we be straight about the Blitz, now that it is 70 years since it began?

Most of us have two absolutely clear reactions to it. The first is that dropping bombs on women and children in their homes is a wicked form of warfare.

The second is that – despite all the horrors of being bombed – the British people were not demoralised or blasted into defeatism, but worked all the harder for victory because it was the only way to get back at the enemy who dropped death on them from the sky.

Yet as soon as anyone suggests that we were wrong to bomb German women and children in their homes – as I firmly believe we were – they are shouted down by cries of ‘They asked for it!’.

Actually, they didn’t ask for it at all. The children, as always, had no say in the matter.

And the people who bravely voted against Hitler to the last lived in the poor urban areas which we deliberately bombed.

And when anyone argues – as I do – that the bombing of German civilians was also an ineffective way of fighting the war, doing surprisingly little damage to the Nazi war effort, they are shouted down by apologists who seem to think that Germans responded to bombing differently from British people.

It’s not true, and those who have studied the facts agree.

Yet I am absolutely in favour of a memorial, large and majestic, in a place where as many people as possible will see it, to the young men who nightly climbed into their bombers and flew over Germany.

They believed they were helping to destroy a great tyranny. They trusted their leaders.

That is why they set off, hearts in mouths, in the full knowledge that they probably wouldn’t come back, and that they were likely to die in a specially horrible fashion.

Not since the Somme in 1916 had so much steadfast valour and youth been squandered by old men who ought to have known better.

On the Bomber Command war memorial, alongside the shattering number of names and the chokingly sad ages at which they died, should be the words ‘Lions, led by Donkeys’.

THE WAR WAS NOT kind to Dresden: the bombers of the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force rained destruction on the Saxon capital, reducing much of the city to piles of rubble, and killing thousands upon thousands of innocent women and children in the process. One of the few buildings to survive the cataclysmic and morally reprehensible bombing campaign was the old garrison, which after the war was turned into a military museum.

Poland, whose unprovoked invasion by the Nazis sparked the Second World War, is exacting a curious revenge on neighbouring Germany, however. Daniel Libeskind, the controversial Polish starchitect, is building a monstrous addition to the Dresden Military History Museum that may not be a crime against humanity, but is undoubtedly a crime against architecture.

Libeskind’s addition to the museum takes the form of a jarring triangle, pointing in the direction from which the British and American bombers came to attack the city. “It is something like a lantern, a signal, a beacon that evokes the city itself,” Libeskind told the press. “It creates a question mark about the continuity of history and what it means. It gives people a point of reflection.”

Libeskind’s addition does not in fact include any significant increase in functioning exhibition space or working areas. It is more of a middle finger to the city.

“I cannot decide whether Libeskind has been brilliant or utterly appalling,” writes Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph. “I suspect he is the latter, though the mock-ups on his website of how the finished product will look are rather incredible: and there is a poetic justice about taking the only undamaged building from that night and allowing it to share in the proceeds of destruction in this way.”

The estimated cost of the project is €48,000,000, funded by the Federal Republic of Germany, which has chosen this institution to be the official military history museum of the country.

Up to this point, Dresden had become known for its commendable progress in rebuilding the historic structures destroyed during the war and left as rubble during the Communist period. The completion of the Frauenkirche (above, the Lutheran church of Our Lady) has been particularly applauded. But Libeskind attacks this progress, claiming that “sentimentality is not a foundation on which you can build a new city.” One is tempted to point out that Dresden is not a new city, having its origins in the late twelfth century, in a region that had been settled by the Linear Pottery tribes around 7500 B.C., but one suspects anything more than five minutes old is of little interest to Mr. Libeskind.

Rebuilding is not a policy of forgetting or ignoring the past but trying to recover it and safeguard it for future generations. While the Libeskinds of this world have no concept of relating to the past other than insulting it or erasing it, I hope cities the world over will, like Dresden, pursue a policy of coming to terms with the past instead.

Hoeveel kere het ek dit hoor sê? München, die Beierse hoofstad, is die mees bewoonbare stad in die wêreld volgens baie lyste deur talle mense saamgestel. Die meeste kenmerk hierdie status aan die unieke kombinasie van tradisie en moderniteit in die stad. Beiere het ’n balans getref, en die Beierse mense is baie trots op hul land — en tereg! Müncher weißwurst — bedien met mosterd en ’n krakeling — is my gunsteling wors. (Jammer, boerewors! Jou Duitse neef is tops.)

In elk geval, op die webtuis van Monocle tydskrif, Tyler Brûlé het ‘n blik op München en ondersoek waarom en ondersoek waarom het dit so ‘n goeie reputasie. Kliek hier om te kyk.

It is scandalous that in all my travels I’ve never been to any part of Germany, let alone Bavaria, considering how everyone raves about it unceasingly. Once I finally get myself to the other side of the pond permanently, it’s high up on the list of places to visit pronto (alongside the Netherlands and Finland). All in good time, all in good time…

AMIDST THE MEDIA’S attempts to sling mud at Pope Benedict XVI, one of the most prominent Catholic youth leaders in Germany has chimed in with lackluster words about the reigning pontiff. Dirk Tänzler, the head of the BDKJ, the umbrella group of German Catholic youth organizations, gave an interview to Der Spiegel, the prominent weekly news magazine with a circulation of over one million. Asked his verdict of the so-far five years of Pope Benedict’s reign, Tänzler responded with the word “ambivalent”. Contrasting Benedict XVI with John Paul II — a “showmaster” — the BDKJ head said that, despite some good points, “a lot of young people often simply don’t understand him”. “Most have a different idea of how to live their lives than the pope might imagine for them. There is no ‘Generation Benedict.’”

But are Tänzler’s thoughts an accurate reflection of the state of Catholic youth in Germany or elsewhere? Over a million young people travelled to Cologne to experience World Youth Day with the new pontiff in 2005. (The following WYD held in Sydney in 2008, unfortunately offers little comparison given the relative isolation of Australia). Everywhere the Pope has travelled, such as to the Czech Republic last year, or France and the United States in 2008, vast multitudes of youth have greeted him, often waiting hours for the privilege.

Significantly, young people in Western countries have proved responsive to the Pope’s message in defiance of the collective anti-Christian persuasion of the dominant cultural forces in their lands. The permanent and vituperative media campaign against Pope Benedict has proved counter-productive: younger people have long ceased to place their trust in the princes of the press and instead take part in more diffused information-gathering networks via the internet. This may have escaped Herr Tänzler who, despite being the head of an umbrella group of Catholic youth, is in his early 40s.

Tänzler’s claims have not gone unchallenged, particularly as there is actually an organization of German Catholics which has taken the name ‘Generation Benedict’. One German blogger cited a note from a friend, who is “shocked” about the BDKJ’s claim to speak for all Catholic youth in Germany (if my interpretation of Google’s rather muddled German translation has any accuracy whatsoever). “Apparently those outside of these groups [who make up the BDKJ] are not Catholics,” Benedict-fan Ulrich writes, quipping “Outside the BDKJ, there is no salvation.”

When asked by Der Speigel if he had considered leaving the Church, Tänzler said he had “never even toyed with this idea” but gave as the reason for his certitude not a confidence in the truth of the Church’s claims but instead the rather paltry reason that he is “convinced that the Church and faith are good for society”.

The BDKJ leader did offer some complimentary words in his interview. Tänzler cited Benedict’s “significant contribution” to the Copenhagen climate change conference and the emphasis on justice and love in the social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, and also complimented the Vatican’s efforts to make use of new social media like YouTube and Twitter.

One might suggest that, having reached his forty-first year of age, it might be time Herr Tänzler finally put away the things of a child — except that an enthusiasm for the Holy Father is today a more reliable sign of youth rather than age.