Ralf Goergens

On German-language newspapers in pre-US* America

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* Or at least before America officially became the United States of America

David writes here about Sgt. Mom’s intriguing trilogy of books on German settlers in Texas and their influence, cultural and otherwise, on the state of Texas.

I couldn’t possibly do the subject, much less the lovely and erudite Sgt. Mom, any justice on this short notice. So here are just two somewhat surprising facts about a (kind of) related subject, i.e, the German-language press in America:

– In 1732, Benjamin Franklin published the Philadelphische Zeitung, the first German-language newspaper in North America. Unfortunately it only lasted for two issues.

– On July 5 1776, The Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote was the first newspaper to report the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

PS: Some years ago, Sgt. Mom was kind of enough to mail me the recipe for some delicious caramel. I’ve made it several times since then (maybe a bit more often than my waistline can take, but it sure is worth it :)

‘The customer is not always right’

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Grannies: Gotta Love ‘Em:

(A new employee informs me that she spotted a little boy sneaking some candy in his pants. I confront the boy and an older woman about it.)

Me: “Excuse me, ma’am. Hey, kiddo, what’s in your pocket?”

Boy: “Nothing!”

Granny: “Oh, h***, again?! Boy, if you don’t put that d***ed candy back, that lady gonna call the po-po on you! And I ain’t gonna stop her none.”

(The boy, crying, hands me 2 candy bars and a handful of suckers. I thank the lady, and get back to work. A few minutes later, the boy’s mother comes up to me.)

Read the rest, it’s worth it :)

‘Post Mortem’

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There’s at least one blog for everything, and it turns out that the Washinton Post actually has an obituary blog, called ‘Post Mortem‘.

Some interesting ones:

Is God Dead?:

In 1966, Time magazine ran a provocative cover with the bold question, “Is God Dead?” The story led to sharp backlash from social conservatives and sparked a public debate about philosophy and religion. The editor responsible for that story, Otto Fuerbringer, has died at 97, and his obituary is in today’s (Friday’s) Post.

Read more

Post-war East Germany was no safe place for Jews

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As an exhibition in Berlin earlier this year demonstrated, Jewish Communists returning from exile to the Soviet occupied part of Germany were confronted with prejudice and suspicion and sometimes even had to fear for their lives. The exhibition was located in the rebuilt Neue Synagogue (New Synagogue) and curated by the Centrum Judaicum Foundation, in cooperation with the historian Andreas Weigelt, who is attending to the documentation center for the former concentration camp Lieberose.

Called “Zwischen Bleiben und Gehen” (“Between Staying and Going”), the exhibition documented the lives of 10 Jewish men and women in the post-war Soviet occupied zone, later East Germany:

Nelhans’ fate was especially tragic. Having survived the war underground in Berlin, he helped found a Jewish community in East Berlin in late 1945, only to be arrested in 1948 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret service – allegedly for helping Jewish Red Army soldiers escape to Palestine.

Jailed for 25 years by a military court, he died in a Soviet labor camp in 1950, aged 51. Some 47 years later the Russian military authorities conceded Nelhans had been falsely convicted and ordered his posthumous rehabilitation.

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The East-West propaganda battle began immediately after the war. The Communist Party loudly trumpeted its view that East Germany was innocent of the evil Nazi past.

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Stalinist party purges in Eastern Europe, accompanied by anti-Semitic show trials in Prague and Budapest sparked fear among Jews in East Berlin.

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Jews who were communist party members often found themselves accused of being “Zionist agents” or “Jewish nationalists” at a time when the communist Eastern bloc was supporting Arab states in their conflict with Israel.

The website of the Centrum Judaicum itself currently has no information on this exhibition, but here is some English language information on two other past exhibitions: Pioneers in Celluloid: Jews in Early Cinema and Relatively Jewish. Albert Einstein – Jew, Zionist, Nonconformist.

Some more pictures of the Neue Synagoge can be found here.

Conservative British think tank: Abandon Liverpool

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This from the Times:

David Cameron has been embarrassed by his favourite think-tank after it suggested that Liverpool, Sunderland and Bolton should be abandoned because the North would never improve.

The Tory leader, who begins a two-day tour of the North today, firmly rejected a report by Policy Exchange, which suggested that the Government should help northerners to relocate to Oxford and Cambridge. It suggested that Britain’s two university towns are likely to be able to “form the basis of strong, successful, substantial cities”.

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“No one is suggesting that residents should be forced to move, but we do argue that they should be told the reality of the position: regeneration, in the sense of convergence, will not happen, because it is not possible.”

and this from the BBC:

The Policy Exchange report said coastal cities like Sunderland and Liverpool had “lost much of their raison d’etre”.

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It said the largest coastal cities like Liverpool and Hull had built up for reasons that had since disappeared – like ship building.

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Policy Exchange, a registered charity, has been described as Mr Cameron’s favourite think tank. But Mr Cameron, who will be keen to minimise any embarrassment as he tries to gain ground in traditional Labour heartlands, distanced himself from the organisation’s findings on Wednesday, saying the report was “insane”.

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“I think the idea that cities can’t regenerate themselves, they were built for one purpose and can’t do another purpose, is just nonsense.

He is certainly right about that. If those cities turn out to be unable to reinvent themselves, they are going to wither away in the long run, but chances are that they are going to be able to adapt and prosper. There are a lot of formerly decrepit cities around the world that have done just that. This think tank seems to have lost contact to reality.