Paul and I met, as I said in that first essay, online in iLink Writers in the early 1990s. We’ve been in each other’s physical presence only two times during our entire friendship — once in 1995 in San Francisco for less than a week and once in Berlin in 2003 for about two weeks, when Paul invited me into his home. Back then I was much more committed to blogging than I am now, so I wrote about that 2003 visit with Paul rather extensively (beginning here and continuing for about 16 consecutive entries until this one).

But through the years we’ve become closer as friends as we’ve moved further apart physically. Perhaps the irony is that there’s an inverse correlation between physical proximity and being really close friends. I’m sure if he and I were confined in the same space for any prolonged period of time, we’d drive each other insane. He tolerates me best, and with just cause, in small doses.

When I think of him, it is with great fondness and profound admiration. I really like him and spending time with him, in spite of himself. I sense he feels the same about me, and I find that very rewarding.

Today is his 86th birthday, so I want to tell him this.

Paul, I hope you get what you want for your birthday, whatever that is. I have already gotten everything I could have possibly hoped for in return for the time I have spent being your friend. I look forward to whatever time we have left to share.

I love you, Paul, and I thank you for rewarding me with your friendship.

To those of you who may read this, I invite you to write your own essay about your friend Paul in the comments below. And even if you can’t get it completed on his birthday, I’m sure he will treasure reading how you describe your friendship with him, and it will give you a way to share your wishes for him. Thank you, if you take the time to do so.

My most recent conversations with him indicate that he is doing as well as can be expected, but his stroke, coupled with his apparently approaching dementia, have resulted in his almost total inability to do things on the Internet that he used to do. Both he and I mourn the passage of that milestone, but he continues to want to interact with the world, despite his limitations. Alas, we are all therefore condemned to my imperfect attempts to convey what he might have said or wanted to say if he were still able.

Please know that he loves you and appreciates all of you and your continued interest in him and his welfare.

14.01.2008

German States Prepare to Do Battle over Dumplings

Two German states fighting over food?  It would be laughable if it didn’t happen every other month.  This time, Bavaria and Rhineland-Palatinate are getting all steamed up over a dumpling.

One of the best ways of celebrating your survival after completing a hair-raising descent of an icy Piste is to shed your skis or snowboard and get stuck into a Dampfnudel.  While literally translating as steamed noodle, it’s essentially a massive dumpling, served either in savo[u]ry or sweet form.  It can be the best way of reaffirming life after partaking of death-defying winter sports.  Combined with a bucketload of après-ski alcohol, the Dampfnudel makes everything good in the wintry world.

Such a culinary treat should be treasured, and the Dampfnudel is certainly championed as a fine example of German cuisine in the places where it is held most dear.  But, as with most things coveted by the many, it is fiercely defended by the few.

Instead of devouring the monstrous ball of dough with vigor – or with either mushrooms in white sauce or custard and jam, depending on your taste – the good people of Bavaria and Rhineland Palatinate are channeling their energies into slagging one another off over the origin of the Dampfnudel.

Arguments over food and drink are not a new thing in Germany.  Most recently, the Berliners have had to defend their Currywurst against covetous northerners while the people of Hesse almost came to blows with Brussels over their Apfelwein [a mildly alcohol potable made from apples].  So, apart from it all being rather petty and unseemly, what’s the deal with this new outbreak of culinary hostilities?

Bavarians stake claim on the Web

Well, as with most food fights it all stems from perceived ownership and the regional pride a particular food can instil.  The Bavarians have stolen a march on the Rhineland folk by proclaiming on the electronic oracle of all that is truthful (the Internet to the rest of us) that the Dampfnudel is a speciality of Bavaria.  The Rhinelanders fear that this will lead to their rivals to the south staking a claim for ownership of the dumpling at an EU level.

“We will not allow them to take the Dampfnudel without a fight,” proclaimed Rhineland-Palatinate’s Minister of Agriculture Hendrik Hering in a local newspaper article on the growing crisis.  He added that all judicial and diplomatic efforts would be employed in keeping the origin of the Dampfnudel associated with the Rhineland.

Rhinelanders expose rivals as culinary magpies

On first glance, the Rhinelanders may appear to be the antagonists here.  The Bavarians have done nothing other than stake a claim, rightly or wrongly, to something they believe to be theirs.  But on further investigation, it appears that Bavaria has form when it comes to snaffling other regions’ delicacies and calling them their own.

Glancing at the offending Internet site, “Food from Bavaria,” there are the obvious specialities from that most proud region of Germany: the veal sausage, Abensberger asparagus and Hefeweizen wheat-based beer among them.  But since when did Swabian Maultaschen, the oversized savoury-stuffed pillows from neighboring Baden-Württemberg, come from Bavaria?  How long have the Swabian Spätzle noodles been a Bavarian invention…?

Digging deeper, one can see that maybe the Rhineland has a point…

DW staff (nda)

DW staff (nda) | www.dw-world.de | © Deutsche Welle.

{And it will surprise nobody who knows me personally that I’ve gussied up these native-born Goddam Krauts’ Englisch before passing this tidbit along to you….}

Germany’s radical, even revolutionary “student movement” during the late 1960s totally dumped – forever, let’s hope – the long traditional stiff-necked authoritarian German methods of child-rearing that gave the world, among other calamities, Adolf Hitler and his unprecedentedly murderous Third Reich.  At that time, during the 1960s, revolutionary trends among those wonderfully courageous students sometimes swung a bit far in the opposite direction, but one lone book changed German attitudes towards education in a totally benevolent way: Summerhill, by England’s maverick educator A. S. Neill.  He’d adopted as his own personal guru Sigmund Freud’s most radical disciple Wilhelm Reich, the title of one of whose books will tell you a good deal about that (quite literally) mad genius: The Function of the Orgasm.  Under Reich’s dominant influence, Neill founded in England an unprecedented school for children who’d proven such behavior problems that their parents, finally at their wits’ ends, had literally no place else to send them for schooling that would even touch them with a bargepole.  One basic sentence suffices to sum up the sole rule Neill imposed upon his nippers: total – and I do mean total – freedom, as long as that unbridled freedom didn’t violate the rights of others.

One salutary offshoot of those yeasty days here in the 1960s’ Berlin (which fell well within my own first quarter-century sojourn here, from 1956 to 1981) took the form of what became known as the Kinderladen – literally “children shop”: parents sufficiently interested in shielding their kids from those horribly destructive traditional authoritarian methods joined together in groups and simply rented cheap empty storefronts (to use the American term), and in them housed newly created private kindergartens, with carefully selected teachers who shared their views about teaching during those early formative childhood years – in turn an echo of one of Freud’s primary fundamentals of psychoanalysis, which recognises the first six or so formative years of a young human’s life as uniquely important for what that human will then in time develop into.

My apartment building in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf borough has had such a Kinderladen nextdoor since before I moved into it immediately after returning to Berlin twelve years ago.  One little boy there attracted my psychologically educated attention the first time I saw him: pallid complexion, dead eyes, withdrawn manner – he immediately evoked my limited experience with that still puzzling psychological phenomenon called autism.  From time to time, when my Dachshund boss Maxe walks me, I pause for brief conversations with the two young women in charge of the place, and when I asked one of them about this obviously far from happy little boy, it came as no surprise when she told me: “Er ist Autist.“

Returning with Maxe from our first walk this morning, I saw ahead of us, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of my building and the Kinderladen, those two women’s considerably younger new assistant, whom I’d noticed a few days earlier because of his clearly harmonious relationship with a group of the kids coming back from the spacious playground in the aptly named Volkspark – People’s Park – a short walk away.  This morning, as I approached, I could barely believe my eyes to behold that autistic little boy actually smiling – something I’d never before seen him do.  That behavior had an obvious reason: that young assistant had taken him – and him alone – out to play with him, on a tricycle on our stretch of sidewalk.  That sight so gladdened my heart that I spoke to him and complimented him on his clearly manifest expertise in dealing with all those kids.

The day, which had begun with unseasonably sunny weather, seemed to cry out for me to make the most of one of our last fair days before the temperature will force me to caparison myself with such things as gloves, so since Maxe’s exceptionally attenuated spine (his first X-ray revealed that Maxe – the world’s champion dog by anyone’s genuinely disinterested, truly objective standard, has one more vertebra than nature intended for even a Dachshund to have) precludes his making longer walks than necessary, I set out alone.

Crossing the Bundesallee (the pre-war Kaiserallee) on the overhead footbridge, I first came upon the spacious enclosure where dog-owners have official permission to let their mutts run free, and I paused for a few minutes of fond regret.  When Maxe took charge of my life about twelve years ago, I tried taking him there every afternoon to let him wear himself out by trying desperately, on those truncated legs of his, to keep pace with longer-legged dogs, but he soon proved, to the surprise of no one with the least experience of this most headstrong of canine breeds, so anarchic that in order to re-leash him, when time came to go home, I had to enlist one or more strangers to help me corner and overwhelm my recalcitrantly headstrong mutt.

Continuing on my way eastward this morning, I passed another spacious enclosure, this one for young bipeds.  Does anyone reading this recall Cat Stevens’ poignant song about modern city life “But Where Do the Children Play?”  My beloved Berlin has certainly long since answered that vitally important question – in every neighborhood of this huge city, twenty-five miles across at its widest diameter – once and for all.

At the easternmost end of my walk I came to the building that had once, soon after World War II ended in 1945, housed what every German at that time knew as RIAS, the acronym for Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor – Radio in the American Sector of that era’s four-power city ruled over by the victorious Allies: Britain, France, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and the USA.  RIAS (pronounced REE-ahss) became one of the most implacably persistent thorns in the Soviet authorities’ Communist sides, and it remained that until 1989 brought Germany’s reunification and RIAS got absorbed into today’s RBB, Rundfunk (literally circular spark, a term that also includes television) in Berlin and Brandenburg, the federal state that completely surrounds the city-state Berlin.

When Maxe got me home, one of the two ladies in charge of the Kinderladen happened to tarry outside its entrance, and I seized the occasion to zing in a good word for their young new assistant Johannes.  I told her that his noticeably excellent wave-length with his young charges, in particular with that little autist, had made it a surprise when he told me he’d studied foreign languages but had no actual specific training as a Kindergärtner.  “No,” she said, “he’s only twenty-eight and he’s going this job as his” – here she used an abbreviation new to me, something I recall as Zivi (pronounced Tzee-vee), obviously short for Zivildienst, a catch-all term for various kinds of public service available to all young Germans as an alternative to going into uniform as legally required by my adopted country’s “universal” military service.  How wonderfully sensible, I couldn’t help thinking, that such young Germans today (another of them: a newly married young physician I’d first photographed, the son of friends, at the age of less than twenty-four hours, who with his lovely fellow-physician pregnant wife had graced the party given for me a month or so ago to celebrate my naturalization) have available this possibility to serve today’s Germany – my Germany – truly pro bono publico.

And then several hours ago, what should fall into my lap but yet another story, this time actual news, of the kind I especially enjoy distributing for two reasons: it seems to me characteristic, even typical, of the Germany I so sincerely and gratefully love, and because its kind of story about my own today’s Germany so often simply remains unknown abroad.  Instead of my even partially summarizing it for you, I’ve instead made it available in its entirety to anyone reading this bloggery who can work up the energy merely to click here.

The choreographer Jerome Robbins once told me about an alleged first encounter between the flamboyantly noncomformist actress Tallulah Bankhead and Norman Mailer, whose brilliant first novel The Naked and the Dead had catapulted him into major fame at a time when even his otherwise naturalistically protrayed World War II GIs had to resort in print to the fatuous euphemism fug, which did at least serve to keep any censors off its publisher’s back.  According to Jerry, Tallu greeted the new celebrity with “Ah yes – you’re that funny little man that doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”

Years ago, during a live radio panel program on the BBC, Kenneth Tynan, at that time the leading London theater critic (on The Observer, whence The New Yorker hired him away for an American stint that ended when his revulsion over the McCarthyite faction then running amok drove him back to England), caused a figurative earthquake at some logically appropriate point in a discussion of censorship by offhandedly dropping the most puissant of all four-letter words in any language known to me.  Not long after my settling in San Francisco in 1982, during a similar call-in discussion on KQED, one of Frisco’s two National Public Radio outlets, the devil in me I usually keep under control took over and I called in for the express purpose of replicating Ken Tynan’s BBC scandal.  I can’t recall which KQED staff-member led that discussion, but a protracted moment of stunned silence followed the dropping of my mischievous little bomb: momentarily I had indeed literally struck the poor wretch dumb.  Whoopee Goldberg (would anybody reading this like to know the true source of her adopted first name?), then on the threshold of her local launching into showbiz orbit, pulled the same prank during another live radio interview I happened to hear, where her interviewer suavely took care of that with an unforced remark along the lines of “Well, now we at least have that out of the way.”

Prof. Pinker leads off his brilliant dissertation with this stunner:

“Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards.  Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, ‘This is really, really, fucking brilliant’ on the air.  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation’s airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word.  Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define ‘indecency’ as ‘material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities’ and Bono had used fucking as ‘an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation’” – a semantic wiggle surely worthy of the Hohenzollerns at their most adroit.

Prof. Pinker then with this continuation reverts to the elevated scholarly niveau which has made Harvard Harvard:

“Cultural conservatives were outraged.  California Representative Doug Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC’s regulations with the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress.  Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast the words ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘asshole’, and the phrases ‘cock sucker’, ‘mother fucker’, and ‘ass hole’, compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).”

But why content yourselves with this frustrating teasing on my part when – as soon as I can say “Bravo, bravissimo, bravississimo!” to The New Republic for an unprecedented, potentially subscription-cancelling article – I can make that entire unabridged article available to anyone sufficiently prurient to click here?

Two Anglophone FM radio transmitters here within Berlin’s city limits add importantly to this marvellous city’s overall “quality of life”, to borrow a term from sociology: the Beeb (90.2) and National Public Radio (104.1).  The Beeb also maintains a sometimes absolutely riveting website, to which I most gratefully owe this morning’s bloggery – for me personally an introduction to the annual Ig Nobel awards domiciled at the Ivy League’s prime sprig: Cambridge, Massachusetts’ hallowed Harvard University.

Since this morning’s BBC news bulletin about these supreme awards in ten disciplines exemplifies British humo[u]r’s inimitable admixture of lambent wit and extra-dryness, let me merely whet your appetite with the one of the total of ten prizes (for research in Aviation, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Linguistics, Literature, Medicine, Nutrition, Peace, and Physics) the Beeb evidently regards as the most noteworthy, since it singles this one out for its lead paragraph, videlicet:

“Pioneering research into a ‘gay bomb’ that makes enemy troops ‘sexually irresistible’ to one another has scooped one of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.”

Rather than merely paraphrase, let me admit you to the Beeb’s own presentation by enabling you simply to click here.

From The New York Times on June 14th:

“Texas juries in capital cases must make a prediction.  They may impose a death sentence only if they find that the defendant will probably commit more violent acts….

”’The fact is,’ said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston, ”you’re being punished for something that you haven’t done….”’

I’ve made that entire article available to you by merely clicking here.

And more recently, on September 29th, from the country’s same official newspaper of record:

“A day after the United States Supreme Court halted an execution in Texas at the last minute, Texas officials made clear on Friday that they would nonetheless proceed with more executions in coming months, including one next week.

“Though several other states are halting lethal injections until it is clear whether they are constitutional, Texas is taking a different course, risking a confrontation with the court.

“’The Supreme Court’s decision to stay convicted murderer Carlton Turner’s execution will not necessarily result in an abrupt halt to Texas executions,’ said Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas.  ‘State and federal courts will continue to address each scheduled execution on a case-by-case basis….’”

And that New York Times report you can read in toto by merely clicking here.

It also rejoices in the best weekly newsmagazine to come to my attention, in any country, in any language, ever: the Hamburg-Based Der Spiegel.  When I got home tonight, its Anglophone version ambushed me with an especially horrifying story from my native state, Texas, for which I still and always will have many fond nostalgic memories – although on occasions like this it does give me serious pause, in this instance about what actually boils down to something close to murder by callous bureaucracy – and with its hapless victim yet another of the numerous black citizens who’ve breathed their last in Texas prisons.  (Post-war Germany, f.y.i., put an end to the practice of capital punishment the Nazis had made part and parcel of Hitler’s Third Reich from 1933 until World War II ended it in 1945.) 

Now let me turn you over to the Spiegel story I found awaiting me tonight, quoting the daily American-Statesman in the state capital Austin:

DID UNBUDGING TEXAS BUREAUCRATS KILL A MAN?

Court Told Condemned Man: Sorry, We’re Closing

The state of Texas executed death-row inmate Michael Richard because the court responsible for his sentence was unwilling to remain open an additional twenty minutes to receive a petition for a stay on his execution.  Business hours were to be respected, and Richard was killed, on schedule, by lethal injection.

AP

Death row inmate Michael Richard was executed by lethal injection in Texas on Sept. 25, 2007.

When it comes to Texas justice, twenty minutes could mean the difference between life and death.  The Austin-American Statesman newspaper reported this week that the state executed death-row inmate Michael Richard on Sept. 25 — because bureaucrats couldn’t be bothered to wait twenty minutes to receive his lawyers’ appeal for a stay.

According to the newspaper, when the lawyers explained to Texas Court of Criminal Appeals at 4:50 p.m. that their computer had crashed and they needed extra time, they were told: “We’re closing at five.”

You can read the unabridged account by clicking here.

I’ve previously mentioned Ol’ Eagle-Eye Perry Nelson here, my Knoxville, Tennessee blogfather who virtually whupped me into opening this rumpus room.  I’ve known Perry for years as a virtually infallible fountain of wisdom when it comes to what my fellow Germans call Informatik – or, for short, IT, computer technology – but he also seems to do the IT equivalent of marking the sparrow’s fall: he’s just surprised me with a pertinent article about bloggery from the trade publication Advertising Age, headlined with a truncated version of “The New York Times Has Seen the Future: It’s All the Blogging That’s Fit to Print” – for you provincials an allusion to that grand old newspaper’s longtime slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print”.

In this article, Simon Dumenco takes off on that august paper’s recent decision to stop soaking us parasites when we come around to the paper’s rich website to schnorr articles and information and revert to its earlier, less mercenary policy of making them available – to all comers – for free.  Dumenco takes off thus:

“I have seen the future of The New York Times — in the Times itself. 

“Last week, technology editor/reporter Saul Hansell had a short item in the business section that began, rather shockingly, ‘If there was ever a measure of how little traction Sir Howard Stringer is having as chief executive of Sony, it is the company’s comical inability to find a coherent approach to delivering content online to its wide range of digital devices.’ 

“Truth lives here: In blogs, Times reporters don’t suppress what they really know, feel.”

If you’d care to read that entire Advertising Age article, click here.

I brought to my introductory visit to Germany an unusual background.  The New York job that first enabled me to come out of a timorous kind of wannabe writer’s closet and officially call myself a writer entailed writing scripts for two newsreels (remember pre-television newsreels?) produced every week by my employer RKO-Pathé.  An agreement with the U.S. Army Signal Corps brought us all the uncut newsfilm from all theaters of World War II, and that made me one of the first people in the country to see documentation of the concentration camps – and, even more horrific, the extermination camps – taken one after another by the advancing Allied troops. 

Confusion reigned in those late-night screening rooms.  Today virtually all reasonably well informed people interested in Nazi German history know the name of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (where those who perished included the budding Dutch writer Anne Frank), but when the first films of it arrived in New York, none of us could find it anywhere on any of the maps available in RKO-Pathé’s sizable library.  Those screenings – which went on for hours and hours and hours, not infrequently around the clock – left wounds that have not even yet completely healed, and I had those images especially fresh in my 25-year-old mind the first time my travel route forced me to pass by train through bombed-out Germany – which I hated, simply put, with a passion.

How can I love my new Heimat - my volitionally chosen new homeland – when all too frequently echoes of that horror continue to blemish it, and especially its reputation abroad, such as one this very weekend, that cropped up in the superbly preserved, tenth-century, quintessentially German town of some 26,000 souls only a short drive away from my longtime beloved adopted hometown Berlin?  You’d have to look far to find any other town in Germany today that so exemplifies the pre-war charm of this country that could match Quedlinburg.

This latest incident came to my attention Friday night as a lengthy news feature in my favorite television Kulturmagazin, called Kulturzeit, on our wonderful tri-national (Austria/Germany/Switzerland) German-language non-commercial www.3sat.de satellite network.

An Anglophone German website offers the fundamental background on last night’s conflict, which led to a head-on confrontation of about 300 irately militant anti-Nazi Germans, some of them having made a special trip to Quedlinburg to demonstrate against some 200 members of the far-right NPD, customarily referred to as neo-Nazi.  Postwar Germany’s insistence on civil rights for all citizens – as laid down in the U.S. Constitution – provides, ironically, for such political demonstrations as long as the participants respect the letter of the law about behavior.  (Speaking of letter of the law, this NPD party even gives a token nod to post-war Germany’s inexorably democratic stand, borne out by its official name: Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands.)  The British news agency Reuters has today provided this even-handed report:

“Fairytale German town fights neo-Nazis

“Christmas lights are on, policemen on a mission: To stop neo-Nazi violence.

“The Christmas market in this medieval German town could be off a page in a children’s picture book.  The sugary smell of Glühwein (mulled wine) wafts over wooden stalls selling toys and gingerbread while children sway to seasonal songs.  Christmas lights illuminate the half-timbered houses around the square.”

Last evening, Reuters reports, “three burly policemen stood under those fairy lights clutching truncheons.

“Their job: To stop neo-Nazi violence.

“Sure enough, a couple of hours later bottles started flying, a scuffle ensued, and an ambulance drew up….

“In statistics which make alarming reading given Germany’s Nazi history, right-wing-motivated violence is on the rise in the country as a whole and especially in the former east German state of Saxony-Anhalt” – which includes Quedlinburg.

A victim-support group called “Miteinander” (literally “With One Another”) has registered 110 right-wing-motivated acts of violence in the first half of this year in Saxony-Anhalt.  That was more than in any other state and compared to 129 incidents in the whole of 2005.

Police in Quedlinburg have, according to Reuters, “reacted by installing video cameras, reinforced the number of officers on night duty, launched a campaign to help the community recognize politically motivated crime, and are trying to react more quickly when incidents occur.

“‘The aim is to get quick convictions for perpetrators,’ said a police spokesperson.  He said the far-right scene was not well-organized and police know the individuals involved.”

That website has published this neo-Nazi vignette: 

The circular legend around a steel-helmeted World War II German soldier salutes “Soldiers of the world – you were the best.”

“The UNESCO World Heritage site of Quedlinburg”, Reuters continues, “counts as one of Germany’s prettiest towns.  According to folklore, the nearby Harz mountain range is home to witches and woodland spirits.

“But during the day, it is the neo-Nazis who make their presence felt.

“Hanging around the square, they are recognizable by their skinhead haircuts, military clothing with far-right slogans like “Stahlgewitter” (storm of steel) and Burberry [!] caps.”

You can read that unabridged report by clicking here. 

Subsidized theater flourishes throughout Germany, even in comparatively small cities.  One such regional theater, the Nordharzer Städtebundtheater in nearby Halberstadt, only a short distance away from Quedlinburg, rose up in wrath after the NPD announced plans for last night’s rally in Quedlinburg.  The theater’s website announced a counter-demonstration called “Auf die Plätze!” (appoximately “Into Position!”) exhorting the populace to protest en masse against the neo-Nazis virtually nextdoor.

This morning’s news carried detailed reports of what happened. 

Several hundred policemen took fourteen rightist demonstrators into custody and expelled seventy-three.  Those fourteen wound up in the slammer, nine of them under what German law calls preventive arrest, with five charged with “bearing forbidden objects” (presumably weapons of some kind) and violators of laws concerning disguises, with further legal processes against them still pending.

The Halberstadt group that had come to the aid of Quedlinburg’s anti-Nazi forces called itself the Runde Tisch Quedlinburg, the Quedlinburg Round Table.  It comprised a variety of anti-fascist groups, clubs and associations, labor unions, political parties, churches, and individuals, all of them determined to make clear to the NPD that they have no place in Quedlinburg.

The pro-democratic counter-demonstration started at 10 a.m., with public speeches in front of Quadlinburg’s little railroad station.  Four hours later, when the Kirchspiel Quedlinburg bells rang out as usual to call the faithful to prayers in the Market Church, all the bells in town joined in that tintinnabulation as signal for all Quedlinburgers to assemble in the central marketplace.  Sympathizers from Wernigerode, Osterwieck, and other nearby settlements who had no cars of their own or driver’s licences got bus transportation for a token one-Euro fare, in either direction; that theater’s homepage published comprehensive details.  At the Golden Pump tavern, the local fire brigade served free beer.  Over in Halberstadt, tramlines served all night long, gratis, for both nights in succession.

Do I take all this seriously? 

Damned right I do – but I also take heart in a number of factors involved.  Most importantly, especially for me as what my new fellow citizens here call a freshly baked German, those ordinary German citizens who spontaneously formed and backed that Quedlinburg Round Table splendidly represent my Germany, the Germany I’ve gradually come to know better and better, which has given me so much during the fifty-six years since I first moved from Paris to Munich, and which I’ve come to love so gratefully and sincerely.