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.
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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.



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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.