august: cleveland county

Happy Neuer! pic.twitter.com/FKyUU4tEeY

— FC Bayern München (@FCBayern) December 31, 2015

The players are slowly but surely falling into place for the 2017 elections. Angela Merkel was already reelected head of her party; now the Greens have followed. The Greens voted Katrin Goering-Eckhardt as their top candidate for the chancellorship with Cem Oezdemir as the second. (Check out this Wikipedia page for an abbreviated explanation of the Realo/Fundi split in the Greens.) Martin Schulz, fresh off a stint as EU President, has been selected as the SPD candidate.

The NSU trial, which has been going on since May 2013, may finally be drawing to a close as Beate Zschaepe is running out of options. This trial started after five members of the National Socialist Underground, a right-wing terrorist organization, were accused of ten murders in Germany.

I'm very sad to see the United States's Ambassador to Germany, John Emerson, leave. I always felt safe in Germany, partly because I knew there was a great diplomatic team keeping things going! Here's an interview with Ambassador Emerson and his family that was on the morning magazine, MoMa.

The fancy new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport is a catastrophe that just won't seem to end. It was announced this month that the airport, originally scheduled to open in 2012, won't be opening this year. This means that the city's two tiny airports must continue to operate until 2018 at the earliest. The Berliner Zeitung ran an editorial called "Who Even Wants the BER Anymore?," which pointed out that the project has known about its problems for years and is a political liability.

The Women's March also took place in Germany on January 21. In Frankfurt, a mixture of Americans and Germans marched for women's rights - this article is in English!

This article about motherhood and feminism in East Germany was very interesting. It talks about the mythical "Ost-Frau" who could quickly return to full-time work after having a child and fully take care of the house as well. Effects of this can still be seen today - 1 in 2 children born in eastern Germany go to a daycare as opposed to only 1 in 3 children in western Germany.

One of my favorite historians, Timothy Garton Ash, won the Aachener Karlspreis for his work against populism and for democracy!

I read Hollywood and Hitler this month - it was so interesting to see how Hollywood reacted to Nazism and inspired me to watch some clips from movies in the '30s. "Inside Nazi Germany" from the March of Time was especially interesting as it was made with Nazi permission, but included some clips stolen when minders weren't paying attention.

In lighter news, I have a podcast recommendation: Ferngespraech, where two best friends talk about living in separate countries.

I just finished reading Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach. Tina Fey suggested that everyone read Riefenstahl's autobiography, but my library system doesn't have a copy of it so I settled for another biography. The TL;DR of Riefenstahl's life is that she made Triumph of the Will among other films for the NSDAP and spent the rest of her life (she died at 101) denying that she knew what the party was up to.

Why you should read it now: Riefenstahl put herself and her career before literally everything. She did whatever it took to get what she wanted, then pretended to be blind to the consequences of her actions. We need to remember that many actions cannot be justified, and history will judge us if we fail to intervene.

This is Paradise: My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang does what it says on the tin. The author recounts his experiences growing up in North Korea before and during the famine in the '90s, which ultimately resulted in his family's escape to South Korea via China. I found the account of North Korean schools especially fascinating and horrifying.

Why you should read it now: The world cannot forget North Korea. People are suffering under a horrible dictatorship which stifles every freedom imaginable. The United States cannot only put itself first while we have the power to influence the rest of the world for good.

The File and The Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash are two of my all-time favorite books. The File is about how the East German security system functioned, while The Magic Lantern depicts the final days of dictatorships in Eastern Europe and shows how the protests were successful.

Why you should read it now: Some people think protesting can't do any good. They forget that peaceful protests in Leipzig and across Eastern Europe in the 1980s helped end a dictatorship. Never let anyone tell you that protests are inconsequential - those people have forgotten their history.
__________

Still to be read: Prague Winter by Madeleine Albright, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, When the Earth Was Young by David Yeadon, and Without You, There is No Us  by Suki Kim.

Shouts out to my local library, which has handled my many books on hold without annoyance. I kinda want to use the hashtag #ResistanceReading for this project, but I'm on the fence. What other books should I read as part of my 2017 education?

2016 is finally coming to an end. I know that I'm not sad to see it go, even though I had some amazing experiences this year. Austria has a good month, but Germany ended the year on a terror-filled note that brought further (in my opinion, unmerited) criticism to the country's asylum system.

Alexander Van der Bellen won the second presidential election in Austria! There were fears that he would lose since the first election was very close and the American election had just occurred. However, many are pointing out that the Austrian presidency is largely ceremonial, and Austria shouldn't overlook the influence of the far-right Freedom Party in the coming year.

In German politics, Angela Merkel was re-elected head of the Christian Democratic Union during that party's meeting in early December. The SPD, however, won't decide who their leader will be in the upcoming elections until January 2017.

Berlin ushered in a red-red-green government comprised of the Left Party, the SPD, and the Greens. Since I wrote my thesis over the possibility of this coalition on the national level, I'm thrilled to see that Berlin has joined Thuringia in this coalition style! Unlike in Thuringia, however, the SPD is the senior partner in this coalition.

"Postfaktisch" was declared the Word of the Year by the Society for German Language in Wiesbaden. Related to that, Buzzfeed released an article talking about how many of the pro-Trump Twitter accounts appeared to be refocusing themselves against Merkel in light of the Berlin attack and the country's upcoming election.

I really truly love the city of Leipzig. If I had to choose between visiting Leipzig or Dresden, Leipzig wins in an instant based on the train station alone. However, I have such mixed feelings about RB Leipzig and their rise to the top of the Bundesliga. This article from The Washington Post manages to voice many of my concerns. Given that my current favorite team is FC Bayern Muenchen, I really don't have room to hate a team for being popular or corporate-owned. It's hard to hate the first Bundesliga team in years from the East Side of Germany. (Hertha Berlin was in West Berlin during the Cold War.) I'm going to try to keep an open mind until I can watch them some more - I didn't get to watch any matches while I was working on the campaign, so I'm out of the loop right now.

Locomore, a crowd-funded train company, just started making long-distance trips. Before they started, German Rail had no competition for long-distance domestic trips, so it will be interesting to see how this progresses! They've naturally been getting a lot of press - arte visited them on their first trip, where they started off late but ended up early in Berlin. Right now, the tickets are cheaper than a German Rail ticket purchased with a 50% discount card; hopefully this keeps up until I can visit and try it for myself!

Now I'll take it over to the less academic, more entertaining part of the Internet.

Michael Buchinger made a video talking about everyday sexism that I enjoyed.

I've really been loving Lucie Kallies's blog as well as Tea and Twigs. It's an easy way to keep up with written German that doesn't feel like homework.


I tend to mention my favorite YouTube channel in every post, but Lena's last video from the US really nails how it feels to leave a country that you've come to love, but still be excited to see friends and family at home.

And since it's almost Silvester....here's Dinner for One.



__________
Photo via Unsplash

Erfurter Weihnachtsmarkt wird mit Botonsperren geschützt. #breitschreidplatz pic.twitter.com/58Uo4Rc0qT

— ZDF Thüringen (@ZDFerfurt) December 20, 2016

As always, I admire how German police and media have responded to this crisis. They are careful to avoid speculation and revealing the identity of suspects. They released a suspect when there was insufficient evidence to hold him. More media and police should follow their example of not airing every conspiracy theory to the general public; it helps ensure dignity for victims as well as innocent bystanders. It's honorable to stick to the law even when a terrible act has occurred to ensure that proper justice can be carried out.

If you can find Alexanderplatz, you can find a drugstore because that area has two.

Pinterest always tries to recommend posts to me about packing tips for a trip to Europe. However, most of these posts seem to be under the impression that Europe is a third world continent without drugstores. Germany, for example, has two successful drugstore chains called DM and Rossmann. Both carry very similar (if not the precise same) products as American drugstores, and the prices are usually quite reasonable.

This month, the biggest issues in German politics were the German-Turkish relationship and press freedom in Germany. The German comedy program extra3 made a satirical video about Turkish President Erdogan. This led to the German ambassador to Turkey being called in for a lecture, and prompted German comedian Jan Boehmermann to recite a poem about the leader that was quite nasty. The biggest part of the issue is that there is a section of German law that prohibits insulting foreign leaders. There's been a ton of coverage in both German and English, so have fun!

The Atlantic
Newsweek
bento - What young Turkish-Germans think about Erdogan (German)
Poll: The majority of Germans think Merkel is wrong about Erdogan (German)
German reporter forced to leave Turkey (Older, but still interesting)
Commentary: Give Back Your Medal of Freedom, Merkel! (German)

The rest of my links for this month don't follow a theme - they're just things that I found interesting:

bento reported on how the German emo kids of the 2000s turned out.
Berlin has truly out-Berlined itself: a vegan restaurant opening was shut down by the police.
Angela Merkel gave a speech on the 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot (German Beer Purity Law)
The 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster is especially pertinent in eastern Germany, where the government gave children contaminated milk.
This article about how German coalitions are often named after rather obscure national flags was interesting, since I find the practice both amusing and confusing.
Erfurt got free WiFi in all its trams! This almost makes up for them taking the cozy East German-era trams out of service.
In adorable news, the governor of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, is now godfather to one girl from a set of quadruplets born to a refugee family in Jena late last year.

Finally, I can't decide if I like this band or not:

.@b_riexinger - könnte auch #Kanzler ;-) #FeelTheBernd #LTW16 #BWPlusSozial pic.twitter.com/ayIGtiSPH6

— fds BaWü (@fds_linke_bw) February 5, 2016

The Washington Post has some interesting photos from Karneval earlier this month. The most controversial was a float which features Donald Trump with the slogan "Make Fascism Great Again."

Also, Thuringian governor Bodo Ramelow visited the Pope at the end of the month, which made this thesis-writer very happy.

pic.twitter.com/vvfCDmapeM

— Bodo Ramelow (@bodoramelow) February 26, 2016

It's time for my monthly German wrap-up! The German side of the internet jumped right out of the holiday lull into new discussions about feminism, refugees, and sexism. Most of my links today have something to do with the New Year's Eve attacks in Cologne. Here's a bit of background from The Atlantic.

These horrible attacks have, as I said, sparked a huge national debate about refugee rights, feminism, and sexism in Germany. This opinion piece from tagesschau.de points out that sexism is not a new problem that the refugees brought with them. An English language article from Der Spiegel talks about the immediate fallout from the attacks. Additionally, earlier today the center-left SPD's local party office in Essen had to call off a planned protest against refugees. This shows how wide-spread and divisive the issue has become; the SPD's national and state parties have condemned the protest as going against the party's values.

In my old city of Erfurt, someone took out ads supporting the refugees and condemning the right wing ahead of an AfD demonstration.

In English: "Is Erfurt cool?" (In my opinion, the answer is yes!)

In less heavy news, I've rediscovered my love for German "Check" tv programs. Both ARD and ZDF have several programs that are a sort of consumer report for various objects - my favorite ones compare the supermarket chains. Here's one titled "Wie gut ist die deutsche Kueche?" ("How good is German food?") and another one called "Vorsicht, Verbraucherfalle!" ("Caution, Consumer Trap!") which examines the difference between the way food looks on the packaging and how it looks in reality.

Here's a helpful blog post telling ways to sound less foreign when speaking German. I felt quite clever since I already knew about "ischab" and "ne" even though I suppose those are two of the easier things to pick up on.

Besides that, I've been watching a lot of YouTube - I especially enjoyed Ella The Bee's planning videos this month, even if they're a bit more intense than the way I do things.

__________
Photo source: NYPL Digital Collections

Angela Merkel deserved to be Person of the Year. Her influence over world politics was unparalleled this year and has not met its equal on the European level for quite some time. However, previous Person of the Year essays have not always been so positive. Although the choice was sound, it could also have been tempered with a slightly larger dose of reality.

After a seemingly unending period of construction, part of the new InterCity Express train line that will eventually connect Berlin to Munich via Erfurt is finally finished! Now you can travel from Erfurt to Leipzig in less than an hour, and by the end of 2017, the travel time from Berlin to Munich is only going to be four hours, which is two hours less than it was when I first visited Germany in 2012.

You can watch a German news video about the event here.
This project is part of German Unity Transport Project 8, whose website is in both German and English. In addition, the new train line is part of a wider European Union effort to increase ease of transit within Europe.

When I was living in Erfurt, the train station had to be closed on holidays several times in order to get the part of the tracks immediately surrounding the train station put in place. This led to an interesting experience - Deutsche Bahn (the train company) had to bus people from Erfurt to Weimar or Erfurt East in order to catch trains from these smaller stations. The buses were quite crowded, which made for a memorable trip.

It's an exciting time for Erfurt. Once finished, the city will finally be on the line between Munich and Berlin. Up until now, that route passed through the smaller university town of Jena instead. This makes it a much more enticing spot for businesses since it will finally have great train connections to match its regional airport, which offers flights to London and Majorca, and the large amount of industrial space that is available on the city's outskirts.

Erfurt's train station, September 2013

The German television station Das Erste's news program, tagesschau, has started a version of their 100 second news broadcast online with subtitles in Arabic and English for migrant and refugee viewers. Both are silent with subtitles, but it is a welcome gesture nonetheless. The broadcast will be updated twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends and holidays. The original German broadcast is one of my favorite news sources, so I'm glad that English and Arabic speakers can access it now!

Here's a link to the article (in German).

tagesschau in Arabic here.
tagesschau in English here.