We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
A year ago today, like millions of others, I saw Palestinians celebrate the murder of Shani Louk:
Hours later that day, a video emerged showing Louk’s body,[28][29][b][c] partially clothed, with a significant head injury and blood-matted hair, being paraded in the streets of Gaza City by Hamas militants in the back of a pickup truck; they were exclaiming “Allahu Akbar”, and were joined in the cheers by the people in the crowd surrounding the vehicle, some of whom spat on the body.[33][23][34][35] The video went viral,[36][37][2] becoming one of the first viral videos of the Israel–Hamas war.[36] It was released in a wave of videos of Hamas members parading hostages and bodies.
The link with the text “Palestinians celebrate” takes you to my post of that title. The quoted text takes you to the Wikipedia article with the title “Killing of Shani Louk”, which describes how her half-naked corpse was paraded in triumph to the mob, and how members of that mob happily filmed it and shared the videos with their friends. A detail it does not mention but which is burned into my memory is that the Hamas men sat on her dead body, as if it were a hunting trophy.
Usually when I post a Wikipedia extract, I strip out the numbers in square brackets that show where the Wikipedia article links to a source. In this case I have left them in. If anyone reading this has the slightest doubt about whether these events really were as depraved as they sound, prepare yourself mentally then follow those links to confirm it for yourself. Remember as you look that Shani Louk was but one of 364 festival-goers murdered by Hamas. Nor was she the only victim paraded before a Palestinian crowd most of whose members were not members of Hamas. What struck me about that mob was that there was no pretence that Shani Louk was guilty of anything, even by their standards. There was no claim that she was a blasphemer against Islam or an Israeli soldier – the fact that her body was displayed in her underwear flaunted that she was just a random Jewish woman they had caught and killed.
Kemi Badenoch MP, one of the contenders to be the next leader of the Conservative party, recently and astonishly caused controversy by saying ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’. I agree with this statement. Some cultures are worse than others. Now that ISIS is gone, Hamas-ruled Gaza is probably the most horrible culture currently present on Earth. Please note that this makes absolutely no difference to the obligation of Israel to adhere to the laws of war, even against an enemy that does not. It just lets the Israelis know what to expect from Gaza if they do not defeat Hamas.
Should we conclude that the Palestinians, or the Gazans, are an accursed people by nature? No. There is a dark mirror to the past in the fact that Shami Louk was half German. In living memory Germany fell as low as any nation in human history. Let us not delude ourselves that the attempted extermination of the Jews was carried out by the Nazi party alone. A brave but tiny minority of Germans who were not Nazis sheltered Jews, a larger minority at least did not report their suspicions that their neighbours were doing so, and the majority obeyed the Nazis so long as they remained in power.
Who would have dreamed eighty years ago that one day the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin would be illuminated with an image of the Star of David to remember Jews murdered in a pogrom? Yes, a mere symbol, but a true symbol – Germany re-joined the family of nations decades ago. What brought about this change? The complete military defeat of the Nazi regime. Cynics observe that the change did not happen until after the defeat. Optimists observe that it did happen after the defeat.
“Leading German politician calls for the state to issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online”. The eponymous Eugyppius of Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle describes how Mario Voigt, the head of the centre-right CDU in Thüringen, plans to protect democracy:
Stung by this failure [an uninspiring performance in a debate against an AfD politician called Björn Höcke], Voigt has set off to find other means of defending democracy. This week, in the Thüringen state parliament, he gave an amazing speech outlining a five-point plan to protect German democracy from that other great menace, the free and open internet:
So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:
Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.
There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.
Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.
We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.
And we also have to improve media skills.
For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.
I added the emphasis to show that the bit about diversity of opinion wasn’t just me or Eugyppius being sarcastic. Mario Voigt really did advocate for revocable social media licences to get those people he deems dangerous off the internet and in the next breath say that he wants the people still allowed to be on the internet to have a greater diversity of opinions.
Former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters, who has spoken about the Russian invasion of Ukraine (he has excused it, so it looks), is a regular critic of Israel, and so on, thinks it was going to be a smart idea to dress up in, er, rather 1930s-looking German militaristic sort of gear at a concert where there is also some sort of large, inflatable pig, with staring eyes, flying through an arena. There is red light, there is talk about conspiracies and the like.
And the kicker: this event took place in Berlin. I read that authorities are investigating the concert. I am no fan of hate-speech laws, being a hardline free speech guy, and I also reserve the right to state my views about this guttersnipe as loudly as I can. But however much one should stay on the JS Mill straight and narrow, it is mighty tempting to wish all bad legal and other consequences for this piece of excrement. No wonder his old band members broke off from him and have no time for him. (See this controversy.)
He’s an anti-semite, plain and simple. The old saying about “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”, applies.
Saturday, the German government closed its last four nuclear power plants, finally fulfilling Angela Merkel’s Fukushima-era promise to destroy her nation’s most abundant source of safe, clean, cheap power — in the middle of an energy crisis. To fill the giant hole in the nation’s energy portfolio, the famously “environmentally conscious” Germans will be burning more coal, a degree of stupidity almost impossible to fathom. In America, this specific genre of Clown World policy was last observed at the Diablo Canyon power plant, which the state attempted to shut down in the middle of its own series of energy-related crises. At the last possible moment, following a tremendous groundswell of counter activism, that decision was reversed. But today, with the activist group “Friends of Earth” trying to override this rare California flirtation with logic, and with activists around the world celebrating the end of German nuclear power, rational policy is once again on the wrong side of political momentum. So let’s just break it down: poverty and global warming are both real, and they exist because of “environmentalism.” If you stand opposed to nuclear, you are either 1) too dumb to comprehend the risks inherent of the technology, 2) dedicated to some nefarious ulterior motive, or 3) pseudo-religiously obsessed with the belief mass murder is not only inevitable, but necessary to keep the human population “in check.” There is no steelman for these positions. The debate is over. Nuclear is the way.
– Mike Solana
Well over a decade ago fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings and I walked into a bar in Berlin. There was a game of German Second Division football on the telly between Ingolstadt and Union Berlin. Union scored and the place went nuts. Other than ourselves and the bar staff there were 3 other people in the bar. Clearly, this was no ordinary team.
Indeed it wasn’t. Union had been reasonably successful in the East German league – although – perhaps wisely – not as successful as Dynamo Berlin who were backed by the Stasi. Now you might have thought with reunification teams from the East would have been welcomed with open arms. Not so. West German teams didn’t really fancy the competition. If you have ever wondered why Celtic and Rangers don’t play in the English Premier League much the same reasoning applies. So Union found themselves playing in a regional league. They almost went bust. At one point fans gave blood to keep the club in business. At another they found themselves rebuilding the stadium.
Just to get into the German Second Division was an achievement. A few years later they got themselves into what the Germans call “Relegation”. This is where the third best Second Division club plays the third worst First Division Club to decide who gets to play in the superior league. Usually, the First Division team wins but on this occasion – inspired by the club song written by Nina Hagen no less and one of the most fanatical sets of supporters to be found anywhere – the boys from Köpenick – yes, that Köpenick – triumphed.
Of course, it is one thing to be promoted to the top division, quite another to stay there. It is not as if Union is overburdened with advantages. Berlin is not a particularly rich city. Their ground has a capacity of a mere 22,000. Their Berlin rivals (Herta) get the Olympic Stadium – yes that Olympic Stadium – to call their home. Union’s utter refusal to depart from the fan-owned system means they have no sugar daddy to spoil them. And yet, at the time I started writing this post this was how the table looked:
Oh, I don’t think this will be how it looks at the end of the season. I suspect they’ll fall away in much the same way I suspect the EPL’s own temporary over-achievers will fall away over the next couple of months but even so, given where they’ve come from this is a hell of an achievement.
*Headline in Bild.
Natalie asked, “Can you guess what Lufthansa is talking about here?” For a bonus point, can you guess what word, beginning with ‘N’, the German policeman is prohibiting here?
… Jewish passengers were confronted by a layer of armed police who stood between them and the departure gate. In a scene that conceivably would have won critical praise had it been staged in a dark historical comedy, one of the distressed passengers asked plaintively, “Why do you hate us?” as the officers grimly surveyed them. Then someone else said the word “N—” … one of the offended police officers began barking in a thick German accent, “Who said the ‘N’ word? Who was it?”
[Excerpted from this article, edited to omit some letters following ‘N’ lest these offend any German police readers, or sympathisers thereof.]
One can hardly blame a German policeman for speaking “with a thick German accent”, and in Germany, it is a crime to call a police officer that word. Prudent Germans who wish to use the word without consequences are better advised to apply it to Donald Trump, or to call Israel a ‘N— state’. And prudent Jews who find themselves in Germany were reminded three years ago by the (perhaps unfortunately termed) ‘German anti-semitism commissioner’ to avoid looking Jewish – advice these “visibly Jewish” Lufthansa passengers had completely failed to heed.
I guess one take-away from this is that, next time anyone make a fuss about “the ‘N’ word”, they’ll need (and frequently deserve!) to be asked, “Which one?” Commenters are welcome to add any other take-aways that occur to them.
I thought that after most of a lifetime reading science fiction and alternate history I knew all the ways Hitler could have won World War II if just one little thing had turned out differently, but I had never heard of this one:
Onthisday.com for May 12th included this entry:
1941 Konrad Zuse presents the Z3, the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin
W-w-what? Straight to Wikipedia I went. Here is the entry for the Z3:
The Z3 was completed in Berlin in 1941. It was not considered vital, so it was never put into everyday operation. Based on the work of the German aerodynamics engineer Hans Georg Küssner (known for the Küssner effect), a “Program to Compute a Complex Matrix”[b] was written and used to solve wing flutter problems. Zuse asked the German government for funding to replace the relays with fully electronic switches, but funding was denied during World War II since such development was deemed “not war-important”.
The original Z3 was destroyed on 21 December 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin.
Well, good. While it is interesting to speculate on how the development of the computer might have been different, it sounds like the Lord guided the bomb-aimer’s hand on that occasion.
Anyone know, how close did they come?
The author of this Reuters article on the German jobs market plainly hasn’t heard of Linkedin, or jobs advertising, or even old-style labour exchanges where people can go to find out where vacancies are and retrain. Time for a good old fisking:
Germany’s industrial heavyweights are teaming up to retrain workers in areas such as software and logistics to fill a growing skills gap and avoid layoffs among workers of all ages as the economy shifts to clean energy and online shopping.
There is nothing wrong with firms exchanging ideas with one another to fix an issue. (Although ironically, government “anti-trust” laws might work against that.) It is worth noting, of course, that losses of jobs in areas such as petrol-driven cars are partly caused by government policy itself, such as the Net Zero decarbonization efforts that, depending on your point of view, are necessary or barking insane.
More than 36 major companies, ranging from auto suppliers such as Continental (CONG.DE) and Bosch (ROBG.UL) to industrial firms BASF (BASFn.DE) and Siemens (SIEGn.DE), have agreed to coordinate on redundancies at one firm and vacancies at another, training workers to move directly from job to job.
Right.
The scheme underscores Germany’s long-term social market economy model, which gives more influence to labour unions as opposed to free-market capitalism focused on maximizing profits.
Does it? I mean, I assume German firms want to pursue a profit. They’re not charities.
The costs of the initiative will be shared by the companies involved on a case-by-case basis. So if a factory closes, a dialogue will begin on what to do with its workers and then involve another company which may be seeking new skills.
Again, this seems like rational self-interest to me. There’s no objection I see to firms liaising with one another, and forming pacts about dealing with the need for skilled people. The key is that the State keeps its nose out of it. Also, if firms try and steer staff who might lose a job to another firm, that needs to be weighed against whether and how the employee might want their lives to go. The tone of the article seems to be that what is needed is a sort of hand-holding paternalism, but that creates a vicious circle where employees lose the desire to manage their working careers in a proactive way.
A study by think-tank Ifo Institute warned that 100,000 jobs linked to the internal combustion engine could be lost by 2025 if carmakers failed to transition fast enough to electric vehicles and retrain workers.
Forcing an entire industry to abandon a reliable, effective technology used for a century and switch to an arguably less reliable, and more costly one. Yep, there are going to be consequences. It also doesn’t help that German government policy in the past 20 years on energy has been almost calculated to harm its manufacturing base in the long run.
Engineering, metalwork and logistics are among the sectors seeking high numbers of people in Germany, alongside care work, catering and sales.The demand for skilled workers is coming from overseas companies too, highlighted by Tesla’s (TSLA.O) decision to build its European electric vehicle and battery plant in the state of Brandenburg, where it will create 12,000 new jobs.
Good news, so long as the jobs are financially viable.
Ariane Reinhart, board member responsible for human resources (HR) at Continental and chief spokesperson of the [jobs] business-led initiative, was quoted as saying: “Leaving it to the free market is not enough – it would not be what’s best for workers, or the economy.”
Wrong. For a start, none of the ideas about firms collaborating to move workers with desired skills around could not happen in a free market without state interference. Employers (I am one) know that finding talented staff is one of the most important issues there is, and in an open economy, there are all kinds of ways people with skills in demand can find jobs. Further, it is hardly a mystery to employees that they should keep on top of new skills to make themselves more desirable and increase what they earn. That’s the “free market”. The author of this article might want to reflect that it was the free market economy, and not some sort of top-down socialism, that helped propel West Germany after 1945 into being one of the richest economies on earth. By 1960 or thereabouts, that country had matched the UK in terms output per head.
To repeat an important point: there is no reason why firms could not and would not collaborate, if their self-interest coincided, in figuring out how people with desirable skills could be moved from place to place. What the author of this article cannot or will not address is whether firms in the article are not just doing what they might do anyway? Why did this question not get asked? Why just accept, at face value, that this sort of collaboration is some wonderful example of a less market-based system? After all, I can log on to the internet and find jobs, homes, flights, hotels, courses for training in new skills, etc, without anyone from government or some official entity holding my hand. Amazing, isn’t it, this “free market” of ours.
How long before Twitter and YouTube takes down these videos of massive rolling demonstrations in Canada and Germany?
As promised.
By the way, I found this rather good obituary of Brian by Sean Gabb at The Critic.
Update. The post was initially put up with the wrong link (hence Paul’s comment). It has now been corrected.
Our late colleague and friend Brian Micklethwait was very good at making people think. In particular he was very good at making me think, and even at times making me write. Often he would say something interesting that would make me write something as a response that I would never think to write for any other reason, and this blog, his own blog and its predecessors are full of articles and comments that were responses to things he started me thinking about. He had a tendency to repost my comments as articles when he found them particularly interesting, and many of our conversations took place in the articles and comment sections of various blogs. He loved posting photos of quirky things, fascinating objects, major pieces of architecture and engineering and interesting maps of places around the world that looked like they might be interesting.
Brian was not a great traveller. He was very pro-American, but he never visited the United States. He had done some travel earlier in life – including some behind the Iron Curtain before it fell, which I wish I had been able to do – but in the final two decades of his life when I knew him, he only ever really left London for regular summer trips to visit some friends in France. He clearly enjoyed this immensely, but travel was too much of a hassle for him unless there was warm hospitality as well as good company at the end of it.
He did, however, inspire me to travel. I saw photos of interesting things on his blog, and I researched them and wanted to go there, and I often did. He found this amusing, but he also liked to talk about what I had seen and photographed with me, so this continued the thoughts and conversations. (I still haven’t been on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, alas, although I have been on the similar but not quite as spectacular Matheran Hill Railway south of Mumbai).
In any event, in March this year Brian posted a pictographic map of Berlin in 1440 that he knew nothing of the origins of Berlin, but that he found the map interesting, showing a town or small city on two islands in the river Spree with a third island on the left that was at not that point significantly populated. As it happened, I knew relatively little about the origins of Berlin either, but I was instantly curious. I have been to Berlin many times, but I couldn’t have told you where the original town was. (Actually Berlin was technically two towns at the time – Berlin on one island and Cölln on the other). So I researched it, and discovered that although Berlin had some medieval city walls, these had not protected the city well in the Thirty Years War. The relatively unfortified city had subsequently been fortified into a star fort between 1650 and 1683, at which time the two outer streams of the river surrounding the three islands had been turned into a moat and the inner banks replaced with high walls. These walls then subsided into the swamps on which Berlin was built and were torn down starting in 1734, after which the two outer streams of the river were filled in, leaving only one island. The route of the north-easterly wall/stream was eventually used as the route for the Stadtbahn – Berlin’s main east-west railway. The south-easterly route, well, it was filled in and replaced with a layout of streets. Where it was is not obvious on a map or in a photograph.
I also found some modern maps and photographs of Berlin, and sent them to Brian. The inner island, the Spreeinsel, is recognisably the same between the oldest map and the newest photo, and does still have some remnants of being the important centre, including Berlin’s protestant cathedral, but the northern half northern half of it became the site of Berlin’s greatest museums, many of which have been reconstructed in recent times and restored to something even beyond their pre-WWII glory. In the comments, further conversation ensued. More people got involved in the conversation.
Inevitably in all this, I booked a trip to Berlin to wander around and look at the city from this new (or old) perspective. This was originally booked for April 2021. This was optimistic on my part given the circumstances, but I have actually done a lot of optimistic booking of travel over the last 18 months, the vast bulk of which has subsequently been rebooked, postponed and/or cancelled. (Lots of things have been ludicrously cheap to book due to travel companies promising anything in return for being given even small amounts of money, and have then been deferred to the indefinite future. Hopefully these companies will not now go bankrupt when they are forced to catch up with their liabilities). In any event, this trip was postponed to this month.
And, well, on Friday October 15 I got on a plane having received the awful news earlier in the day that Brian had died that morning.
Trying to find old things in Berlin is a struggle. There was a fairly small town there in 1400, but since then it has been drained, expanded, made a provincial capital, rebuilt, fortified, invaded once or twice, expanded again, demolished, rebuilt again, expanded some more, fortified, rebuilt again and turned into an imperial capital, torn down, blown up, bombed to rubble, blown up some more, turned into a communist capital, demolished again, neglected, expanded some more and rebuilt again and made into a national capital, just giving he highlights. In most cities, the geographical and historical bones stick through. In Berlin, much less so. The watercourses to some extent, but that is all.
I attempted to look for remnants of the old city walls. In most cities it would be helpful to type “[City Name] wall remnants” into Google, but “Berlin Wall Remnants” gets something else. To make things even more complicated there was another wall, the Customs Wall, that was built around 1737 for tax collection purposes (boo). Most Berlin place names refereeing to gates (most notably the Brandenburg Gate) refer to this wall. So, I actually found myself looking at the original maps of Berlin in 1440 (and the later map of the star fortress in around 1683), looking carefully for the rights bends and branches and former branches of the river. I started well, finding a piece of (obviously restored) medieval city wall in Littenstrasse>. But that was it for finding further pieces of wall. I followed the approximate line of Littenstrasse through Alexanderplatz, just to the south of the Stadtbahn along the top of what had been Alt-Berlin.
The street plan had been changed by the centuries and the Prussians and the fascists and the communists, and I found nothing more medieval. I crossed the Spree at Bodestrasse, between the Neues Museum (now again containing the bust of Nefertiti, as it did before 1939) and the Berliner Dom, the now restored protestant cathedral that had still been in post-WWII ruins when I first visited Berlin in 1992. I then doubled back to the top of the island before walking past the Humboldt University of Berlin, through Bebelplatz (site of the Nazis infamous book burnings), past the Roman Catholic St. Hedwig’s Cathedral (at present closed for the East German post-war modernist restoration to be removed and replaced with something more tasteful and less full of asbestos) and Oberwallstrasse, Niederwallstrasse, and Wallstrasssse, the latter three streets following the route (with a little straightening) of the wall of the star fortress, at least some of the bends in the shape of that wall being apparent. And back where I started, but on the other side of the river, having circumnavigated the old cities of Berlin and Cölln.
But there was one more thing to see. When we were looking at old and new pictures of Berlin, Brian’s cousin (I think) David Micklethwait commented that the only building that could be seen in the first, last, and intermediate pictures of Berlin was the Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace), originally the Churfurstl Schloss (Elector’s Palace), home of the heads of House of Hohenzollern during their long journey from Margraves of Brandenburg to being Emperors of Germany before Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate in 1918.
Except, I did some further research and it is stranger than that. Rather than being the oldest building in the later photo of Berlin, the Berliner Schloss is actually one of the very youngest – the current building was completed in 2020. The original building was badly but not irreparably damaged in World War 2. The East Germans at times used it as a backdrop for a War movie (including firing live ammunition at it), partly repaired it and used it as office space, denounced it as a symbol of Prussian militarism, and finally demolished it in 1950, partly for ideological reasons but mainly because they were arseholes. The Palace of the Republic – the East German parliament – was then built on the site. After German reunification in 1990, the new German government demolished this building, partly for ideological reasons and partly because it was full of asbestos.
After much discussion, the Palace was rebuilt as the Humboldt Forum, a museum featuring a reconstruction of the Berliner Schloss on the exterior but with an entirely modern interior. (The result was then denounced by the New York Times as an attempt to hide the history of Prussian militarism). Brian found this amusing, as it fitted in with another of his ideas – the triumph of modernism on the insides of buildings but not so much on the outside. His recent thoughts on this subject came in the context of hospitals, alas.
So, I finished my walk around old Berlin with a visit to the Berliner Schloss / Humboldt Forum. And, well, it’s weirder than that.
If you are going to reconstruct old buildings after a war, there are a few things you can do. You can take what is left, and use modern techniques and designs to rebuilt the rest, leaving you with a building that is half and half new and old. (Lots of buildings in Britain and for that matter in West Germany that were quickly rebuilt after WWII are like this). You can reconstruct the new parts in hopefully a sympathetic and complementary style, but also in such a way that the new bits are obviously new rather than old. (Much of the recent restorations of central Gdansk are like this, and I like them a lot). You can attempt to restore the damaged part of the building to the same design as before. The aforementioned Berliner Dom is an example of this. Or you can demolish the ruins and start again, either in the same style or differently. Rebuilding exactly what was there before (as was done in the centre of Warsaw) perhaps works if you do it right away (as the Poles did) but the longer you leave it, the more the result looks like trite and artificial, at least at first. (For an example, look at the Dresden Frauenkirche. It’s a brand new Baroque building with no wear built to modern health and safety standards)
And well, the architects who rebuilt the Berliner Schloss decided to make the fact that it is a reconstruction obvious, by building the front wall (including the main entrance) and two side walls as perfect reconstructions of the original down to every detail, but the back wall in a rather severe modernist style. Similarly, the main courtyard has three interior walls in the Prussian Baroque style of the original building and one in modernist wall. If you look at the building from the front or the sides, it looks like an (admittedly brand new) Prussian Baroque palace. From the back, it looks like a modernist building. From other angles, it looks mostly like an old building, but not quite.
Does it work? I’m not sure. It would have no chance of working anywhere other than in the strange city of Berlin, which is a mix of old and new and original and reconstructed and broken and repaired and has been a showcase of every German regime for the last 500 years – for good or for bad.
A month ago, and a year ago, and ten years ago, and twenty years ago, I would have talked about all this with Brian when I got back. I might have e-mailed him photos when I was still there. There would have been more sharing of photos and conversing and commenting on blogs. He might well have called me an idiot if I said something I disagreed with. I have no idea whether he would have liked or disliked the rebuilt Schloss Berlin, but he would have had something interesting to say about it. He loved talking about what buildings looked like in the context of the surrounds of the cities they were in, and found that too much architectural commentary didn’t focus on this and instead talked about buildings in isolation. I agreed with him on this point, which is one reason why I go places to see stuff.
Anyway, the point is that I miss Brian. Fuck cancer.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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