Dermot: Things I've noticed on his birthday. With thanks to Rob.

This is all my brother Rob's fault. It really is. Not the heart attack, not the years of frustration and pseudo-control freakery as you don your tinfoil hat and say goodbye to someone you know and watch their memory float off, like a balloon, into the public ether to be guided off course by the winds of public memory. What's Rob's fault is his posting of a picture with a familiar face smiling as only he could, though never in public. Not until today. And that went viral, on the old man's 63rd birthday.

So here are some things I've noticed from trawling though the Internet as I punctuate the day's work.

1. Outage is not a word. I don't know what they experienced in Turkey today, but it wasn't that. More evidence of the Irish Times' descent into madness and decadence.
2. Estranged was a word ascribed to my parents. They were separated, and they were strange (both living and dead - no mean feat), but they were great friends. Also no mean feat.
3. Wikipedia is still shite. My father's birthday was indeed today, and scrolling down some comments, one person confirmed the birthday was wrong, as they had checked it on Wikipedia. This, despite the fact that the man's middle son had posted a picture on the correct date. Its power to persuade despite every iota of reason contradicting it is indeed frightening.
4. 63 is still younger than Kenneth Williams when he died. For that matter, it's still young.

The other is that despite officials Ireland's amnesia of my father in public discourse (I notice Bernice Harrison in the Irish Times, historically a paper which could be quite ambivalent towards him, praising the excellent Irish Pictorial Weekly as if their edge were unseen in the annals of Irish broadcasting; this, despite work like Scrap Saturday similarly causing ructions among RTE defamation lawyers.), two inalienable facts remain:

That death is relative, and he is still held in great affection.  He has, in the oddest, most post-modern way, never, thankfully, gone away. Struck down, he became more powerful than any of us could have imagined.

The power of affection can be a deeply humbling experience.

Thanks Rob. Happy birthday Pops.

Schloenwitz, March 6th 1945, The Russians and a Love Story of Chance

This is a week for anniversaries. For remembrance. Like Proust, I have eaten something yummy. Whilst the late lamented Marcel ate a Madeleine, my memory food was a Lidl nougat egg. Just Now. Literally. And I was surrounded, not for the first time in my life, by ghosts. This is their story.

The German side of my family originated from a village called Schloenwitz in Pomerania. Nowadays it is part of the north western corner of Poland. But up until the cards fell against them at the Postdam Conference, it was their home, the home of the Garmatz family. Today, seventy years ago, they were given thirty minutes to leave their village by the advancing Russians or face almost certain extinction. This is a tale of choices. 

It happened that the Russians had begun to advance on German territory since the Christmas of '44 or thereabouts and news had already spread of the manner of the Russians' approach. They were, in the words of Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles, 'open for business'. Where they didn't loot, pillage, burn or rape is where they didn't happen to be.  In propaganda pieces they spoke of massacres, of Nemmersdorf; the ensuing panic and the many thousands - millions they would become - who would go on the Treks to safety, if at all possible. 

At this stage, March 1945, the Russians were engaged in ferocious battles with the remainder of the retreating German military. Ten kilometres from my grandfather's village was Schievelbein, birthplace of Rudolf Virchow, 19th century pioneer of modern surgery. About the size of Carlow, it was gobbled up in a pincer movement by Marshall Zhukov's troops, on their irresistible march towards the west, Berlin and the Elbe river. 

The pastor of Schloenwitz would take his life, as would his wife and daughter. Amid the chaos, the villagers were given orders to leave. There is a family legend about today, seventy years ago. The villagers had packed their carts with what belongings they could, the family Garmatz included. Once they had, my great grandmother, a small woman, Elisabeth, nee Popp, insisted she wanted to go back inside and sleep off the stress, but surely to God, there was no time. Meanwhile, her husband, Willy, a respected elder of the village, came to confront the local Nazi official who had outlined the escape route he wished the villagers to take. The route would have taken them directly into the arms of the advancing Russian forces. Willy knew this and argued for an alternative. Even at this late hour, the Nazis were not amenable to reason. Yours was not to reason why, be it this route or any other edict. Willy nevertheless stood his ground. I suspect if he was anything like his son Rudolf, at this stage a guest of the Americans in France, he would have been dryly derisive of the local Nazi, budged not an inch and rolled his 'R's like a good Lutheran Pomeranian farmer might. In the end, they split, and the Garmatzes, another family, their horses and two French prisoners of war, sent to work on their farm, set out to dodge a human and military tsunami. They ventured away from the Russians, moved north-west, towards Cammin and the Baltic coast. They advanced, as my grandfather Rudolf relaid to me, 'unter schwerem Beschuss', under heavy fire, towards the west, Schleswig Holstein, and a village called Kaltenkirchen, an hour north of Hamburg. 

They survived despite the bombardment, the misery and fear. The family legend goes on: those who followed the Nazi didn't, engulfed by that red sea from the east. 

Two things arose from this day, seventy years ago. The first was that my family would never live, love, die or farm the land that had been theirs since before the end of the Thirty Years War. Willy would become a frustrated man, living in his small house in Kaltenkrichen, replete with plans for a farm never to be seen again. Two people from that day survive: my mother's cousins, both infants at the time, their father already killed, their childhood to be shaped by this and all other calamitous events of that time.

The second thing to happen included an encounter with another family, the Nawrots, who had been housed in the same refugee camp. Their home in inner city Hamburg was destroyed by the allied bomber squadrons, in the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah. Having run from a ball of fire, 20 year old Ingeborg would run into the arms of Rudolf Garmatz, freed, and having found his way from France to this refugee camp and, by chance, to her. He wrote once that he didn't want to live in her dreams but live in her life. She wrote that he should return some overdue library books, and some other, unpublishable stuff. He obeyed, and they lived, very much in love, in each other's lives for 44 years, until her death in 1992. He even wore a top hat for her on their wedding day in 1948. That's how my grandparents met - Not a bad way to end a war. 

We are in our family, my mother, uncle, brother, cousins are all the products of this day, March 6th 1945.   

1945, von Weizaecker and learning from history...

The following was published in November in the GDI Bulletin, was intended for teachers, but some of it seemed timely following the news this morning of Richard von Weizaecker's death. His passing has been disgracefully cursory in the German broadcast media so far. 


When Bundespräsident Richard von Weizäcker addressed the Bundestag thirty years ago next May, he distilled the great truths about 8th of May 1945. “Der achte Mai”, he said, “war ein Tag der Befreiung”. Every five years, the symmetry of 1945 allows us not only to never forget the twelve years of the Hitler regime in Germany, but to return to a year which throws up exciting, uncomfortable and necessary topics which we as teachers of German can address to great effect.
One of the components of the senior German syllabus is one of cultural competence. And yet frustratingly, whilst the Alltagkultur of German speaking countries is recognised, the history of German speaking people is overlooked. This is a great pity, as for teachers of German, there is a compelling case for German history being part of what we teach.

To that end, 1945 allows students, all aware on some level of the significance of the year, to delve into four powerful digits and discover what life was like at this moment in time. Some teachers might use Ernst Jandl’s poem 1944/1945 as a useful starting point, before delving into other aspects of the year the war ended.

That year was eventful to say the least. 1945 was the year of the Dresden Bombings, captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse 5; the Flüchtlingstreks of some 12 million Germans from east of the river Oder, whilst at one stage seen to be politically suspect to discuss, can and should be discussed in its proper context: Europe as the year, as one British veteran pointed out on a BBC documentary, the year the people of Europe were on the move.

1945 was also the year of the final defeat of the Wehrmacht and the disintegration of the Nazi regime; Of Stunde Null and the moment when Germany, technically, ceased to be; when civilisation wended its way to the defining moment of the last half millennium: The Holocaust.
Discussions can and should inevitably lead to Auschwitz. And that is important. Whilst the moral and factual aspects are again well known, a learner of German should know about what ordinary Germans knew, how they struggled to acknowledge the true scale of genocide committed by on their behalf by many of them. For many families this was a time to bury terrible secrets, as seen in Tomi Reichental’s excellent recent documentary about one of his captors.

The ‘deep brown stain’, as historian Harold James refers to it, tarnishes the Germans sense of collective self. The years which followed, certainly the decades after World War Two, lead to decades of prevarication, dishonesty, denial and the struggle with what ordinary Germans has endured, and reconciling that with what they had perpetrated. For every lie, however, there was a truth that would out. The consequences of 1945, the unholy mess of that year, from military defeat, mass starvation and migration, to demagoguery and unprecedented genocide, make this a year which stands on its own merits as a unit of learning; One which can be done with great ease with colleagues in other subjects.  

Resources are plentiful. It is a great tribute to this country that the Holocaust Education Trust receives as much public support as it does. The Goethe Institut and other institutions have also touched upon individual aspects of this tumultuous year. Online, the BBC has many fine documentaries which can be used, as is true of the German public broadcasters like ZDF and ARD, many of which are readily found in specific archives. For those who wish to ditch watching amusing clips of dancing cats on YouTube can find programmes and films which can be didactised easily enough. All one needs, as always, is time.

The reality is, that the outcomes of examining 1945 in the language classroom is not only to create a departure from familiar territory – of itself a good reason to take this on – but also allows students to analyse, speculate, describe past events and make critical evaluations, all the while using constructions and vocabulary which students will require at senior cycle.

To be perfectly honest however, if there were one overriding reason for using this year in our classes it is because it is the morally right thing to do. Racism is still with us, ignorance is still in our own society ‘es hört nie auf’ as Günter Grass wrote at the end of Im Krebsgang.

In my own classroom I have used on multiple occasions the words of Bundespräsident von Weizäcker on the 8th of May 1985, the most significant speech I would argue of the Bonn Republic. His appeal to the young act as the learning outcomes for students of this year and what it signifies:

“Die Bitte an die jungen Menschen lautet:
Lassen Sie sich nicht hineintreiben in Feindschaft und Haß gegen andere Menschen, gegen Russen oder Amerikaner, gegen Juden oder Türken, gegen Alternative oder Konservative, gegen Schwarz oder Weiß. Lernen Sie miteinander zu leben, nicht gegeneinander.
Ehren wir die Freiheit. Arbeiten wir für den Frieden. Halten wir uns an das Recht. Dienen wir unseren inneren Maßstäben der Gerechtigkeit.
Schauen wir am heutigen 8. Mai, so gut wir es können, der Wahrheit ins Auge."

This is an activity we can all share in, 70 years on from the most resonant year of the 20th century.  

An Absence of Isms: When exactly did 'terrorism' become mere 'terror'?

We live in a world of without ideals. The world gets viewed through a prism without -isms. As the French go for a wee stroll through the Place de la Republique, Francois Hollande hopes the locals don't use it as an opportune moment to clobber him over the head with a rolled up copy of Charlie Hebdo for being the most disappointing leader of any republic since Richard Cromwell. 'Tumbledown Dick' (a useful moniker for the current Monsieur President), is a symbol, to my limited understanding, of the failure of republicanism in England. This despite the best efforts of the beneficiaries of the aforementioned failure, the House of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, to aid the cause.

Later on, during a march to reaffirm French national unity and reiterate traditional French values of liberté, egalité, fraternité, the politicians of Europe will be at the forefront of that march: Hollande, Merkel and himself from Castlebar. What each has in common is that none of these figures actually stands for anything. They are symbols of the dull muddling through, that takes precedence over inspired thinking. In such a world, language changes and adapts to suit the needs of the people using it. The media, being platforms of communication using language, provide the discourse and mediation. What is unsettling has been the supplanting of ‘terrorism’ over the last years with the abridged word 'terror'. Bush 2 (not a fan of sequels at the best of times, but this was a doozy) embarked on a 'War on Terror' following the 9-11 attacks. This week again the Paris attacks, replete with hashtags and anodyne debate, was branded the Paris Terror Attacks, the BBC leading the charge to change the meaning of words and concepts through subtle change. 

So what? Close enough? Not at all. Terror is an emotion, a feeling; a sensation when in a place of danger, in peril, like when you are about to be cornered at a party by someone whose entire conversation will consist of what point on the public sector pay scale they're on and your wing-person has mysteriously vanished to find drink. Or hide in the loo. 

Terrorism, however, is part method, part ideology. Was Bush engaging Navy Seals to clear the Bogeyman from under his bed or seek out the perpetrators of an unprecedented attack on the US by zealots who used terrorism as a means of furthering their warped viewpoint? Or both? Similarly, the real terror of an attack on the freedom of speech, which the attacks of Paris come to symbolise, is the fuzzing at the edges of language and the truth it tells. To allow inexactitude renders free speech useless. When an –ism here or there is abandoned for base feelings; unformed emotions that are to be mediated and groomed, and to be done in the fuzziest and scariest of ways through official discourse.   

Whatever about the merits of satire, a concept we in Ireland sporadically toy with before deliberately confusing it with silly voices, it has at its core the bravery to say exactly what you mean in all its savagery. The writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, like Jonathan Swift, like TW3, like the late lamented Scrap, and Martyn Turner all have in common the ability to use language exactly.

This is the bravery to say what you mean using language in its exactitude. In a world where unequivocal ideology has attacked our vague little world, it should be met with the power of clarity.