... to 30-45 (+) minute long German biographies of many famous people,
including:
Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Cassius Clay,
Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson, Sebastian Vettel, Michael Schumacher, Steve Jobs,
Udo Jürgens, the Fantastischen Vier
-- and so many more.
The above link is from today's piece with Scott Simon on NPR, who conducts another interview-installment with well-read London cabbie, Will Grozier. The book Grozier most highly recommends is Hidden History, meticulously documented Dockerty/McGregor book,which seems to throw the old account of WWI to the dogs.
I now know what I want to read next summer! To prepare for this read, I checked out and now republish here this entry below, which is already Revisionist History. But does it mesh at all with the new Dockerty/McGregor book? Time will tell. Please weigh in! What is it that you are taught in school these days?
Here's what my search revealed after googling "revisionist history of WWI". --rsb History books record
that World War I started when the nations went to war to avenge the
assassination of the Archduke Francis
Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, on June 28, 1914.
This is the typical
explanation. But the "revisionist historian" knows just what
caused and what the purpose was of the conflagration of World
War I.
Up until America's
entry into this war, the American people had followed the wise
advice of President George Washington given in his farewell
address, delivered to the nation on September 17, 1796.
President Washington said: "It is our true policy to steer
clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign
world.... Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any
part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils
of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?'
President Washington
attempted to warn the American people about getting embroiled
in the affairs of Europe. But in 1914, it was not to be.
There were those who were secretly planning America's
involvement in World War I whether the American people wanted
it or not.
The Plan to Involve America in World War 1
The pressure to
involve the American government started in 1909, long before
the actual assassination of the Archduke.
Norman Dodd, former
director of the Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt
Foundations of the U.S. House of Representatives, testified
that the Committee was invited to study the minutes of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the
Committee's investigation. The Committee stated: "The trustees
of the Foundation brought up a single question. If it is
desirable to alter the life of an entire people, is there any
means more efficient than war.... They discussed this
question... for a year and came up with an answer: There are
no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective
is altering the life of an entire people. That leads
them to a question: How do we involve the United States in a
war. This is in 1909."
So the decision was
made to involve the United States in a war so that the "life
of the entire people could be altered." This was the
conclusion of a foundation supposedly committed to "peace."
The method by which
the United States was drawn into the war started on October
25, 1911, when Winston Churchill was appointed the First Lord
of the Admiralty in England.
Winston Churchill is
an interesting individual, as he later came to the conclusion
that there was indeed a master conspiracy at work in the major
events of the world, when he wrote the following in 1920:
"From the days of Spartacus—Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx,
to those of Trotsky (Russia)... this world-wide conspiracy for
the overthrow of civilization... has been steadily growing."
The second key
appointment made during the pre-war period was the appointment
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the
Navy by President Woodrow Wilson.
Roosevelt is also on
record as concluding that there was a conspiracy, at least in
the United States. He once wrote to Colonel Edward Mandell
House: "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know,
that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the
government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson, and I am not
wholly excepting the administration of W.W. (Woodrow Wilson.)
The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight
with the Bank of the United States—only on a far bigger and
broader basis."
The Sinking of the Lusitania
The next step in the
maneuvering of the United States into the war came when the
Cunard Lines, owner of the ocean liner, the Lusitania,
turned the ship over to the First Lord of the Admiralty,
Winston Churchill. It now became a ship of the English Navy
and was under the control of the English government.
The ship was sent to
New York City where it was loaded with six million rounds of
ammunition, owned by J.P. Morgan & Co., to be sold to England
and France to aid in their war against Germany.
It was known that the
very wealthy were interested in involving the American
government in that war, and Secretary of State William
Jennings Bryan was one who made note of this. "As Secretary
[Bryan] had anticipated, the large banking interests were
deeply interested in the World War because of wide
opportunities for large profits. On August 3, 1914, even
before the actual clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild
Freres cabled to Morgan and Company in New York suggesting the
flotation of a loan of $100,000,000, a substantial part of
which was to be left in the United States, to pay for French
purchases of American goods."
England broke the
German war code on December 14, 1914, so that "By the end of
January, 1915, [British Intelligence was] able to advise the
Admiralty of the departure of each U-boat as it left for
patrol...."
This meant that the
First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, knew where
every U-boat was in the vicinity of the English Channel that
separated England and France.
The ocean liner was
set to sail to England already at war with Germany. The
German government had placed advertisements in the New York
newspapers warning the American people considering whether or
not to sail with the ship to England that they would be
sailing into a war zone, and that the liner could be sunk.
Secretary Bryan
promised that "he would endeavor to persuade the President
(Woodrow Wilson) publicly to warn the Americans not to travel
[aboard the Lusitania]. No such warning was issued by
the President, but there can be no doubt that President Wilson
was told of the character of the cargo destined for the
Lusitania. He did nothing... ."
Even though Wilson
proclaimed America's neutrality in the European War, in
accordance with the prior admonitions of George Washington,
his government was secretly plotting to involve the American
people by having the Lusitania sunk. This was made
public in the book The Intimate Papers of Colonel House,
written by a supporter of the Colonel, who recorded a
conversation between Colonel House and Sir Edward Grey of
England, the Foreign Secretary of England:
Grey: What will
America do if the Germans sink an ocean liner with American
passengers on board?
House: I
believe that a flame of indignation would sweep the United
States and that by itself would be sufficient to carry us into
the war.
On May 7, 1915, the
Lusitania was sunk off the coast of County Cork,
Ireland by a U-boat
after it had slowed to await the arrival of the English escort
vessel, the Juno, which was intended to escort it into
the English port. The First Lord of the Admiralty,
Winston Churchill, issued orders that the Juno was to return
to port, and the Lusitania sat alone in the channel.
Because Churchill knew of the presence of three U-boats in the
vicinity, it is reasonable to presume that he had planned for
the Lusitania to be sunk, and it was. 1201 people lost
their lives in the sinking.
This sinking has been
described by Colin Simpson, the author of a book entitled
The Lusitania, as "the foulest act of wilful murder ever
committed on the seas."
But the event was not enough to enable
President Wilson to declare war against the German government, and the
conspirators changed tactics. They would use other means to get the American
people involved in the war, as the "flame of indignation" did not sweep the
United States as had been planned.
Robert Lansing, the Assistant Secretary
of State, is on record as stating: "We must educate the public gradually —
draw it along to the point where it will be willing to go into
the war."
After the sinking of the
Lusitania, two
inquiries were held, one by the English government, in June, 1915, and
one by the American government in 1918. Mr. Simpson has written that "Both
sets of archives... contain meager information. There are substantial
differences of fact in the two sets of papers and in many cases it is difficult to
accept that the files relate to the same vessel."
But in both inquiries, the conclusions
were the same: torpedoes and not exploding ammunition sank the
Lusitania,
because there was no ammunition aboard.
The cover-up was now
official.
But there have been critics of these
inquiries. One was, of course, the book written by Colin Simpson, who did
the research necessary to write his book in the original minutes of the two
inquiries.
The Los Angeles Times reviewed Mr.
Simpson's book and concluded: "The Lusitania
proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the British government connived at the sinking of the
passenger ship in order to lure America into World War I. The Germans, whose
torpedo struck the liner, were the unwitting accomplices or victims of a
plot probably concocted by Winston Churchill."
President Wilson was seeking re-election
in 1916. He campaigned on his record of "keeping us out of the War"
during his first term of office from 1912 to 1916.
But behind the scenes, Wilson was
secretly plotting America's entry into the War, mainly through the machinations
of Wilson's major advisor, Colonel Edward Mandell House. House had
already committed America to a participation in the war: "The
House-Grey memorandum... pledged American intervention on the side of the
Allies if Germany would not come promptly to the peace table. This
agreement was approved by Wilson eight months before the 1916
election."
But the real reason the War was being
fought was slowly emerging. One of the first revelations occurred on May
27, 1916, when President Wilson urged the creation of the League of Nations in a
speech entitled League to Enforce Peace. Wilson argued that what the world
needed to prevent the recurrence of a similar war was a world government.
Some were not happy with the slowness of
America's entry into the war. One of these was Franklin Roosevelt, who:
In the early months of 1917 [before the
official declaration of war by the United States government] he
had been in constant conflict with his chief, Secretary of the
Navy, Joseph Daniels, over the same issues.
For Daniels, who resisted every move that
might carry the United States into the war, those four
months (January through April) of 1917 were the "agony of
Gethsemane."
He opposed convoying [the intentional
sending of American ships into the war zone in the hope that
one would be sunk by the German Navy]. He opposed the arming of
merchant ships [intentionally provoking the German Navy into
believing that the ship was a ship of war].
Roosevelt favored both.
And when a filibuster prevented
congressional authorization of the arming of merchantmen, Roosevelt
was impatient with Wilson for not immediately using his
executive power to arm [the ships]. He dined at the Metropolitan Club
with a group of Republican "warhawks" [Roosevelt was a
Democrat]. It included Theodore Roosevelt, General Wood, J.P.
Morgan, and Elihu Root [one of the founders of the CFR].
The primary topic of discussion was,
according to Roosevelt's diary, "how to make Administration steer
a dear course to uphold rights."
This was an euphemism for an aggressive
policy on the high seas that would result in indents
and involve the United States in the war.
Roosevelt's badgering apparently paid
off, for on April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress for a
Declaration of War, and it was granted on April 6. The United States was now in
the war "to end all wars," and "to make the world safe for democracy."
The war wound its horrible course through
the destruction of human lives and ended on November 11, 1918.
Historian Walter Millis wrote the
following about the purpose of the war and about House's basic intent: "The
Colonel's sole justification for preparing such a batch of blood for his
countrymen was his hope of establishing a new world order [a world
government] of peace and security...."
The Outrageous Treaty of Versailles
The official treaty that ended the war was
the Treaty of Versailles, where representatives of all sides sat down at
a conference table and wrote the treaty.
Several interesting personalities
attended these meetings. In the British delegation was the
British economist John Maynard Keynes, and representing the American banking interests was
Paul Warburg, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. His brother. Max, the
head of the German banking firm of M.M. Warburg and Company, of Hamburg,
Germany, and who "was not only in charge of Germany's finances but
was a leader of the German espionage system" was there as a
representative of the German government.
The Treaty was written to end the war,
but another delegate to the conference. Lord Curzon of England, the
British Foreign Secretary, saw through what the actual intent was and
declared: "This is no peace; this is only a truce for twenty years." Lord
Curzon felt that the terms of the Treaty were setting the stage for a second world
war, and he correctly predicted the year it would start: 1939.
Lord Curzon was indeed a prophet: he
picked the actual year that World War II would start!
One of the planks of the Treaty called
for large amounts of war reparations to be paid to the victorious
nations by the German government. This plank of the Treaty alone caused more
grief in the German nation than any other and precipitated three events:
The "hyperinflation" of the German
mark between 1920 and 1923;
The destruction of the middle
class in
Germany; and
The bringing to power of someone who
could end the inflation: a dictator like Adolf Hitler.
This plank was written by John Foster
Dulles, one of the founders of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later
the Secretary of State to President Dwight Eisenhower.
Even John Maynard Keynes became concerned
about the Treaty. He wrote: "The peace is outrageous and
impossible and can bring nothing but misfortune behind it".
In addition to writing the Treaty of
Versailles, the nations who were victorious in the war also wrote the
Charter of the League of Nations, which was ratified on January 10, 1920, and
signed by President Wilson for the American government. Wilson brought the
treaty back to the United States and asked the Senate to
ratify it The Senate, remembering George Washington's advice to avoid foreign
entanglements and reflecting the views of the American people who did not wish to enter
the League, refused to ratify the treaty. President Wilson was not pleased,
possibly because he saw himself, as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was quick to
point out, as: "... a future President of the world."
It is now apparent
that Wilson intended to head up the world government the war was fought to give the
world, and he became depressed when the Treaty was not ratified. Imagine the
disappointment of one who had come so close to becoming the very first
President of the World, only to have it taken away by the actions of the
Senate of the United States. Imagine the sense of incredible power that Wilson
must have felt, thinking he would become the very first individual in the
history of mankind to rule the world. Others had tried and failed, but Wilson
was confident that he would succeed.
But the American people, expressing their
displeasure through the Senate, would not let him.
The Rich Get Richer
Others were not so disappointed, however.
"The war, in brief, provided an unparalleled opportunity for the richest
families to grab [exorbitant profits] at the expense of the public and, without
exception, they made the most of this opportunity. The rich families, to
be sure, wanted the war to be won, but they took care that the victory was
expensive to the common taxpayers. They uttered no cries for government
economy... so long as the public treasury was at their
disposal."
One of the families who reaped the
exorbitant profits were "the Rockefellers, who were very eager for the
United States to enter World War I, [and who] made far more than
$200,000,000 from that conflict."
But support for the League of Nations
continued. The Grand Orient Lodge of Freemasonry of France was one
which advised all of its members: "It is the duty of universal Freemasonry
to give its full support to the League of Nations...."
As could have been anticipated, the League
of Nations became a major issue during the Presidential election of
1920.
The Republican candidate Warren G.
Harding was on record as opposing the League and further attempts
to ratify the charter: "It will avail nothing to discuss in detail the League
covenant, which was conceived for world super-government In
the existing League of Nations, world governing with its super-powers, this Republic
will have no part."
He was opposed in the Republican
primaries by General Leonard Wood, one of the Republican "warhawks,"
who was ".. .backed by a powerful group of rich men who wish(ed) a
military man in the White House."
The American people, once again
manifesting their disapproval of the League, voted for Harding as an evidence
of that distrust and concern. Harding outpolled his opposition by a
greater margin than did President Wilson who had "kept us out of the war"
during the election of 1916. Wilson got only fifty-two percent of the vote,
and Harding got sixty-four percent
Harding was a supporter of William Howard
Taft, the President who opposed the bankers and their
Federal Reserve Bill. After his election, he named Harry M. Daugherty, Taft's campaign
manager, as his Attorney General.
His other Cabinet appointments
were not as wise, however, as he unexplainably surrounded himself with men
representing the oil industry.
For instance:
his Secretary of State was Charles Evans
Hughes, an attorney of Standard Oil;
his Secretary of the Treasury was Andrew
Mellon, owner of Gulf Oil;
his Postmaster General was Will Hays, an
attorney for Sinclair Oil; and
his Secretary of the Interior was Albert
Fall, a protégé of the oil men.
It was Mr. Fall who was to be President
Harding's downfall, as he later accepted a bribe from Harry Sinclair in
exchange for a lease of the Navy's oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
There are many who believe that the
scandal was intended to discredit the Harding administration in an attempt
to remove him from office for two very important reasons:
Harding was consistently vocal
against the League of Nations, and there was still a chance that its
supporters could get the United States to join as the League had survived
the Senate's prior refusal to ratify the treaty, and
Attorney General Daugherty had been
prosecuting the oil trusts under the Sherman anti-trust laws.
These activities did not please the oil
interests who had created the Teapot Dome scandal. But Harding
unfortunately did not live to see the full repercussions of the artificial scandal,
as he died on August 2, 1923, before the story completely surfaced. (There are
those who believe that there were some who couldn't wait for the Teapot Dome
Scandal to remove President Harding, and that he was poisoned.)
But the oil interests allowed it to
completely play its course as a warning to future Presidents of the United States
not to oppose the oil interests.
The warning has been generally heeded.
Not many have chosen to contend with the true rulers of the
United States.
Herlinde Koelbl has been
photographing Merkel since 1991. Koelbl says that Merkel has always been
“a bit awkward,” but “you could feel her strength at the beginning.”Credit Photographs by Herlinde Koelbl / Agentur Focus / Contact Press Images
A
summer afternoon at the Reichstag. Soft Berlin light filters down
through the great glass dome, past tourists ascending the spiral ramp,
and into the main hall of parliament. Half the members’ seats are empty.
At the lectern, a short, slightly hunched figure in a fuchsia jacket,
black slacks, and a helmet of no-color hair is reading a speech from a
binder. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
and the world’s most powerful woman, is making every effort not to be
interesting.
...... Paragraph 1 of many!
Find out details of Angela's youth as an award - winning Russian speaker growing up in Brandenburg. Learn what she thought of rebellious West Germans in the '60's (The Baader Meinhof Gruppe) and of Americans. Read about her initially cold relationship with Obama, which has warmed considerably -- even while he's grown far less popular. Yes, there are clues to her private life. There is discussion of Germany's history and politics (including fascinating details about the destruction and rebuilding of the amazing parliament building, the Reichstag). We also learn how incredulous Germans initially were to hand their nation's government over to her. And how she's quietly relishing the country's stability now, which has fueled her popularity, while her opponents find she's made of Teflon.
Might she run for a 4th term? Certainly her success cannot last. -- Right?
Genders .... and Plural forms German English
der Loeffel -- the spoon (masculine) PL: die Loeffel (you're good) spoons
der Tisch -- the table PL: die Tische (add that 'e') tables
die Gabel -- the fork (feminine) PL: die Gabeln (add that 'n') forks
das Messer -- the knife (neutral) PL: die Messer (you're good) -- the knives (wot-wot?)
In the month of October Americans (and some Canadians)
commemorate the Germanic heritage element of American (and Canadian)
society. About one in four Americans claims to have German ancestors.
German-Americans from Adolph Coors to Albert Einstein have made
important contributions to both American and world culture. The
legendary Brooklyn Bridge was designed by a German-born engineer. The
American rockets to the moon were designed and supervised by another
German-American. There were Germans among the Jamestown settlers in 1607
and Germans (Prussians, Austrians, etc.) have continued to migrate to
the New World until the present day--most notably during the two
migratory waves of the late 1840s and from 1880 to 1889.
Here's an excerpt from President Ronald Reagan's 1987
German-American Day proclamation:
"The United States has embraced a vast
array of German traditions, institutions, and influences. Many of these
have become so accepted as parts of our way of life that their ethnic
origin has been obscured. For instance, Christmas trees and Broadway
musicals are familiar features of American society. Our kindergartens,
graduate schools, the social security system, and labor unions are all
based on models derived from Germany.
German teachers, musicians, and enthusiastic amateurs have left
an indelible imprint on classical music, hymns, choral singing, and
marching bands in our country. In architecture and design, German
contributions include the modern suspension bridge, Bauhaus, and
Jugendstil. German-American scientists have helped make the United
States the world's pioneer in research and technology. The American work
ethic, a major factor in the rapid rise of the United States to
preeminence in agriculture and industry, owes much to German-Americans'
commitment to excellence."
This series focusing on Berlin is one of several published by REWBOSS (Andrew Bossom), a Brit who has been living in Germany for quite a few years now. The following comment summarizes the reception his series on Berlin has been receiving (which also included a potential nomination for Best of YOUTUBE). I've become a subscriber...
I
don't believe there is a more exciting city on the planet than Berlin.
It's history is mind-boggling. I will be watching this entire 5 part
series again! Great production, great narrative!! Thank you so much for
your time and efforts!!
First: Tips on visiting Berlin:
Thanks to RewBoss
Episode 1: Birth of a Capital
"Here we explore the very oldest parts of Berlin, tracing its history
from its beginnings in the 13th century to the construction of the
Brandenburg Gate. Along the way we visit the St Nicholas Quarter
(Nikolaiviertel), the TV Tower, Museum Island and Unter den Linden."
Episode 2: From Empire to Republic
"I trace its history from the creation of the German Empire to the Weimar
Republic. Along the way, I visit the Reichstag, Schloss Charlottenburg
and the Ku'damm, and take a ride on the U-Bahn."
Episode 3: Nazionalsozialism
In this video, I look at the impact the Nazi period and its immediate
aftermath had on the face of Berlin: the Olympic stadium, Tempelhof
Airport, war memorials and the events leading up to the division of
Berlin.
Episode 4: The Cold War
As tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviets increase, East
Germany resorts to extreme measures. But life in the divided city is not
quite as bad as it could have been.
NEW TO ME: Soviets killed 153 protesters (mostly construction workers were protesting poor working conditions) on June 17, 1961. 3 days later, the West Berlin Senate approved renaming part of the E-W access road "Straße des 17. Juni". --rsb
Episode 5: A New BerlinPublished on Aug 31, 2014
The Berlin Wall comes down, and life can start to get back to normal. What does the future hold for the city?
ECONOMIST Johnson Language Feb 7th 2013, 2:19 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
THE debate around immigration in America often touches on language. The fear of nativist Americans is that immigrants do not learn (and maybe do not want to learn) English. If many of them speak the same language (say, Spanish) and cluster geographically (in, say, Los Angeles or San Antonio) they threaten to make America de facto bilingual. If this happens, so goes the concern, they will inevitably make demands for more legal recognition of other languages, threatening English's status as a unifying force behind America's motto, e pluribus unum, "out of many, one".
Americans know that this is an immigrant country. So why, in this narrative, did previous waves of immigration not threaten English, while today's does? In the traditional story, immigrants back in the good old days wanted to, and did in fact, learn English. But this is not really so.
Immigrant languages probably persisted longer in America a century ago than they do today. And one language in particular persisted in large, coherent pockets in America for more than half a century: German. German immigration to America peaked from around 1840 to 1880. Like most immigrants, Germans came to towns where their co-nationals had settled, so they built up big communities in cities like Milwaukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis.
So what did this immigrant community look like? Hard-working English learners who quickly dissolved in the great melting pot? Hardly. This fascinating short paper by Miranda Wilkerson and Joseph Salmons looks at just one town in southeastern Wisconsin, called Hustisford. They focus on the year 1910; German-speaking plunged fairly quickly in America after the first world war (1914-1918), for the obvious reasons. But before the war, German monolingual communities persisted for many decades after immigrants' arrivals.
Almost a quarter of Hustisford's population (over ten years old) was monolingual in German in 1910. Of that share, a third were born in America. Of the German monolinguals born abroad, a majority had been in America for more than 30 years, having immigrated during the height of the German wave. In other words, in small-town America a century ago, it was perfectly possible to grow up, or to live there for decades after immigrating, without learning English.
Was this because Germans were isolated, in pockets in town or perhaps on the outskirts? No; Ms Wilkerson and Mr Salmons' map shows them interspersed among Anglo-Americans. Were they simply undissolved lumps in an Anglo-American pot, though? No again: the scholars find many mixed households, and English and Irish names among the parishioners at German churches. Perhaps the Germans still felt somehow really German, not American? Here, the story is nuanced; German-Americans were certainly proud of their German heritage, but a 1917 cover of Die Deutsche Hausfrau, a ladies' magazine, featured prominent flags and the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner"—in German translation. This was just before America's entry into the war.
German was the single biggest and most concentrated foreign language on American soil after independence—until today. Almost five decades of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries has recreated something like the German situation. Some people, like the late Samuel Huntington, a political scientist, feel that America's "Anglo-American core" is threatened like never before. But for many reasons (hard to rank in importance), it is nearly impossible today to grow up in America without learning English. One study of more than 5,000 children in the Miami and San Diego areas (thick with Spanish-speakers) found that 94.7% of Latino middle-schoolers who had been born in America spoke English well. The authors concluded that "knowledge of English is near universal, and preference for that language is dominant among most immigrant nationalities. On the other hand, only a minority remain fluent in the parental languages."
As with most stories of "the good old days", the stories of the "good old immigrants" who learned English in contrast to today's layabouts are just that: stories. Their point is emotional, not educational. The purpose is to elicit fear of change, through reminiscence for an age that never existed.
(Wilkerson-Salmons paper via Mr. Verb. The headline is "Proud to be an American" in German. I'd quite like to see Lee Greenwood sing it in German.)
Featured comments
MKE_Hornet Feb 8th 2013, 15:42 As a native Milwaukeean and German-American myself, I can certainly vouch for the persistence of German culture and language even to this day in a city that used to be called the "Deutsch-Athen". It's considered quite the gig to play a show at Turner Hall downtown, and there are monuments not far from the Germania building to the Iron Brigadiers of the Civil War, many of whom could hardly speak English beyond announcing proudly that "they were going to fight mit Sigel!" (General Franz Sigel). Frankly I don't think current nativist nonsense directed at Hispanic Americans and Arab Americans holds much more water than the kind that said America would be overwhelmed by socialist Germans 100 years ago.
Michael Watsonin reply to Ingenieurwissenschaftler Feb 8th 2013, 02:17 Lieber Ingenieur, Isn't it extraordinary what nonsense and ignorance is so often expressed in so many of these comments in The Economist? Most Americans fail to realise that citizens of acknowledged German ancestry are the largest, measurable group in the US at about 50 million, i.e. more than Irish or African-American. (I understand that it is problematic to determine the number of citizens of English ancestry since they have been there so long that they consider themselves 'indigenous'.) It is in official records that significant numbers of Germans began arriving in America from 1670 onwards, initially mainly in New York and Pennsylvania (the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch were not Dutch but Deutsch, i.e., German). They brought with them the traditions of the Christmas tree, the hot dog and the hamburger. There are innumerable famous US citizens of German ancestry, e.g. Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, President Eisenhower, John Steinbeck, Meryl Streep, etc. What seems not to be realized by a great number of Americans is that there is no official language in the US - English is simply its de facto language. Today, Illinois State publishes a driver's manual in German just as Cincinnati does in Ohio. I mention these facts to counteract the absurd xenophobia concerning citizens, or potential citizens, whose mother tongue is Spanish. The pattern is always pretty much the same, especially since radio and talkies and TV and the Internet came along to homogenize and distribute the language everywhere. The first people, who came here as adults, will almost never be fluent. Their children are truly bi-lingual. The next generation is monolingual, and the only words you can be sure they know in the old language are foods and swears.
On May 25, 1920, Robert T. Meyer, while an instructor in Zion Parochial School, a one-room schoolhouse in Hampton, Nebraska, taught the subject of reading in the German language
to 10-year-old Raymond Parpart, a fourth-grader, the Hamilton County
Attorney entered the classroom and discovered Parpart reading from the
Bible in German. He charged Meyer with violating the Siman Act.[3] ** ** On April 9, 1919, Nebraska enacted a statute called "An act relating to
the teaching of foreign languages in the state of Nebraska," commonly
known as the Siman Act. It imposed restrictions on both the use of a
foreign language as a medium of instruction and on foreign languages as a
subject of study.
With respect to the use of a foreign language while
teaching, it provided that "No person, individually or as a teacher,
shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach
any subject to any person in any language other than the English
language."
With respect to foreign-language education, it prohibited
instruction of children who had yet to successfully complete the 8th
grade.
Meyer was tried and convicted in the district court for Hamilton county, Nebraska, and fined $25 ($294 in today's dollars). The Nebraska Supreme Court
affirmed his conviction by a vote of 4 to 2. The majority thought the
law a proper response to "the baneful effects" of allowing immigrants to
educate their children in their mother tongue, with results "inimical
to our own safety." The dissent called the Siman Act the work of "crowd
psychology."[3]
Meyer appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. His lead
attorney was Arthur Mullen, an Irish Catholic and a prominent Democrat,
who had earlier failed in his attempt to obtain an injunction against
enforcement of the Siman Act from the Nebraska State Supreme Court. Oral
arguments expressed conflicting interpretations of the World War I
experience. Mullen attributed the law to "hatred, national bigotry and
racial prejudice engendered by the World War." Opposing counsel
countered that "it is the ambition of the State to have its entire
population 100 per cent. American."[4]
Majority opinion
In his decision, Justice McReynolds
stated that the "liberty" protected by the Due Process clause
"[w]ithout doubt...denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but
also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the
common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry,
establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the
dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges
long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of
happiness by free men."
Analyzing in that context the liberty of the teacher and of parents
with respect to their children, McReynolds wrote: "Practically,
education of the young is only possible in schools conducted by
especially qualified persons who devote themselves thereto. The calling
always has been regarded as useful and honorable, essential, indeed, to
the public welfare. Mere knowledge of the German language cannot
reasonably be regarded as harmful. Heretofore it has been commonly
looked upon as helpful and desirable. Plaintiff in error taught this
language in school as part of his occupation. His right thus to teach
and the right of parents to engage him so to instruct their children, we
think, are within the liberty of the amendment." And further:
"Evidently the Legislature has attempted materially to interfere with
the calling of modern language teachers, with the opportunities of
pupils to acquire knowledge, and with the power of parents to control
the education of their own."
And finally: "That the state may do much, go very far, indeed, in
order to improve the quality of its citizens, physically, mentally and
morally, is clear; but the individual has certain fundamental rights
which must be respected. The protection of the Constitution extends to
all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with
English on the tongue. Perhaps it would be highly advantageous if all
had ready understanding of our ordinary speech, but this cannot be
coerced by methods which conflict with the Constitution—a desirable
end cannot be promoted by prohibited means."
He allowed that wartime circumstances might justify a different
understanding, but that Nebraska had not demonstrated sufficient need
"in time of peace and domestic tranquility" to justify "the consequent
infringement of rights long freely enjoyed."
SOUNDS LIKE A CLOSE CALL TO ME! Not sure if other languages besides German have been targeted in this way. Check out this further article regarding challenges which teaching the German language has had to overcome. -- rsb
Call
To Ban Teaching German Language Split Allentown Board During Wwi School
District's Compromise To Keep It As An Elective Was Eventually
Overruled By State Legislature, Which Forbid It.
March 27, 2000|by FRANK WHELAN, The Morning Call
On the evening of May 27, 1918, a thunderstorm pounded the Lehigh Valley with rain, wind and hail. Inside
the Allentown School Board's meeting room, the mood was almost as
stormy. The members had the most controversial subject on their agenda
that they had ever faced, it combined a volatile mix of patriotism and
the teaching of a foreign language.
School
Board Chairman J. Dallas Erdman was demanding that the members forbid
the teaching of German in the public schools. If not, they would be
siding with the nation's foes who were killing Americans at that moment
in World War I.
The Catasauqua School Board, Erdman pointed out, had already banned German. It was up to Allentown to follow.
Board members William F.P. Good, Oliver A. Iobst and Charles A. Reber were in Erdman's corner. But
members Wilson Arbogast, Harry G. Correll, William J. Dietrich, the
Rev. Charles J. Rausch and Oliver T. Weaber could only be pushed so far.
Make
German an elective rather than the required high school course it had
been since 1858, they argued. But don't do away with the teaching of the
language of Luther, Goethe and the German ancestors of everyone in the
room.
The board's argument grew heated. When their loyalty was
questioned, the dissidents protested. `I am an American," said Rausch
after a cutting remark in German by Iobst. `Do you challenge my
patriotism?` said Weaber, rising, `menacingly from his chair," the Call
reported.
The argument raged on, but the German supporters would
not budge. Finally, the board agreed to the compromise of making German
an elective. Part of the agreement was replacing the course's textbook,
`Im Vaterland," which means `My Fatherland,` with something that sounded
less pro-Germany.
The roots of this argument went back to the earliest days of the city and region's education system. Until
the Civil War, German was the first language of the Lehigh Valley.Newspapers were written in it, God's word was preached in it and school
children were taught in it. It was not unusual to find rural schools in
the Lehigh Valley where Pennsylvania German was the only language spoken
into the 20th century.
This was not confined to public schools.
Into the 1900s, Muhlenberg College's faculty and administration were
deeply divided between those who felt all its courses should be taught
in German and those who believed that only its theology courses -- the
school was founded to train students for the Lutheran ministry -- should
be taught in German.
But after the Civil War, the region was
becoming more and more bilingual. English was the language of business
and the popular culture that surrounded the Lehigh Valley. It was
clearly being heard more often, mixed with the Pennsylvania German
dialect, in the region's cities and towns. Perhaps for that reason
the city's educational leadership, particularly clergymen, wanted
German as a required part of the public school curriculum.
As the
German Empire rose to a position of world power, many people in the
Lehigh Valley were proud of it and their German roots. Teaching German
in the schools was a part of the community's ethnic heritage that few
questioned. But World War I and the anti-German hysteria that followed America's
entry in April 1917 changed all that. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage
and anybody who spoke the `Hun's` language was as good as a traitor.
The
Allentown School Board's decision was made the same spring that the
most popular movie in the city was a propaganda film, `The Kaiser -- The
Beast of Berlin." Ads for the film in the Call showed a sinister
Wilhelm II with blood dripping from his hands.
The day after the
board's decision, the Allentown chapter of the Past Presidents
Association of the Patriotic Order, Sons of America, denounced the
members and demanded German be dropped.
Eventually, the board's
compromise decision was overruled by a higher authority. In April 1919,
six months after the war ended, Pennsylvania's Legislature banned the
teaching of German in the state's public and normal schools. Although
the law eventually lapsed and German came out of hiding, the debate of
1918 is a reminder of how volatile a mix language and politics can be.
9 Erfindungen und Innovationen, die wir den Schwaben verdanken
Huffington post
| von
Jan Rauschning-Vits
Veröffentlicht:
Aktualisiert:
Die Burg Hohenzollern in der schwäbischen Alb | Shutterstock
Die Schwaben sind ein missverstandenes Volk. Sie gelten als geizig (curmudgeonly) und spießig (narrow minded). In
Wirklichkeit haben Schwaben aber mehr drauf als viele andere Deutsche.
Ohne sie wäre Deutschland nicht der Wirtschaftsmotor, der er heute ist.
Denn:
In Sachen Innovation macht ihnen keiner etwas vor.(As far as innovations are concerned, the Schwabians are beyond compare.)
In Baden-Württemberg
sitzen einige der patentstärksten Unternehmen Deutschlands.
Von viele
hat noch niemand etwas gehört - oft sind sie aber in ihren Branchen
Weltmarktführer.
Die Region ist ein wahrer "Innovations-Hotspot".
Das
war schon immer so: In kaum einer anderen Region Europas haben die
Menschen so viel erfunden. Schon seit dem Mittelalter steckt in ihnen
der Erfindergeist.
Viele Produkte prägen heute die ganze Welt.
Die 9 coolsten Dinge, die wir Schwaben zu verdanken haben:
1. Auto und Motorboot
Der
Stuttgarter Ingenieur Gottlieb Daimler baute 1886 das erste Auto, in
dem er einen Ottomotor auf eine spezielle Kutsche setzte.
Was allerdings
kaum jemand weiß: Bereits ein Jahr vorhererfand er das Motorboot. (What few realize: a year before that he had invented the motorboot.)
Gottlieb Daimler wird von seinem Sohn mit dem ersten motorisierten Wagen der Welt gefahren
Schon
im alten China wurden Holzstückchen in Schwefel(sulfur) getaucht (dipped).
In den
Jahrhunderten danach wurde das Prinzip Streichholz ständig
weiterentwickelt.
Zahlreiche kleine Schritte führten zu dem
heutigen Sicherheitsstreichholz. Eine der größten Weiterentwicklungen
geht allerdings auf einen Schwaben zurück. Friedrich Kammerer stellte ab
1831 Streichhölzer als erster industriell her. (Kammerer was the first to industrialize the making of matches.) So sah die Streichholzherstellung aus, als alles noch per Hand gemacht werden musste
(This is what the manufacture of matches looked like, when they all had to be made by hand.)
4. E=mc²
Einer, wenn nicht der weltweit bekannteste Schwabe, der aber oft nicht als Schwabe wahrgenommen wird, ist Albert Einstein.
Rührt
daher auch sein wohl einzigartiger Erfindergeist? Fest steht: Albert
Einstein hat Bahnbrechendes geleistet und uns die klischeehafteste
Formel der Physik geschenkt: E=mc² - die Grundlage für die
Relativitätstheorie, die das Verhältnis von Raum, Zeit und
Geschwindigkeit beschreibt.
5. Nicht entflammbares Papier
1967 kam es bei einer Routineübung der Apollo 1 Mission zu einem schweren Unfall.
Während sich drei Astronauten von der Rakete abkapseln wollten, brach ein Feuer aus, bei dem alle Insassen starben.
Als Reaktion auf den Unfall orderte die NASA bei dem schwäbischen Papierspezialisten „Scheufelen" nicht entflammbares Papier. Das schwäbische Hightech-Produkt reiste zwei Jahre später mit der Apollo 11 auf den Mond.
6. Hollywood
1912 ging aus der Fusion mehrerer Firmen das noch heute existierende Unternehmen „Universal“ hervor.
Chef war der Schwabe Carl Laemmle.
Er zog mit seinen Universal Studios 1914 auf das Gelände einer alten
Geflügelfarm an der Westküste der USA um. (In 1914, Laemmle moved his Universal Studios onto the land of a former chicken farm on the west coast of the USA.) Nach und nach (By and by,) folgten weitere
Filmfirmen.
An dem beschaulichen Ort, in dem die besagte Hühnerfarm lag, entwickelte sich die heutige Milliardenstätte Hollywood.
Das Lustige daran: Der Ort hieß damals schon so...(Interestingly, the place kept its orignial name.)
So sieht die Zufahrt zu den Universal Studios heute aus
7. Motorsäge (Hand-held Power Saws)
Die Firma Stihl aus Stuttgart ist heute die bekannteste und größte Marke für Motorsägen auf der Welt.
Auf die Firma 1950 auch die erste Ein-Mann-Motorsäge der Welt erfand, die von einem Menschen allein geführt werden konnte.
8. Fernsehturm
Nach
dem Zweiten Weltkrieg begann der endgültige Siegeszug des Fernsehers.
Um das dafür benötigte Signal über das gesamte Land zu verbreiten,
musste man viele hohe Türme bauen.
Fernsehtürme gibt es erst seit
den 50er Jahren. In Europa sind die meisten heute aus Stahlbeton, mit
einer Plattform auf ungefähr zwei Drittel der Höhe.
Die erste Fassung des „Standardmodells“ wurde 1956 in Stuttgart errichtet, der Stuttgarter Fernsehturm. Er ist damit quasi der „Ur-Fernsehturm“
Stationäre
Bohrer gab es schon vorher. Doch Feins Erfindung war die erste
Bohrmaschine, die nicht mehr ein Tischgerät war, sondern in der Hand
lag.Damit hat er auch den Weg für den Akkuschrauber(cordless screwdriver) geebnet, ohne den heute wohl kaum ein Ikea-Regal aufzubauen wäre (without which today few could assemble their bookshelves from IKEA).
So verschoben sich(realigned)Europas Grenzen (borders) im Lauf der Jahrhunderte
MEISTGESEHEN
Die Geschichte Europas ist eine bewegte – auch territorial. Eine
Animation, die gerade im Netz für Furore sorgt, zeichnet die
Grenzverschiebungen auf der Landkarte Europas und Vorderasiens im
Zeitraffer nach.
Here are documents and drawings regarding the American Revolution. All three of Britain's King Georges came from the "House of Hanover," which helped contribute to conflicted loyalties.
You'll also appreciate the early maps under the "Engaging the New World" tab.
4: How One Artist Attempted To Work Alongside the Regime
3: How One Man Accidentally Confided in the Communist Regime
2: Why the Communist Party Was Helpless Against Faith
Hier ist der 1. Artikel: 1: What Happens When Everything You Thought Was True Proves False?
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56 is a book about the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism on Eastern Europe: how institutions were transformed, how civil society was undermined, how violence and propaganda were used to create communist regimes. It is also a book about the people who lived through this confusing period. Faced with impossible choices, some chose to collaborate, though they bitterly resented it. Others found ways to oppose the new regimes in subtle ways. This series of excerpts offers, in abbreviated form, a few of these stories.
* * *
Many people have tried to describe what it feels like to endure the disintegration of one’s entire civilization, to watch the buildings and landscapes of one’s childhood collapse, to understand that the moral world of one’s parents and teachers no longer exists and that one’s respected national leaders have failed. Yet it is still not an easy thing to understand for those who have not experienced it. Words like “vacuum” and “emptiness” when used about a national catastrophe such as an alien occupation are simply insufficient: They cannot convey the anger people felt at their prewar and wartime leaders, their failed political systems, their own “naive” patriotism and the wishful thinking of their parents and teachers. Different parts of Eastern Europe experienced this collapse at different times. But whenever and however it came, national failure had profound effects, especially on young people, many of whom simply concluded that everything they had once thought true was false.
Certainly that was what happened to Tadeusz Konwicki, a Polish novelist who spent the war as a partisan. Brought up in a patriotic family near Vilnius, in what was then eastern Poland, Konwicki eagerly joined the armed wing of the Polish Resistance, the Home Army, during the war. First he fought the Nazis. Then, for a time, his unit fought the Red Army. At some point their struggle began to deteriorate into armed robberies and gratuitous violence, and he found himself wondering why he was still fighting. Eventually he left the forests and moved to Poland, a state whose new borders no longer included his family home. Upon arrival, he realized that he had nothing. At age 19, he was in possession of a coat, a small backpack, and a handful of fake documents. He had no family, no friends, and no higher education.
Konwicki had also lost his faith in much of what he had believed to be true in the past. “During the war,” he told me, “I saw so much slaughter. I saw a whole world of ideas, humanism, morality collapse. I was alone in this ruined country. What should I do? Which way should I go?” Konwicki drifted for many months, considered escaping to the West, tried to rediscover his “proletarian” roots by working as a laborer. Eventually he fell, almost accidentally, into the Communist literary world and into the Communist Party—something he would never have considered possible before 1939. For a very brief time, he even became a “Stalinist” writer, adopting the style and mannerisms dictated by the Communist Party.
His was a dramatic fate, but not an unusual one. Many young people focused their disappointment on the old political elite who had so catastrophically failed to prepare Poland for war, and on the patriotic nationalism that had previously sustained them. Another Polish writer, Tadeusz Borowski, satirized the saccharine patriotism of the prewar politicians: “Your fatherland: a peaceful corner and a log burning obediently in the fire. My fatherland: a burnt house and an NKVD summons.”
For young Nazis, the experience of failure was even more apocalyptic, since they had been taught not just patriotism, but a belief in German physical and mental superiority. Hans Modrow—later a leading communist politician—was about the same age as Konwicki in 1946, and equally disoriented. A loyal member of the Hitler Youth, he had joined the Volkssturm, the “people’s militia” which put up the final resistance to the Red Army in the last days of the war. At age 17 he was filled with intense hatred of the Bolsheviks, whom he thought of as subhumans, physically and morally inferior to Germans. But he was captured by the Red Army in May 1945, and immediately experienced a moment of profound disillusion. He and another group of German prisoners of war were put on a truck and transported to a farm to work:
“I was a young man, and I wanted to help. I stood on the truck and handed down the others’ backpacks, and then gave my pack to somebody else, so that I could jump off the truck myself. By the time I landed on the ground, it was stolen. I never got it back. And it was not a Soviet soldier who had done it but one of us, the Germans. Not until the next day did the Red Army turn us all into equals: They collected all of our backpacks—nobody was left with one—and we were given a spoon and cup to eat with. Because of this episode I started thinking about the Germans’ so-called camaraderie in a different way.
A few days later, he was appointed driver to a Soviet captain who asked him about the German poet, Heinrich Heine. Modrow had never heard of Heine, and felt embarrassed that the people he had thought of as “subhuman” seemed to know more about German culture than he. Eventually Modrow was transported to a POW camp near Moscow, where he was selected to attend an “antifascist” school, and where he would receive training in Marxist-Leninsm—training which, by that point, he was more than eager to absorb. So profound was his experience of Germany’s failure that he very quickly came to embrace an ideology that he had been taught to hate throughout his childhood. Over time, he also came to feel something like gratitude. The Communist Party offered him the chance to make up for the mistakes of the past—Germany’s mistakes, as well as his own. The shame he felt at having been an ardent Nazi could be erased.
This article is the first of four excerpts drawn from Anne Applebaum’s book, The Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956.
-- Historians are split between 2 camps, we might identify as the wheel(chariot-driven warriors), and the hoe(peaceful farmers). Here is some new evidence in the debate.
Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say
Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.
The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.
Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.
The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.
The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,” they report.
But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone.
The researchers started with a menu of vocabulary items that are known to be resistant to linguistic change, like pronouns, parts of the body and family relations, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. Words that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral word are known as cognates. Thus “mother,” “mutter” (German), “mat’ ” (Russian), “madar” (Persian), “matka” (Polish) and “mater” (Latin) are all cognates derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”
Dr. Atkinson and his colleagues then scored each set of words on the vocabulary menu for the 103 languages. In languages where the word was a cognate, the researchers assigned it a score of 1; in those where the cognate had been replaced with an unrelated word, it was scored 0. Each language could thus be represented by a string of 1’s and 0’s, and the researchers could compute the most likely family tree showing the relationships among the 103 languages.
A computer was then supplied with known dates of language splits. Romanian and other Romance languages, for instance, started to diverge from Latin after A.D. 270, when Roman troops pulled back from the Roman province of Dacia. Applying those dates to a few branches in its tree, the computer was able to estimate dates for all the rest.
The computer was also given geographical information about the present range of each language and told to work out the likeliest pathways of distribution from an origin, given the probable family tree of descent. The calculation pointed to Anatolia, particularly a lozenge-shaped area in what is now southern Turkey, as the most plausible origin — a region that had also been proposed as the origin of Indo-European by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in 1987, because it was the source from which agriculture spread to Europe.
Dr. Atkinson’s work has integrated a large amount of information with a computational method that has proved successful in evolutionary studies. But his results may not sway supporters of the rival theory, who believe the Indo-European languages were spread some 5,000 years later by warlike pastoralists who conquered Europe and India from the Black Sea steppe.
A key piece of their evidence is that proto-Indo-European had a vocabulary for chariots and wagons that included words for “wheel,” “axle,” “harness-pole” and “to go or convey in a vehicle.” These words have numerous descendants in the Indo-European daughter languages. So Indo-European itself cannot have fragmented into those daughter languages, historical linguists argue, before the invention of chariots and wagons, the earliest known examples of which date to 3500 B.C. This would rule out any connection between Indo-European and the spread of agriculture from Anatolia, which occurred much earlier.
“I see the wheeled-vehicle evidence as a trump card over any evolutionary tree,” said David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College who studies Indo-European origins.
4: How One Artist Attempted To Work Alongside the Regime
2: Why the Communist Party Was Helpless Against Faith
Hier ist der 1. Artikel: 1: What Happens When Everything You Thought Was True Proves False?
