Meet the Germans | Rory's Berlin Blog | Goethe-Institut

    Robert Enke, the German national goalkeeper, committed suicide earlier this month.  On Sunday 45,000 fans – many dressed in black and wearing the club scarf -- gathered at a Hanover football stadium for his funeral.   His widow stood by the coffin at the centre of the pitch.  Speeches were made, tears shed.  Then Enke’s coffin was carried away by his team-mates to be buried in a private ceremony next to his baby daughter.



    Germany has been touched by this story of personal tragedy, mental illness, the pressures of professional sport and men’s fear of weakness.  Enke had been set to travel to South Africa next year with the German squad to play in the 2010 World Cup.  The 32-year-old was at the peak of his powers.  He was popular and – despite setbacks during his time with Barcelona and Fenerbahce Istanbul -- successful.  So how – the country is asking itself -- could this happen?  

    The day after he stepped in front of a train, his wife told a press conference that Enke had suffered from depression for years.  But he had kept his condition secret for fear of losing both his place on the national team and their eight-month-old daughter, adopted after the death of their first child in 2006.

    Sportsmen and women are under tremendous pressure to be ultimate examples of physical and mental strength.  Weakness is seized on by foes and fans alike, every ready to abuse and bully players who expose their vulnerabilities.  That is the brutal reality of competitive sport.  In such a climate it’s no surprise that Enke chose to hide his depression from the team psychologist.

    Theo Zwanziger, president of the German Football Federation, has stated his determination to discover why Enke’s illness went unnoticed.
    ‘The team, the trainers, the players, the football fans and people in this country … want to know why,’ he said.  ‘I can’t answer that question, but we can say with certainty that we’ll try to never let it happen again that someone who gave us so much … sees no alternative but to take his life.’

    ‘Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel’.  After the game is before the game.  Sports writer Raphael Honigstein quotes the famous quip in the Guardian, noting that it epitomises post-war Germany’s determination to get on with it, and its reluctance to dwell on the past.  ‘But for once, the show cannot go on,’ he declares.

    The Times’ Berlin correspondent Roger Boyes agrees.  He writes that Enke had seen what happened to Sebastian Deisler at Bayern Munich.  Edmund Stoiber, the former state premier of Bavaria, once moaned that the depressed Deisler was ‘one of the biggest losing deals’ the club had ever negotiated.  Boyes goes on, ‘Players used to be working class boys who, in return for obeying orders, could make themselves wealthy.  Now players are more articulate; they are young millionaires with advisers, and they want the management to listen to their views.’

    Boyes concludes that the problem is with authoritarian German management.  He believes that too many organisations are run as if they’re part of the Prussian military.  ‘Germany needs a cultural revolution,’ he states.  ‘The old-fashioned chain of command, the muzzling of criticism, throws much of (this country’s) creative energy away.  Why do German universities come so low down on international league tables?  Why is German television so poor compared to foreign competition?  Not because there is a shortage of intelligent, gifted people, but rather because of the way such institutions are managed.’

    It is a tragedy that Robert Enke felt he had no choice but to take his own life and I, like so many others, offer my condolences to his wife, his daughter and family.  Now the greater tragedy would be to miss the opportunity to learn from his death.  First, we need accept that depression is a real, dangerous illness.  Every year in the UK as many as 1,000 young men kill themselves, in part because they have learned – often by idealising their football heroes -- not to show weakness.  Second, players themselves – those demigods in bright team strips -- must accept their responsibility in shaping young minds and set a better example (for example Enke established a charity for children with heart disease).  Third, fans need to be reminded that football is not more important than life and death, as Liverpool chairman Bill Shankly once irresponsibly remarked.  Fourth and finally, managers across Europe need to take time out and look at their management style.

    The Hanover 96  goal is prematurely empty.  Let the emptiness be filled with responsible thinking and higher aspirations – both on and off the pitch.

    My feet are killing me.  I have a blister as big as a CD on my right heel.  A thumping techno beat echoes around my head.  Twenty years ago I stepped through the Berlin Wall.  Last Monday evening I walked into a wall of sound at the Goethe-Institut London.



    On November 9th most of the Goethe-Institute’s 159 offices in 91 countries marked the anniversary of the fall of the Wall.  Los Angeles celebrated with special film screenings and a party at the Standard Hotel then began preparing to launch a haunting, interactive, virtual reality computer graphic installation of the Berlin Wall.   The New York office contributed to a sell-out evening of author readings -- including Kathrin Aehnlich -- at Idlewild Books.  In Paris celebrants danced the night away with especial enthusiasm, in part to compensate for the apprehension of France’s political elite for German unity in 1989.  

    In Sydney, Australians scrambled for places at a panel discussion on the implication of those events for German, European and world history while, across the hallway, the artist Court Williams investigated our relationship with the past.  His startling sculpture ‘Monument: The Comfort of Hindsight’ reinterprets ideas of memory and monuments by creating two plush and upholstered sections of the Berlin Wall.

    The Goethe-Institut Toronto kicked off the events with Ingo Schulze reading from the English translation of his book ‘New Lives’ at the International Festival of Authors.  Later young Canadians danced until dawn at the ‘Berlin Techno Night…the way it was back in Berlin 1989’.  The huge public interest in the Mauerfall surprised and delighted director Sonja Griegoschewski.      ‘This is even more remarkable because November 9th is a very important day for the Jewish community in Toronto – Reichskristallnacht -- and November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada,’ she told me.  ‘A happy and wonderful German anniversary was therefore framed by two very tragic and horrible ones.  But that might also help us to value freedom and non-violent revolutions even more.’



    In London the Goethe team put together a truly sensational day with an exhibition of Norbert Enker’s borderline photographs, a ‘live’ video installation following the events of November 9th 1989 and the UK premiere of ‘The Invisible Frame’.  Director Cynthia Beatt, who had followed Tilda Swinton’s 1988 cycle ride around the Wall, retraced its now ‘invisible frame’ earlier this year.  She and the eloquent and cheeky Swinton were on hand to both charm and electrify the audience.   The lucky winners of the Meet the Germans online quiz were drawn by yours truly.  The grand prizes were a return flight to Berlin and a free language course (if you haven’t yet checked out this fun and educational quiz click here now).  Then at 23.00 the elegant Georgian building on Princes Gate welcomed hundreds of revellers for ‘Klock Time’.  Berlin dj Ben Klock of the club Berghain unleashed an extraordinary sound, light and video show.  Together we danced.  We swayed.  We developed calluses and popped blisters.  And overnight I became a devote of the Berlin techno-beat.

    At the end of the evening one party-goer mistakenly set off an emergency door alarm.  As the London fire brigade rushed to the scene, some of the girls in the coat check queue listened to the pulsating electronic alarm, picked up its beat and started to dance.  With their forefingers pointed heavenwards, they gyrated past the yellow-helmeted firemen and out into the cool London night.

    But of the overseas events to reach my ears, one above all touched me.  Johannesburg is a city with both high crime rate and high security walls.  In that city the Goethe-Institut commemorated the fall of the Berlin Wall by cracking down a twenty metre section of its own security wall.



    A cultural institute should provide an open and welcoming environment.  So the Institut initiated a competition for architectural students at the Faculty for Arts and Design at the University of Johannesburg, challenging them to create a new way of achieving security without walls and high-voltage electrical fences.  On November 9th work began on the installation of the winning design.
    ‘It’s a wonderful feeling,’ said Dieter Haller, the German Ambassador to South Africa, as he tore down the brick wall.  ‘It’s like twenty years ago.  We want to signal to our South African friends that we don’t need the wall.’
    As The National newspaper reported, since the end of apartheid, South Africa has put up its own physical walls.  The residents of wealthy suburbs – and increasingly, in poorer townships – surround their properties with high barriers.  It is a phenomenon that both reflects and reinforces a mindset of division.
    ‘A world without walls is perhaps a safer world,’ Haller told the assembled journalists.  ‘We are not only talking about the visible walls, but also the invisible walls which separate people in different societies and different regions.’

    May the determination to break down barriers be the enduring legacy of the Berlin Wall.

    Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell.  To mark the anniversary Gorbachev, Kohl and Bush Senior are in town.  The Irish band U2 is playing a free concert at the Brandenburg Gate.  One thousand eight-foot-high Styrofoam blocks are now lined up between the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz, ready to be knocked over domino-style.  Meanwhile a red flight of steps is moving around the capital, spectators mounting its observation platform to see – through a clever use of holographic images – how the city has changed since 1989.  On Mauerfall day itself, Chancellor Merkel will welcome Polish anti-communist leader Lech Walesa, British PM Gordon Brown, French and Russian presidents Sarkozy and Medvedev as well as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the ‘Festival of Freedom’.

    Beyond Germany a section of the original Wall has been assembled along Wilshire Boulevard in front of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Special ceremonies are taking places in Toronto’s Nathan Philips Square as well as in Sydney and Auckland.  German embassies and cultural institutions around the world will be Party Central on November 9th (I’ll be at the Goethe Institut London, drawing the winners of the Meet the Germans quiz, perhaps even dancing ‘til dawn with special guest Tilda Swinton to the music of Berghain DJ Ben Kloch).

    So why the big fuss?



    Two decades ago this week both Fascism and Communism were laid to rest in Europe.  Over the previous seventy years those two, abhorrent political ideologies had brought about the deaths of as many as 65,000,000 Europeans.  Their leaders had tried to mould human behaviour through brutality and fear, snuffing out dissent, gassing their fellow citizens or banishing them to Siberia.  Of course the Soviet Union didn’t collapse immediately and Germany – divided after the defeat of Nazism in 1945 – wasn’t reunited for another year or so.  But on that night as East Berliners streamed across the false divide into West Berlin, a brutal chapter of history came to a close.

    The events of 1989 led the philosopher Francis Fukuyama to declare ‘the end of history’.  His essay and subsequent book, which have been both celebrated and maligned over the years, declared, ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
    His basic point was – and remains to this day -- that liberal democracy is ‘the final form of government’.  Earlier this week he said, ‘(Today) there are alternatives out there, like the Islamic Republic of Iran or Chinese authoritarianism.  But I don’t think that all that many people are persuaded these are higher forms of civilization than what exists in Europe, the United States, Japan or other developed democracies; societies that provide their citizens with a higher level of prosperity and personal freedom.’

    What’s November 9th about?  The individuals’ right to choose.  It’s the day to celebrate the bravery of Polish dockworkers and East German Christians, the defiance of Czech students and Russian dissidents, the professionalism of American soldiers and British intelligence officers, the moral courage and intellectual pluck of authors like Walter Kempowski and Timothy Garton Ash, the vision of Pope John Paul II and a few key politicians on both sides of the old Iron Curtain.

    For me the date also has great personal significance.  My first sight of the Berlin Wall shook me to the core, and set the course of my life.  I’d known its history of course.  I understood what had happened.  But I couldn’t conceive how it had happened.  The men and women whose actions had divided Germany and Europe -- the wartime planners, the Soviet commissars, the DDR Grenzpoliezi – weren’t monsters.  They were ordinary men and women.  I wanted to understand their motivation, how they came to act as they did, yet at the same time I needed to condemn their crimes by giving voice to their victims’ suffering.  To answer these questions I decided to become a writer, beginning with Stalin’s Nose.

    Of all this month’s commemorative events one strikes me as especially poignant.  In 1965 the student Karl-Wolfgang Holzapfel was arrested for taking part in a political demonstration and locked up in a secret Stasi prison for thirteen months.  Last week he returned to that prison to relive his incarceration, broadcasting the event live on the internet.  Holzapfel was determined that people remember the kind of repression enacted in East Germany.  But due to emotional stress he decided to break off the seven-day re-enactment.  He couldn’t go through it again.  Before 1989 of course he – like thousands of other political prisoners -- wouldn’t have had that freedom of choice.



    Achtung, baby.  It’s time to celebrate.

    Tomorrow morning I’m getting my swine flu jab.  Given the outpourings from the doomsayers you’d think I was signing my death warrant.  Last week an irresponsible American political pundit named Bill Maher tweeted his fifty-six thousand followers with the words, ‘If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.’  Then an equally paranoid commentator in the Middle East cooked up the half-baked theory that the H1-N1 vaccine is a Western weapon of mass destruction, designed to secure American control of the planet.  Their fearmongering brings to mind the dotty 1950s campaign which alleged that fluoridation of America’s drinking water was a Communist plot.  



    Here the press has exploited a fuss about a ‘two-tier medical system’ because Germany’s vaccine is coming from two different manufacturers.  Most of the 50 million doses which began to reach doctors on Monday are produced by GlaxoSmithKline.  The rest has been made by the pharmaceutical company Baxter.  Coincidentally both the German government and military opted for the Baxter vaccine, causing the mass-circulation tabloid Bild to claim that the GSK doses were inferior.  There is no medical evidence that the Baxter vaccine is better but that didn’t stop politicians from enflaming the debate.  The Green Party’s health expert Biggi Bender (that’s her real name, folks) declared that the separate vaccines amounted to ‘a big risk for the people, little risk for government.  This type of second-class medicine cannot be allowed to exist in a democracy’.

    Curiously in France, which also sources its H1-N1 vaccine from a cocktail of manufacturers, one doesn’t hear a word about multi-tier medicine.  Instead the public debate is focused on whether people should receive one or two jabs.  There is little doubt that two doses increases resilience but – of course – it also doubles the cost to government.  As a single dose costs around €8, the debate is whether the French government should spend €500,000,000 or €1,000,000,000!

    In the UK – which suffered the old chestnut of two-tier medicine during the 1990s MMR debate – the press has focused on the issue of individual liberty, and the rights of medical staff to refuse to take the vaccine (in Germany doctors have been told to have themselves immunised against the virus whatever their personal opinions on the vaccine).

    The strikingly different concerns of three European neighbours can only be attributed to the agendas of their national medias.  Editors in London, Paris and Berlin know what sells newspapers and attracts viewers, so they frame the debate to appeal to national sensitivities.  Germans care passionately about equality.  Brits fear government authority.  The French expect to be coddled by the state.

    With that in mind, one can cut through the opportunistic journalism, political bias and emotional opinion to look at the bare facts about swine flu and the vaccine.

    First, the H1-N1 vaccine is no rush job, as has been claimed by some misinformed commentators.  It was made and tested in exactly the same way that flu vaccines are always made and tested.

    Second, the epidemic has been mild to date because it’s been summertime – and schools have been closed -- in the northern hemisphere. 

    Third, the virus has spread to a hundred and ninety-one countries and killed four thousand people.  Millions of others have been infected.

    Fourth, seasonal flu regularly ranks among the ten leading causes of death in the US, infecting up to twenty per cent of the population.  It kills roughly thirty-five thousand Americans every year.  Even relatively mild pandemics, like those of 1957 and 1968, have been deadly: the first killed two million people and the second a million.

    Fifth, the EU Health Commissioner has predicated that as many as one in three Europeans will contract the swine flu virus in the next few months.

    Six, taking the vaccine means that you are unlikely to catch the disease.

    Unfortunately many of us now fear vaccines more than the illnesses they prevent.  It is true that we don’t know the long-term effect of taking the H1-N1 vaccine but for the vast majority of us the side effects – if any – won’t be as bad as being dead.



    Tomorrow morning I hope to see you in the queue at the health centre.

    It’s started again.  Our alarm clock is ringing in the middle of the night.  The first time this happened I checked the mechanism to see what was wrong.  But nothing was wrong.  The clock read six o’clock and it was six o’clock, despite the midnight blackness outside our bedroom window.  



    So Mrs. Cat, Maus and I got up in the dark.  We ate breakfast in the dark.  We walked Maus to school as the first faint glimmer of dawn illuminated the inky sky.  In his classroom the harsh neon-light exaggerated the dark shadows under the eyes of the other seven-year-olds.  Back out on the street the city’s cyclists looked grim.  In the U-Bahn glum commuters scowled at each other.  During the gloomy, daily trek to work one was more likely to see a fornicating couple than a smiling individual.  

    Germans start their day too early (apart from party-goers bonking their way home after a long night out).  Because school boards haven’t yet adapted to living in an industrial society, school days start here at 08.00 and finish at lunchtime (long ago the little darlings had to work in the fields during the afternoon).  This archaic scheduling has a knock-on effect.  Office workers are also expected to be at their desk by 08.00. Stressed-out mothers who work fulltime need to hire afternoon child-minders.  Sleep-deprived grannies grumble in supermarket queues.  At the end of their shift, blue-collar workers have been known to embark on early evening pub crawls.  Exhausted intellectuals nod off in front of the evening news, rather than wrestle with philosophical questions long into the night.  Come 22.00 every residential neighbourhood in the land is deserted, the quiet disturbed only by sound of synchronised snoring.



    Early rising would be fine if Germany were on the same latitude as Jamaica or Brazil.  In those places the day begins after sun rise, with a smile and an espresso (perhaps even a leisurely puff on a joint).  The morning sunshine lifts the heart and warms the soul.  But Germany is a northern country (Bavaria included – for proof look no further than the traditional lederhosen and dirndls which no self-respecting, design-conscious southerner would be caught dead in).  In the depths of winter the sun doesn’t begin to warm the German soul until long after 09.00.



    Of course being at work before dawn does have its advantages.  Without the distraction of dappled morning light, employees tend to work harder, if only to prove that they are more productive than their yawning co-workers.  There’s also the physiological boast of knowing that, by the time the average British or Irish worker stumbles into the office, their German counterpart will have put in three solid hours at his or her desk.  But the price of this productivity – in terms of blood pressure and general joie de vivre – is much too high.



    Next month is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Leaders from around the world will descend on this city to mark the revolution which ended communist dictatorship in Europe.  The occasion will give Angela Merkel the golden opportunity to call for a new revolution.  Henceforth – I humbly suggest – the Chancellor should end the dictatorship of punktlich time. German alarm clocks will be forbidden from ringing before dawn.  School days will start at 09.00 and finish at 16.00.  Working mothers (and fathers) will no longer need to rush home and feed their starving chicks.

    In addition Frau Merkel could decree that government offices stay closed until noon and then offer a late night service with complimentary wine served along the queues.  Street entertainers will replace conductors at U-Bahn stations.  To banish winter blues therapeutic light boxes will be given free of charge to every taxpayer.  Grumbling grannies will be sent to love hotels with complaining granddads (or other grannies, depending on their sexual orientation).  Pagan solar celebrations – such as the summer solstice and spring equinox -- will be declared national holidays.

    Of course the result will be that the trains run late and the economy collapses.  There will be a rash of geriatric pregnancies.  But how sweet it will be to see morning smiles on the faces of the happy, well-rested Germans.