Goodbye to Palandt

Bye-bye, Palandt! – post at the Dispute Resolution Germany blog, on July 27th:

C.H. Beck, Germany’s leading legal publisher, today announced that several of its publications will finally be renamed in light of the Nazi past of the jurists whose names they currently bear. All of these publications are household names for law students and practitioners alike.

The campaign for these names to be changed was pretty much a niche thing for many years and gained traction and public visibility only fairly recently.

I didn’t realize that Palandt was a member of the Nazi party. According to German Wikipedia, Beck Verlag chose him as the editor (of the BGB commentary) at short notice in 1938. Palandt (1877-1951) wrote the foreword and introduction until the tenth edition in 1952. In 1945 he removed the pro-Nazi bits. He was allegedly not responsible for the overall editing.

I haven’t got a Palandt at the moment, but I have sometimes bought reduced-price older editions in Germany and found them very useful, but not predictably frequently. Probably there are ways of consulting it online – it was never very easy as a full-time freelance translator to go to a library to consult it, as time was scarce.

After much criticism, Beck Verlag has eventually decided to change the name from Palandt to Grüneberg. The same fate befalls Maunz, Schönfelder (killed in Italy in 1944) and Blümich (I don’t think I’ve encountered Blümich).

40% German blog (and podcast)

I’m just logging in to make a gesture towards posting in 2021, post Brexit and mid-Covid.

I have only just discovered Nic Houghton’s blog 40% German, subtitled Pretzels, Beer and Confusion.

Nic is a Geordie who has been living in Germany since 2011 and writes about that. Topics include:

Annoying the Germans: Small Talk
The Eye of the Beer Holder
The Two Sides of Germany’s Cutting Edge
Germany’s Class System
How Healthy is Germany?
Königreich of Kebabs

and all those other topics I have wondered about over the years.

The first thing that caught my attention was a post on integration, Integrating the Germans. A recent discussion with local Bavarian villagers about immigrants to their village not really joining in turned out to be referring to people from Nuremberg who wanted to enjoy the village social life without contributing to it themselves.


This put in stark relief, in my mind at least, the problem of integration. How can anyone in Germany expect peoples from vastly different cultures to integrate into German life, if we still have problems integrating Germans into German life. It also made a mockery of the expectations that some people seem to have that immigrants from all over the world will suddenly become their particular brand of “German”. I’m not sure it can boiled down into some checklist. Politicians in the past have tried, making bold statements about the need for a Leitkultur or a Guiding culture that defines for immigrants the way they should behave, but which culture? Is it the one from the North or the South, the East or the West?

He also has a podcast, Decades from Home, together with Simon Maddox, which I’m listening to now.

Decades from Home is a podcast that looks at the weird and wonderful of German life from the perspective of two non-Germans.

With over two decades of living in Deutschland between them your hosts, Nic and Simon, find news articles and tell stories that show the many different sides to German life.

Flurbereinigung/Land consolidation

It seems my blog has today been running (running down?) for 16 years so here is a birthday post.

Mittagsstunde by Dörte Hansen (2018), a novel full of Plattdeutsch with the theme of Flurbereinigung reminded me of this strange process. (Hansen’s first novel, Altes Land, has been translated as This House is Mine – one wonders how the dialect was handled). In East Germany small plots of land were joined to form collectives, but in West Germany (and Austria I gather – and also in France and the Netherlands) there was a similar consolidation of small plots but not for socialist reasons.

The process was enabled by a 1953 statute, the Flurbereinigungsgesetz. I don’t think it is done much or at all now.

Very small plots of land resulted from Realteilung, the physical partition of land when inherited by several people – I don’t think the system of inheritance always meant equal partitition, though. Land consolidation was agreed by a group of people and was accompanied by changes to roads and waterways.

Wikipedia (German)

Wikipedia (English)

The effects of this process in practice, both during and after the reorganization of land, are something we didn’t have in the UK.

One aspect that has become known here is the effect of consolidation on vineyards. Wikipedia:

A very negative example of Flurbereinigung occurred in the first half of the 70’s at Kaiserstuhl (Baden-Württemberg), when great terraces where created with an inclination in direction to the hillside. The idea was to store water in the area, but heavy rains in the Pentecost week in 1983 led to flooding. Moreover, due to the inclination of the terraces in springtime (blooming time of the wine) cold air was settles, leading to frequent frost damage to the crops. [3]

And here a 2014 article from the Daily Beast (whatever that is): Germany’s Wine Revolution is Just Getting Started:

Ulli is paving the way for a new wave of wine growers who are ignoring Flurbereinigung and looking to the Prussian tax maps to scout, purchase, and salvage historically great vineyard sites, work them by hand (as opposed to restructuring them to work with machines), and produce dry-tasting wines reminiscent of those created in the 19th century.

I’m afraid that’s all for today, folks.

Travelling in Germany in earlier years

I eventually got round to reading Vanity Fair when I had watched the excellent TV adaptation last year – I did not realize the book was over 900 pages long. Previous attempts had failed after about 4 pages because I thought there were no interesting characters, so I missed its light treatment of society and politics and Waterloo.

There are some parts where the characters travel to the German principalities in the summer, as was apparently common. They went by boat from near the Tower. Here from Project Gutenberg

Am Rhein

The above everyday events had occurred, and a few weeks had passed, when on one fine morning, Parliament being over, the summer advanced, and all the good company in London about to quit that city for their annual tour in search of pleasure or health, the Batavier steamboat left the Tower-stairs laden with a goodly company of English fugitives. The quarter-deck awnings were up, and the benches and gangways crowded with scores of rosy children, bustling nursemaids; ladies in the prettiest pink bonnets and summer dresses; gentlemen in travelling caps and linen-jackets, whose mustachios had just begun to sprout for the ensuing tour; and stout trim old veterans with starched neckcloths and neat-brushed hats, such as have invaded Europe any time since the conclusion of the war, and carry the national Goddem into every city of the Continent. The congregation of hat-boxes, and Bramah desks, and dressing-cases was prodigious. There were jaunty young Cambridge-men travelling with their tutor, and going for a reading excursion to Nonnenwerth or Konigswinter; there were Irish gentlemen, with the most dashing whiskers and jewellery, talking about horses incessantly, and prodigiously polite to the young ladies on board, whom, on the contrary, the Cambridge lads and their pale-faced tutor avoided with maiden coyness; there were old Pall Mall loungers bound for Ems and Wiesbaden and a course of waters to clear off the dinners of the season, and a little roulette and trente-et-quarante to keep the excitement going; there was old Methuselah, who had married his young wife, with Captain Papillon of the Guards holding her parasol and guide-books; there was young May who was carrying off his bride on a pleasure tour (Mrs. Winter that was, and who had been at school with May’s grandmother); there was Sir John and my Lady with a dozen children, and corresponding nursemaids; and the great grandee Bareacres family that sat by themselves near the wheel, stared at everybody, and spoke to no one. Their carriages, emblazoned with coronets and heaped with shining imperials, were on the foredeck, locked in with a dozen more such vehicles: it was difficult to pass in and out amongst them; and the poor inmates of the fore-cabin had scarcely any space for locomotion. These consisted of a few magnificently attired gentlemen from Houndsditch, who brought their own provisions, and could have bought half the gay people in the grand saloon; a few honest fellows with mustachios and portfolios, who set to sketching before they had been half an hour on board; one or two French femmes de chambre who began to be dreadfully ill by the time the boat had passed Greenwich; a groom or two who lounged in the neighbourhood of the horse-boxes under their charge, or leaned over the side by the paddle-wheels, and talked about who was good for the Leger, and what they stood to win or lose for the Goodwood cup.


There is more.

I’ve also look ed at Travellers in the Third Reich. The rise of fascism through the eyes of everyday people, by Julia Boyd. This collects reports by British and American visitors to the new Germany in the 1930s. There is a wide variety of anecdotes (the US athletes from poor backgrounds who went to the Berlin Olympics were amazed by the amount of food they could eat on the boa – one marathon runner had to give up the race after one mile because he had put on so much weight during the voyage).

From the introduction:

Students form a particularly interesting group. It seems that even in the context of such an unpleasant regime, a dose of German culture was still considered an essential part of growing up. But it is hard to find an explanation for why so many British and American teenagers were sent off to Nazi Germany right up until the outbreak of war. Parents who despised the Nazis and derided their gross ‘culture’ showed no compunction in parcelling off their children to the Reich for a lengthy stay. For the young people in question, it was to prove an extraordinary experience, if not exactly the one originally proposed. Students certainly numbered among those who, on returning from Germany, tried to alert their families and friends to the lurking danger. But public indifference or sympathy with Nazi ‘achievements’, cheerful memories of beer gardens and dirndls, and, above all, the deep-seated fear of another war, meant that too often such warnings fell on deaf ears.

Neue Altstadt Frankfurt am Main

Some impressions of the new Altstadt in Frankfurt am Main following a guided tour on October 22.

Frankfurt’s original old town was the biggest in Germany and consisted of about 1250 medieval and Renaissance timber-framed buildings over an area of 7000 square metres. It was destroyed in air raids in WWII and largely replaced by a 1970s brutalist Technisches Rathaus, administrative buildings, which must have robbed the area of its life. The buildings were eventually bought back by the city and the whole area was ‘rebuilt’ from 2012-2018. The small buildings, alleyways and squares have returned: 15 buildings following the old plans (though no longer 12 families sharing one lavatory) and many others designed in a variety of similar styles. There are shops and restaurants in the lower floors. The area was opened in September 2018 and at the moment is full of groups of tourists like me being led around it.

Here’s a picture of the Technisches Rathaus taken in July 2008 by L. Willms:

Some impressions of the new buildings:

Four buildings in the street called Markt or Krönungsweg

On the left is part of no. 32, Goldene Schachtel, a new building. Then the dark red Altes Kaufhaus, also new. The following two buildings are both reconstructions: the pale blue Würzgarten and the pharmacy Schlegel, which forms the end of the Hühnermarkt.

This is just to show the combination of reconstructed and new buildings. There are better pictures online, For instance, here is the Goldene Schachtel from Matthias Alexander (Hg.): Die Neue Altstadt Frankfurt am Main, Societäts Verlag – playing with the use of overhanging storeys.

Rebuilding Frankfurt’s Old Centre

Here is a map of the district on which you can see which building are reconstructions and which are new.

Detail of the Goldene Waage, the most elaborately restored building, to be a café.

Hühnermarkt with fountain to Friedrich Stoltze, a dialect poet whose museum has not yet opened.

A mysterious text on the house Zur Flechte:

Slate – section of the jeweller’s shop Neues Paradies – slate in Old German style.

Soapstone columns behind Goldenes Lämmchen building

And here is a current screenshot of Google Maps showing building still going on. This has been completed now (although shopkeepers are still doing the final work inside) – Google Maps is obviously a bit out of date, so look forward to the next version.

Brexit-Übergangsgesetz – Transitional Brexit Act

The German Federal Foreign Ministry has prepared a ministry draft of a potential Transitional Brexit Acdt (Brexit-Übergangsgesetz) – the title alone presents a translation problem. There is an explanation on the website in both German and English.

This Referentenentwurf is something prepared by the relevant section of the ministry but not yet adopted by the German government as a bill. So something may happen after the summer holidays.

The part of interest to British citizens who want to take German citizenship suggests that within the transitional period In addition, there is to be a regulation in favour of British nationals who apply for German citizenship during the transition period.

Solange das Vereinigte Königreich noch EU-Mitglied ist oder im Übergangszeitraum wie ein solches behandelt wird, muss für die Einbürgerung die britische Staatsangehörigkeit nicht aufgeben werden. Dabei kommt es aber nicht auf den Tag der Antragstellung, sondern auf den Tag der Entscheidung über die Einbürgerung an. Längere Bearbeitungszeiten könnten also zu Lasten britischer Einbürgerungsbewerber gehen. Um dies zu vermeiden, bestimmt der Referentenentwurf, dass bei Antragstellung vor Ablauf des Übergangszeitraums die britische Staatsangehörigkeit beibehalten werden kann.

 

As long as the United Kingdom is still a member of the EU or is treated as such during the transition period, British nationals applying for German citizenship will not have to give up their British citizenship. However, the pertinent date will be not the date on which the application was submitted, but the date on which a decision on citizenship is taken. In other words, the lengthy period needed to process applications could be to the detriment of British applicants. To avoid this, the ministry draft states that if an application is submitted before the end of the transition period, British citizenship can be retained.

I find this a bit confusing. I don’t know how long it currently takes for a person to be granted German citizenship (and as long as the UK is still in the EU, therefore to have concurrent German and British citizenship), but it looks as if the date of application is to be conclusive. If the bill becomes law in its current form!

The draft itself reads

Zu § 3

Die Einbürgerung in den deutschen Staatsverband setzt grundsätzlich die Aufgabe oder den Verlust der bisherigen Staatsangehörigkeit voraus, es sei denn, der Einbürgerungs- bewerber besitzt die Staatsangehörigkeit eines Mitgliedstaates der Europäischen Union oder der Schweiz (§ 12 Absatz 2 StAG). Solange das Vereinigte Königreich Mitglied der Europäischen Union ist oder in dem Übergangszeitraum als Mitgliedstaat der Europäi- schen Union gilt, werden britische Einbürgerungsbewerber daher mit fortbestehender britischer Staatsagehörigkeit eingebürgert. Dabei kommt es nach allgemeinen verfahrens- rechtlichen Grundsätzen auf den Tag der Einbürgerung an, nicht auf den Tag der Antragstellung. Um zu vermeiden, dass längere Bearbeitungszeiten zu Lasten der britischen Einbürgerungsbewerber gehen, wird in dieser ergänzenden Übergangsregelung be- stimmt, dass bei Antragstellung vor Ablauf des Übergangszeitraums die Beibehaltung der britischen Staatsangehörigkeit hingenommen wird, wenn zu diesem Zeitpunkt die weiteren Einbürgerungsvoraussetzungen bereits erfüllt waren.

In other news, there was a lot of excitement in the press last week when the UK government, on July 12, published a Brexit white paper translated poorly into various languages.

Brexit: British government’s botched German translation of Chequers white paper met with ridicule

That’s all well and good, and certainly the UK does not do much for foreign languages nowadays, but it isn’t the first time such documents have been translated poorly, in whatever country they originated. Apparently the ITI wrote a letter to Dominic Raab but the CIoL didn’t.

I even found a Wiki site Find translation errors in the UK government’s Brexit white paper.

That really says something about how social media are encouraging us to waste our time. What about discussing the content of the white paper, people?

Amerikaner/black and white cookies

I always thought Amerikaner were a German thing and wondered where they got their name from, but it turns out they are a New York cookie (via smitten kitchen).

 


 

(Image by Ben Orwoll, public domain)

Amerikaner certainly used to be made with a form of ammonium carbonate called Hirschhornsalz (Salt of Hartshorn/baker’s ammonia) in German. This is widely sold in Germany, especially at this time of year. I saw it being used by London Eats, who posts Christmas cookies from abroad at this time of year:  Fedtebrød.

If you don’t want to make do with baking powder or bicarbonate of soda, the German Deli sells Hirschhornsalz, and also potash and Lebkuchen spice.

German Döner Kebab

German Döner Kebab shops are apparently everywhere.

Of course, it is a German thing. I think this is ‘Mile End coming soon’.

If you want to find out what meat they use, you have to click on the Location tab, which gives a choice of UK, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Sweden and Bahrain.

For the UK, you get Chicken, Beef or Mix. In Germany it was virtually always Turkey, sometimes beef if you were lucky.

Where’s the lamb? I think it’s because Germans don’t like it.