This is somewhat tricky to answer, not least because: what do we qualify as „British“? English and Scottish and Welsh and Cornish and Northern Irish? English only? Doesn‘t, say, Liverpool, or York have a somewhat different cultural background than London? (And isn’t Liverpool blessedly free of The Sun and other Murdoch productions?) Similarly, even leaving aside the biggie (i.e. East German* and West German differences, which after thirty years of reunification do not only still exist but in some ways seem to get larger), we don‘t have that Federal structure for nothing. I always protest that statements like „Bavaria is the Texas of Germany“ don‘t really fit, but there are certainly differences between Bavaria and, say, Nordrhein-Westfalen, or between Hamburg and Württemberg, and so forth.

*A relatively minor example: one of the ceremonies when a German chancellor leaves office is the so called „Zapfenstreich“. One of the things that happen is that the Chancellor can ask the army orchestra to play three pieces of music for them. Angela Merkel‘s choices were 1) Großer Gott, wir loben dich, 2) „Für mich soll‘s rote Rosen regnen“ as sung by Hildegard Knef, and 3) „Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen“ as sung by Nina Hagen. The last song sent the West German part of Germany googling, but it had been a very popular hit in the GDR. (If you‘re curious: Nina Hagen version, and as played for Angela Merkel by the Bundeswehr.

And then there‘s the next question: what do we mean by „culture“ - culture as in literature, music, painting and sculpture? Pop culture? Folklore? Food culture? Daily traditions?

(One of my professors died recently - at 99, so not unexpected - , forgive the wrangling for precision and meaning, it‘s what he taught me.)

All this being said, I‘ll reach for some generalities:

1. Tea. Before my first visit to GB at the age of 13, I had never drunk it with milk. Decades later, I still try to avoid this. I do love tea, in many variations, but milk doesn‘t belong into it in my German-inprinted taste. I‘m pretty sure Catherine of Braganza when introducing the habit of tea consumption to the British Isles didn‘t do so with milk addendum, so this must be a GB original contribution.
2. Christmas. Famously, the Brits owe the Christmas trees to our boy Albert, the Coburg prince who married Queen Victoria. Presumably it‘s also his fault that the British Royal Family alone in all of GB celebrates the giving of gifts on Christmas Eve, December 24th, not on Christmas Day, December 25th. It‘s a German tradition, and we still do it this way.
3. Federalism. This is mostly the heritage of the HRE (Holy Roman Empire), the way the Emperors after the 13th century kept losing power and the individual princes within the HRE kept gaining it, while both France and England got centralised and unified instead. This has the result that for the longest time, Germany (geographically speaking) did not have a capital (the Emperors kept changing their residences until the Habsburgs monopolised the position, but Vienna was never the capital of the HRE in that sense), a city comparable to London or Paris, but what it did have were numerous cities that became cultural and economic centres, and a strong sense of regional identity tied to what used to be those principalities. And I think when Blair was PM the parliaments in Scotland and Wales got some more responsibilities and power (or did I osmose this wrongly), but even so, that‘s a relatively recent development, whereas Federalism in Germany is deeply entrenched. Mind you, the downside of having cultural and economic centres in every region is that there are some heads of Federal States who still confuse themselves with Princes (any German readers know whom I am thinking of), but there it is. Anyway: love it or hate it, I think it‘s undisputable London is unique for what it is in England as well as Great Britain, and in the British cultural consciousness. There is no comparable German city which evokes the same feelings in Germany. Berlin is a relative new arrival on the scene, speaking in centuries and millennia - it really started to become a must in terms of visiting only in the 19th century, and post reunification in the 20th, there was some serious debate on whether or not the capital should remain in Bonn where it had been for some decades in West Germany, with the late Wolfgang Schäuble being instrumental on campaigning for Berlin. Today, Berlin is of course a big deal, not just politically speaking, but it‘s still not „THE“ German city, the way London keeps getting confused with England (or GB) in pop cultural depictions. (Au contraire; due to decades of having the US Army stationed in Bavaria, it tends to be confused with Germany as a whole in American media. Meanwhile, the fact that the Brits were stationed in the Rhineland (I think?) doesn‘t appear to have made a similar impact.)
4. Puns, black humor and self deprecating humor. This for the longest time was seen as something the Brits are exceptionally and uniquely good at, and which we much admire them for. Contrary to slander, Germany did and does produce wits, satirists and even comedies, but not nearly to the same degree. I will say that the existence of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Moog and the effect they’ve had has had the effect of seeing British humor in a somewhat more sour light on some folk over here.
5. Dresscode for theatres. Mind you, this might be out of date, but I remember being shocked the first time I went on a theatre marathon in London and everyone (save yours truly) was wearing jeans. (Given sometimes you buy the tickets only hours before, it makes sense.) Back in the 80s and 1990s at least, i.e. when I was young and impressionable, you dressed up in evening wear for a visit to the theatre.
6. School uniforms. As in, while I‘m not sure about private schools, no - I hesitate to use the term „public“ because it means something different in a British context - no school paid by the government and which you visit for free has them in Germany. Now this might be a strictly post 1945 thing for all I know, but the whole „uniform“ part of „school uniform“ gets seriously side-eyed here. Or used to when I was a youngling; Harry Potter might have made a difference. We still don‘t have them in our public schools, though.

The Other Days

As the Orange Menace in the US runs out of ways to lose the election (how many times was that by now, counting all the law suits, 50?) but damage his country that much further, his cousin-in-malice-and-bad-hair keeps piling up ways to make satirists weep because they'd never get away with this stuff if they'd invented it. Gunships against French fishermen? Trying divide and conquer with Merkel and Macron and feeling insulted the two respond exactly as they did every time in the last four years a Brit tried this, by pointing out the EU negotiates as a block and not via individual members? And then there's the tale of Johnson during his dinner with Ursula von der Leyen "joking" that hey, English and German people knew how difficult the French could be, heh, heh, heh. She wasn't amused. See, in fiction, villains as successful as Johnson are supposed to have come competency and at least some ability to read the room they're in.

Not unrelatedly, and with my mind still on the late John le Carré, have two scenes from the film version of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold: Richard Burton, Oskar Werner, and Claire Bloom (in the second one):







And here's Philip Seymour Hoffmann in his last role in A Most Wanted Man. You can immediately see he's Richard Burton's grandson, so to speak:

I was alerted to this newest RTD (mini)series by this review, and also this one, both of which are very favourable indeed. Having watched it now: deservedly so. RTD seems to be on a winning streak, between last year’s A Very English Scandal, and now this, a series set basically five minutes into the future. (Not literally: it starts in 2019 and then follows its characters through fifteen years.) It’s also one of the most political things he’s ever done, while playing to his old strengths and interests – to wit, family dynamics. (Both blood and adopted/chosen families.) (And specifically adult families. Leaving all other differences aside, I always thought it interesting that if Stephen Moffat tackles families, it’s usually via presenting children – as children – whereas Russell T. Davies goes for grown up children interacting with their parents and siblings. The one time I felt the Moff was consciously trying to write a Davies-style dynamic was with Bill and her adopted mother/guardian, and that quickly fell at the wayside because it just wasn’t where his natural writerly interest lay. (This is not meant as a criticism, btw. I loved Bill’s season.) Meanwhile, I don’t think Rusty ever managed a kid like little Amelia Pond – it’s telling that in Torchwood: Children of Earth, little Steven is basically a lamb, whereas the narrative focus and layeredness is with his mother Alice (i.e. an adult) and her complicated emotions about her father Jack.

The Lyons clan in Years and Years consists of grandmother (and great grandmother) Muriel, played by Anne Reid, adult siblings Stephen (Rory Kinnear, first time I’ve seen him since Penny Dreadful), Edith (Jessica Hynes), Daniel (Russell Tovey) and Rosie (Ruth Madeley) as well as their spouses and children. (Again, the fleshed out ones of the children are the ones who start out as teenagers and are adults by the time the series ends, whereas the babies/little kids are just sort of there.) They live in Manchester and experience both country and world going ever more beserk as they try to make it through the years. What’s fascinating to me is that if you compare it with two previous RTD penned (or largely invented) dystopia scenarios – both CoE and Torchwood: Miracle Day qualify, and you might as well throw the DW episode Turn Left in as well, this one, which is far more grounded in reality (with speculation on developments that feel frighteningly plausible to me), actually ends up more optimistically than either. If you’ve watched CoE or MD, you can’t help but feel that by and large, humankind is a pretty rotten species. Otoh, Years and Years ends up concluding that we might have screwed up mightily but there’s hope for us yet, and not just for individual members.

It’s also the first Davies take on a „democratic society turns authoritarian“ scenario that doesn’t use the old trappings of fascism (complete with Nazi red and black colour coding) but instead very much tackles the present day crop. His take on a populist leader, Viv(ienne) Rook, played by Emma Thompson, isn’t really ideologically driven, she’s a hollow collection of useful soundbites, taken for authentic and telling-it-as-it-is because she’s verbally outrageous, underestimated even by her opponents because she’s funny, which is yet another way she wins over crowds. (Sidenote: the old idea that humor and totalitarianism are mutually exclusive, i.e. that humor is by its nature subversive and thus ideal to fight power, is something that fell to the wayside during the rise of the far right in the last decades due to rl examples, but this is one of the first fictional takes which really focus on how humor can be used by the future totalitarians to not just bolster their appeal but trivialize any objections.) Muriel in the last episode sums this up as „the age of clowns and monsters“; another key difference to earlier takes on „main characters experience dystopia“ by Davies is that our heroes are by no means immune. Two members of the Lyons clan actively vote for Viv Rook, and even Edith the social activist (who doesn’t vote for her or anyone else, symbolizing those voters striking through their voting sheets in disgust) early on applauds her for „smashing the system“, after which a revolution will surely come (hello, Susan Sarandon). Even the adult Lyons who don’t vote for her think she’s funny and entertaining, except for Dan, who realises her monstrisity beneath the funny, charming veneer not least because he’s a council worker, and also in love with an Ukrainian refugee directly threatened by what qualifies for Rook’s policies.

(Incidentally, Ukraine being annexed by Russia, Russia’s laws making homosexuality illegal again and Victor’s odyssey through an increasingly closed off Europe are among those futuristic scenarios that I found frighteningly real/familiar, from the get go, as when Victor’s still in England and whether or not his being gay qualifies as a reason for asylum, and whether he’s gay enough is under debate. Cue me flashing to various newspaper reports, mostly from Austria, where asylum seekers really were dismissed for not being gay enough in the judge’s eyes to qualify as threatened.)

That fascism is just something that happens to other people and our heroes would never fall for anyone like that, even if the society around them does, is something inherent in most British and American media, so Davies depicting some of the Lyons going for Viv Rook’s „smash the system, fuck yeah!“ appeal (ignoring that as a rich businesswoman she is the system) feels like the most informed by 2016 onwards element about this show. As do things like Daniel’s husband Ralph, whom he’ll later leave for Victor, starting to repeat various theories previously seen as conspiracy theories on the darknet but now mainstream – Dan’s „what the hell happened to you?“ reaction is one I can identify with, having experienced this with various people in my life by now (though thankfully not a spouse).

At the same time, none of this would work for me if I hadn’t come to care for the characters, flawed as they are. They can be dislikable at times (and that’s before one of them does something truly horrifying in the last but one episode), but they’re never less than human. The way the siblings can take the piss out of each other while also being there for each other, how Muriel and Stephen’s wife Celeste start out in low key mutual resentment and end up becoming incredibly close long past the end of the Stephen/Celeste marriage, or how the aftermath of their father’s death is handled (none of them has been in contact with him for years and they don’t know his second family, including their half brother, very well, so the funeral is this awkward affair full of both pain and black humor) – it all makes them incredibly real to me. I didn’t binge watch it but saw one episode per day because, like I said, a great many of the developments feel scarily plausible to me, but I’m really glad I watched it, and look forward to whatever RTD does next.

Sometimes I wonder whether Individual 1 and the Brexiteers have some competition about most bizarre farce in politics going. Our lot tried with the endlessly drawn out drama around now finally sacked spy chief Maaßen of "there never were any xenophobic attacks! the greatest danger to Germany right now are left wing radicals in the SPD!" fame, which certainly was farcical enough, but good lord, is it ever left in the dust by Brits and Americans alike.

The Economist, itself surely as far from "left" as you can get, has chosen Boris Johnson for the worst damage causing idiot of the year award, reasoning:

In a big field, there was one outstanding candidate. He failed miserably as foreign secretary. He sniped at Mrs May while in Cabinet. He has agitated against her deal from the backbenches and in his lucrative newspaper column without presenting a real alternative. A demagogue not a statesman, he is the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years. Step forward, Boris Johnson!

Not that I disagree with any of this, but just look at the competition! Even if you leave aside the Orange Menace and his minions across the Atlantic and treat it as Brits only. And it doesn't show any signs of getting better any time soon, no matter whether or not May remains in office, for, as Jonathan Freedland puts it here:


The justice secretary, David Gauke, was right when he told the BBC this morning that “the parliamentary arithmetic does not change if you change the person living in Downing Street”. As prime minister, Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab might dial up the Brexit rhetoric, but the numbers in the Commons will remain obstinately the same. It will still be a government without a majority. It will still be a hung parliament with a majority of MPs who backed remain.

More to the point, the Irish border question persists no matter who is in No 10. Under the Good Friday agreement, Britain is required to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. The EU is adamant on the same point, fixed in its view that there can be no hard border in Ireland, and yet equally certain that what would now be the external frontier of the EU necessarily involves customs checks and the like. No new PM will be granted a magic wand to wave away those facts, no matter how tightly they screw their eyes shut and insist they truly believe in Brexit.

Tory MPs don’t like hearing that they cannot have their cake and eat it, that there is no Brexit that comes without a severe cost, and so they are taking out their frustration on May. But any prime minister – Johnson, Davis, Raab, Mordaunt, Leadsom, Hunt, Javid – will eventually have to break the same news to them. The problem is not May. The problem is Brexit.

And thus we go for more endless reruns of the whole agonizing circus. It's like watching a friend drink themselves to death, it truly is.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Individual 1 had a temper tantrum on live camera in the reality show he's turned US politics into. this just about sums it up. You know, I've recently read Brecht's play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui again. This is one of the plays where a few decades have completely changed my opinion on it. When I was in my early 20s, I thought it was an amusing satire on Hitler & Co., but also dated by this very fact, unable to function outside of the Third Reich context, which often is the problem with political satire. Now it's 2018, and I'm not surprised The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is staged in the US, in Britain, and on German stages. If you don't know the play: Brecht wrote it in a few weeks, near the end of his time in Finland, waiting for US visas for himself and his entourage. It was supposed to be his debut on the American stage, using some key events of Hitler & Co. rising to power and telling them as a Chicago gangster story (in blank verse, with some witty parodies of Shakespeare scenes and scenes from Goethe's Faust to boot). This didn't work out. (In fact, the play was never staged during Brecht's life time and for years was regarded as a minor work. Not anymore, though.) According to his latest biographer, the potential US producers, far from appreciating the American location of the play, resented the implication that Americans could possibly be receptive to a fascist charlatan rising to power backed by a combination of rich industrials and thugs.

...Yeah. Anyway, read today, I think the play would work best if you ditch the explanation signs as to which event in the fictional Chicago matches which in German history altogether and don't let your Arturo do a Hitler imitation. The Cauliflower Trust and old Dogsborough, that supposedly honorable white haired man corrupted by a mixture of money and vanity, thinking they can use small time gangster Arturo Ui and then, when it turns out they are the ones used by him, cravenly falling in line; Ui's mixture of lethargy and temper tantrums; the matching of gangsters and their crooked schemes with grandiose overblown rethoric; no, you don't need to look at the past for this to work at all. There are no heroes in this play, and no larger than life villains; that the lot of them are pathetic and still gain power, wrecking terrible havoc, was part of Brecht's point. No wonder the last lines of the play these days are among the most regularly quoted Brecht lines (here in the translation by George Tabori):

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Had a very busy week on the road, in which I barely consumed anything fannish and was instead consumed by the two simultanously running "History: A Farce" soaps running in the UK and in the US. No, that's unfair, the US one had a serious plot thread (btw, it's really WEIRD how the Democratic Midterms victory was downplayed initially), with only the tantrum-throwing toddler-in-chief providing the completely over the top satire. Back to the drawing board, scriptwriters. This "President" just isn't believable, not even as a caricature.

More seriously, as an explanation of how the insanity across the channel came into being, this article putting Britain on the couch provides as good an explanation as any as to what went on in the murky depths of (a part of) the public subsconsciousness:


What’s striking is that we can begin to see in this hysterical rhetoric the outlines of two notions that would become crucial to Brexit discourse. One is the comparison of pro-European Brits to quislings, collaborators, appeasers and traitors. (...) But the other idea is the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, for example, stand as resonant examples of the potency of the myth of blood sacrifice. But in the ironic reversal of zombie imperialism, the appropriation of the imagery of resistance to a former colonising power, this romance of martyrdom is mobilized as defiance of the EU. (...) Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted. It does not greatly matter what the European Union is or what it is doing – its function in the plot is to be a more insidious form of nazism.

Meanwhile, this article sums it up shorter, but also to the point: Brexit fantasy going down in tears.

Given I have a lot of British friends whose life will get worse and worse and worse now, I really do wish this were all a tv or radio show, safely fictional. But it's not. Speaking of powerful symbols pertaining to nations, though, I discovered/was reminded again that one of those things I myself am sentimental about is the French-German post WWII relationship. Yes, our two countries have their problems and flaws. (Do they ever.) But dipping into pre and during WWI literature again, it struck me once more how ever present and insidious the assumption of a national feud was, and how self evident today (unless, of course, you're Marine Le Pen or Alexander Gauland) the alliance and friendship. (It's also encouraging to me when the way hatred is whipped up again today not just between nations but within nations makes me wonder how on earth all this tribalism should be overcome. Note to self: it's been done. Fait Accompli.) Macron and Merkel at Compiegne, where the WWI truce was made, was a great illustration for this. (As had been, decades earlier, Kohl and Mitterand at Verdun.) It was also, to me, an illustration of how to deal with a war anniversary without glamourizing the evilness of war in any way (and that war isn't glamorous and heroic but awful is to me the lesson that public consciousness first grasped with the WWI catastrophe, even though it seems we keep having to learn). So, have a few vids from that other reality show, Frankreich et L'Allemagne: c'est possible:

Macron and Merkel at Compiegne (btw, whoever choreographed everything really was extremely thoughtful; note that when they're sitting at the table where the truce was negotiated, they're not sitting opposed to each other, as their historical counterparts did, but at the head of the table, together):



Summary of the entire weekend:



Macron and Merkel at the Peace Forum afterwards:




And to end on a fun note, here's the 101 years old lady excited to meet the President who thought Angela Merkel was Brigitte Macron and, after being told that she was the chancellor of Germany, said "'c'est fantastique':

Like I imagine a great many people I've spent the last few weeks admiring the Parkland teenagers and the way they refuse to let the massacre at their high school be followed by the usual resounding nothing (other than "thoughts and prayers", and "it's too early", of course). The lunacy of the US gun laws has never failed to baffle and infuriate me for decades, specially since it's gotten worse, not better, at nearly every turn. Which is why I found this article on the NRA lobbyist behind Floriday's gun policy - which was subsequently adopted in at least two dozen US states - both very informative and deeply disturbing. It explains the precise why and wherefores, so take a deep breath and read.

Meanwhile, the Tories continuing to demonstrate delusion and incompetence on Brexit - save the occasional John Major, and if you'd told me in the 80s that John Major would turn out to be the embodiment of sanity and common sense in the Conservative Party... - but that particular lunacy at least doesn't come with regular mass slaughter (yet). Still, this article says it all.

Since the real world continues to make so little sense, it's always a relief to turn to fiction. I was happy to see that ssrconfidential will be running again this year, bringing us Agent Carter stories: this is the post with the time table.

Seems that British Politics show I mentioned a week or so ago has written half of their leads out (and all of those pushing for that unbelievable potline). briefly tried to promote a new female villain but then settled on making the lead one of the former minor supporting characters, also female.

Meanwhile, the flashback episodes are still going on. If you want to catch up:

The Chilcot Report, Digested Edition (because it's better to laugh than to cry)


On that note, fanfic from a recently cancelled show, Agent Carter:

Il diavolo rosa: Nonna Manfredi versus Bernard the Flamingo. It's the showdown of the century!