A hymn to the Carpathian meadows

Back in Bucharest - and straining to get into the mountains. A wonderful hymn to the area in the current National Geographic

these valleys in the Carpathian Mountains in the centre of Romania contain one of the great treasures of the cultivated world: some of the richest and most botanically diverse hay meadows in Europe. You can find up to 50 different species of grass and flowers growing there in a single square yard of meadow, and even more within reach as you sit down among them. This flowery miracle is maintained not by nature but by nature worked with the human hand. The richness is there only because a meadow stays a meadow if it is mown every summer. Abandoned, it will be filled with scrub in three to five years. As it is, for the moment anyway, Transylvania is a world made beautiful by symbiosis. All day long the smell of the meadows gradually thickens, and as the sun drops, the honey-sharp smell of the butterfly orchids, night scented, pollinated by moths, comes seeping out of the hillsides. Go for a walk, and you’ll find the flowers crowding around your feet. Practically no chemical sprays and no artificial fertilizers—too expensive and distrusted by these poor, small-scale farmers—mean the hillsides are purple with meadow salvia and pink with sainfoin.

The photo is one you will find in a marvellous album The colour of Hay. But an even greater treat is the occasional blog Carpathian Sheep Walk by Caroline Juler, author (amongst other things) of the delightful Blue Guide  Romania which I referred to in in a blog about good books about Romania some time ago.
If its photographs you are after, have a look at these great pics of the countryside in the Maramures area further north.

getting to know the Germans

Last year I dared to recommend “getting to know the Bulgarians through their painters” (of the last 100 years) and to produce a small book about it. Now I've had the idea of trying to understand the Germans through their literature of the past 50 years. I’ve been gripped by a book I picked up a couple of days ago (for 1.5 euros) called Light Years – a short history of German literature from 1945 to the present, available, sadly, only in German. It’s very far from being your normal, dry listing of worthy books – but rather a series of short and very human vignettes by Volker Weidermann (of the FAZ) of German writers as they struggled to make a living in post-war Germany. I’m almost half way through – and already feel I have made a lot of new friends. 

As I’ve mentioned already in this series of postings I’ve been doing in the past 2 months from Koln (20 so far), anglo-saxons wanting to read about European countries are well served with countries such as France, Italy and Spain but starved when it comes to Germany. There is no contemporary John Ardagh writing – despite the best efforts of Simon Winder and Peter Watson. Of course there’s no apparent market for such books – apart, perhaps, from those taking short-trips to Berlin for stag parties! But Germany is so vast, diverse and culturally rich that it definitely deserves far more books devoted to it than the dreadful choice currently available eg Spring Time for Germany - a little better, admittedly, than the stuff which Roger Boyes has been inflicting on the British public. Watson's "German Genius" or Winder's "Germania" are not the easiest of reads.
I see that there is a "very short introduction" to German Literature available on the Amazon site - it will be interesting to read it - and compare with the Weidermann text.

In a small way, Weidermann's book reminds me of the magnum opus of Clive James – "Cultural Amnesia" - which gave us a few pages apiece on European writers of the last century (most neglected) and was indeed tempted to alert him to Weidermann’s book - not least because of this profile. 

I've been one of James' camp followers for some 40 years and cannot imagine a world without him (see his website!!). I find him one of the world's best wordsmiths and renaissance men! One of the very few people I would like to spend some hours with. I was, first, captivated by his songs with Pete Atkin (the 1970s?); amused with his TV commentaries (written and TV); seduced by his autobiographies; and then stunned with his massive "Cultural Amnesia"

Model Germany?

Germany has, at the moment, the reputation of an invincible powerhouse - although it was some 15 years ago seen to be somewhat sluggish. I have referred in recent posts to the various critiques which have surfaced in the past few years. Last week's Der Spiegel had a large feature on the decline of public investment - and the deterioration in public infrastructure.

This theme is picked up again in a publication by the European Council for Foreign Relations, entitled  - a German Model for Europe? which 

examines the reasons for the success of the German economy during the last decade. In particular, it describes the elements of the Agenda 2010 – essentially a set of labour market reforms implemented by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 2003 onwards – and explores their contribution to Germany’s macroeconomic performance. It points out some problematic elements of Germany’s economic performance during the last decade and concludes that Germany’s economic success is a product of a combination of nominal wage restraint, supported by labour market reforms which have brought down the reservation wage and put downward pressure on wages, and severe spending restraints on public investment as well as on research and development and education. On the whole, this cannot serve as a blueprint for Europe.

Burning and ....Celebration of Books

My local branch of the Thalia bookstore chain was offering remaindered books yesterday in the huge Rhein Centre Mall just minutes from the house I’m renting in the delightful Bahnstrasse whose quiet street goes back 100 years. I emerged clutching 4 books for 10 euros – all of them real finds. First Umberto Eco’s stunning 450 page On Ugliness (although my version was in German, Scribd gives me the full version here in English!!) which immediately goes into the short list I have of “beautiful books” (others include The History of Reading; The Embarrassment of Riches; and Bean Eaters and Bread Soup.

It was 80 years ago (10 May 1933) that the infamous “burning of the books” took place in Nazi Germany – an event which is still marked today. Volker Weidermann is a German literary critic who has published The Book of Burned Books which was my second purchase. The website I love German books noted 3 years ago that it -

provides portraits of every writer on a list compiled by the librarian Wolfgang Herrmann who drew up his list of books by 131 writers of “un-German spirit” for removal from public libraries. It was the student organisation Deutsche Studentenschaft that organised the book burnings around Germany, using the list to select the titles. The writers in question were communists, Jews, anti-militarists and feminists – in a few cases all of the above. The book burning had different consequences for many of them. There were those who went into exile, many of them dying far from home, those who resorted to “inner emigration” of varying degrees of hypocrisy – and some who adapted to the regime, openly writing propaganda for the Nazis. Many of them are still household names in a certain kind of household today, while others died in poverty and obscurity. Plenty of names would be familiar to English readers: Klaus Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. And Weidermann gives us some quirky details on these writers, such as the letters exchanged between Zweig and Roth and Heinrich Mann’s fading optimism in the USA.

And one man – Georg Salzmann – started in the 1970s to collect specimens of these books from flea markets and antiquarian bookshops, amassing a collection of 12,000 which he donated in 2009 to the University of Augsburg. I admire such obsessions!

My third book is actually a comic – the first I have ever bought (in any language). Der Bewegte man (I thought it meant the “aroused man”) appeared in 1987 was probably one of Germany’s first gay comic strips. The author - Ralf Konig - reminds me of Claire Bretecher and is now the country’s most famous “bande desseinist”. I won’t make the obvious comment about the meaning of “bander” in French!  

My final bargain was a collection of short essays What do we want? by one Ingo Schulze who turns out to have interesting views about contemporary events, for example in this issue of Der Freitag which is a worthy German weekly. 

It seems appropriate to end with this link to a marvellous table listing about 150 novels in the German language which Guardian readers recommended for a World Literature Tour, The equivalent French list is here.

Footloose and fancy free

Several times on this blog, I have highlighted the nomadic life I have lived for the past 22 years – with least 20 addresses during that period. Although my project life has been quiet for the past 3 years, I still commute between 3-4 locations and have been on the lookout for an urban base which I could really call home. In 2010 I explored the idea of a house in Brittany but realised that I did not need another rural retreat but rather an urban base for winter. Living in Koln these past 2 months has made the idea of a German base one worth further study. Notwithstanding the sourness of a lot of German journalistic comment at the moment, their transport systems; greenery; civilised behaviour and general costs make this a very attractive place to live.

I’ve been looking (casually) at the housing market during my present 2 month stay in Koln – the internet and also the VOX television programme called “Mieten, kaufen, wohnen” allow me to get a good sense of what the market is like. Furnished rented accommodation is not easy to find – I’m paying 8 times here what I pay in Sofia for my central flat – which, unlike food, petrol and communal services, is about the right relationship given incomes in Bulgaria. And there are signs of stress – the free copy of Der Spiegel which I was given this week as part of a special offer has a story about the extent of decay in the country’s infrastructure which I had not expected to read in a German paper.

And another story tells of an apparent shortage of housing accommodation which, on closer examination, is not quite what it seems -

Long lines stretch out in front of apartments in Munich, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Frankfurt during house showings. Desperate apartment hunters are even starting Facebook campaigns, writing chain emails or posting ads on streetlights: "A small family is looking for a home in this area! Please give us a chance!"
Politicians are starting to react. Hamburg has proposed housing students and trainees on ships. In Berlin, Federal Minister of Transport, Building and Urban Development Peter Ramsauer of the conservative Christian Democrats plans to convert vacant military barracks into dorms and is urging the city to be imaginative. Meanwhile, Peer Steinbrück, the centre-left Social Democrats' candidate for the Chancellery, is promoting subsidized housing during his campaign. Even the ever-hesitant chancellor, Angela Merkel, suddenly seems to feel inclined to put an end to rising rents.
Merkel even surprised many in her own party with her campaign pledge a few weeks back to cap price increases on properties coming up for re-rental to 10 per cent of average rents in the area. But when the Green Party, which has been touting the issue for two years, tried to push a similar initiative through parliament on Friday, Merkel's coalition parties rejected it. The chancellor appears keen to chalk up a victory on the popular issue in her next term in office.
 A Run on Fashionable Areas
The overall impression is that Germany's big cities are facing a housing shortage as bad as the one caused by Word War II. But experts, real estate associations, German renter groups and municipal building companies convey a different message: There is no general housing shortage in Germany. Instead, there is a massive run on certain fashionable areas in popular cities, which inflates prices. Too many people want to live in the same neighborhoods and yet they are surprised that prices for apartments are increasing.
 Comparisons to Hong Kong
"A much greater number of people today exclusively focus on the hip districts in spite of prices. So rents continue to rise and the search for apartments is growing increasingly harder," says Axel Gedaschko, president of the Federal Association of Housing and Real Estate Associations (GdW). That's the reason why many people get the impression that the housing shortage in large German cities has grown to dimensions comparable to Hong Kong.
Often it's only two or three subway stops that make all the difference. According to an analysis by Internet portal Immobilienscout24.de, which runs classified ads for rentals and property for sale, five times more inquiries are made for apartments in Cologne's city center compared to the district of Bilderstöckchen -- which isn't much further out.

"It makes my blood boil," says the manager of one property management company is responsible for around 4,000 apartments. "Those who claim that there are no affordable living spaces in all of Cologne and in other big cities are lying," he insists.
The average rent excluding heat and utilities in Cologne has risen by 9 percent. But dramatic increases in price have only occurred in re-rentals in some popular neighbourhoods. He says the hikes in price are also a result of the government encouraging homeowners to conduct renovations to make homes more energy efficient -- costs that are in part then passed on to the renter.
He also places some blame on today's generation of renters, who he says make it easier for property owners to raise rents on a regular basis. "Today's renter tends to be unsettled," Pass says. He points to singles as an example. At first they're satisfied with 50 square meters (538 square feet), but after they receive their first pay raise, they move into a 70-square-meter apartment. That gives apartment owners the perfect opportunity to turn the screws: They have no problems whatsoever increasing the rent when the re-rent the old apartment to a new tenant.
Already today, around 50 percent of the people residing in large cities are living alone, in some cases occupying living space that would be suitable for up to three people. Something urgently needs to be done for families with low incomes.

If true, that's an amazing statistic - 50% of people living alone in large German cities. I feel we need more flexibility. Take my case - I want to buy somewhere - but only for use during the winter. The place I'm currently renting (upper floor of an old house) would be ideal - but the market doesn't cater for such eccentricities...... 

Coincidentally, The Guardian has today a story about developments in the English market for rented accommodation 

Bulgarian protests get serious

OK, time for some normal service! I left Bulgaria in mid-April - leaving my nice flat in the heart of the city for the summer months. After a couple of weeks in Bucharest, I then flew on May day to Koln where I have been undergoing some medical treatment. I hope shortly to get back to my mountain house in the Carpathians where the weather has apparently been as cold and wet as the rest of Europe. Pity my old villagers and their helpers who have been trying to get the first of the summer hay in!!

But, in the meantime, my Bulgarian friends have been taking to the streets yet again. I am grateful to The Guardian for this coverage -

In recent weeks the world has been transfixed by protests in Turkey and Brazil. Fewer media outlets have reported on the anti-government protests in Bulgaria, now well into their second week. But make no mistake about it: Bulgaria is undergoing a profound crisis of representation.
Every night for more than a week up to 10,000 people have taken to the streets of Sofia, initially protesting against the appointment on 14 June of the media oligarch Delyan Peevski as Bulgaria's "security tsar", the head of the State Agency for National Security (Dans), the Bulgarian CIA.
Peevski, who is 32, comes from a well-connected family that owns Bulgaria's largest newspaper and television group (it controls 80% of print media in the country) and has no experience in the security sector. In 2007 he was sacked from his post as deputy minister and investigated for attempted blackmail. He is an MP for the ethnic Turkish party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), which supports the prime minister Plamen Oresharski's governing coalition, led by the Bulgarian Socialist party (BSP). His appointment took place without a debate in the National Assembly.
Dans is the agency responsible both for Bulgaria's internal and external security. Its role was elevated significantly in the wake of the terrorist attack on Burgas airport in July 2012 (attributed to Hezbollah) which killed five Israeli tourists and their Bulgarian bus driver. This executive role has been strengthened even further recently after controversial amendments in the Dans legislation were signed giving the organisation responsibility for dealing with organised crime.
Bulgarians are protesting against far-reaching and systematic corruption and the "capture" of the state by rent-seeking oligarchic networks. Oresharski was appointed by the BSP to head a so-called "expert" government, after a general election in April produced a tight outcome. The technocratic government came about because the leading figures within the two largest political parties, the BSP and the centre-right Gerb (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) were widely discredited. And although the prime minister has now withdrawn the appointment of Peevski, for protesters the episode suggested that even respected figures like Oresharski are incapable of shaking off the shadowy world of oligarchic power in Bulgaria.
In Bulgaria it is often impossible to know where organised crime ends and legitimate business begins. The nexus between the two is characterised by complex bureaucratic structures, opaque corporate accounting and a maze of offshore accounts. In Varna, Bulgaria's third largest city, the protests have taken direct aim at TIM, a business conglomerate allied to Gerb and long the real power in the region. Some estimates suggest that it controls up to 70% of Varna's economy, including most of the tourist infrastructure. When protesters in Varna yell "M-A-F-I-A" they are automatically collapsing business into politics and implicating local municipal officials as the agents of this powerful oligarchic network.
Varna perfectly illustrates why the current protests are largely non-party-policitical and anti-politics in tone: the definitive division in today's Bulgaria is no longer between right and left, but between the citizens and the mafia. This is a world where the guilty don't just go unpunished; they ascend to the highest citadels of power.
Although corruption and the abuse of power are the central themes of this protest, economic hardship also plays a role. New data from the EU demonstrates that Bulgarians have the lowest standard of living in the European Union, at around 50% of the EU average. Even Croatia, which will accede to the EU on 1 July, is significantly more prosperous than Bulgaria.
The irony here is not lost on Bulgarians. At the onset of the EU financial crisis in 2008, Bulgaria had one of the lowest levels of public debt in Europe at 15% of GDP. Its budget deficit was below 3%. And yet the government of Boyko Borissov embarked on a foolish programme of austerity measures, the logic of which was almost entirely predicated on demonstrating to Brussels what a good pupil Bulgaria now was. Reductions in public spending coupled with large increases in the price of electricity and other utilities brought people out on to the streets in February. But, like Turkey, what began as a protest against a specific appointment has quickly mutated into a general opposition to the government.
Oresharski also has to grapple with increasing ethnic tensions in the country. Many Bulgarians resent the influence of the junior coalition party, the MRF which represents mainly the Turkish minority (about 10% of the population). The far-right party Ataka, which won 23 seats and 7.3% of the vote in the recent parliamentary election, has sought to exploit this sentiment at every opportunity. Its leader, Volen Siderov, continues to stoke the flames of hatred against both the ethnic Turks and the Roma population.
A further destabilising element is the continued feuding between the leaders of Bulgaria's largest political parties. Last week, Borissov vowed to initiate a libel lawsuit against Sergei Stanishev, leader of the BSP and president of the Party of European Socialists, over claims by the latter that Borissov had a criminal record. The timing of all these developments could not be worse for Bulgaria as it comes under more and more scrutiny in the run-up to the June European council summit meeting.
The protesters, meanwhile, cherish the attention. They want to re-enforce their message to Bulgaria's politicians: an end to vertiginous and voracious oligarchical power and the normalisation of Bulgarian politics.

A sado-masochistic canter through some German books on contemporary society

Everything is going to the dogs, if we are to believe the books to be found on the shelves of average mainstreet German bookshops today. Thomas Wieczorek is a prolific (and angry) German journalist who has been charting the excesses of the power elite over the past decade, for example in The Dumb Republic – how the media, business and the politicians are selling us which first appeared in 2009. His latest title can be translated variously as "Ruined" or Fucked up - why our country is going downhill and who's profiting from this which gives a pretty good sense of its drift. 

Juergen Toth’s Webs of power – how the political and business elite is destroying our country (2013) seems to be a powerful critique of neo-liberalism and its effects on Germany. It plots the tight links between business, politics, media, think tanks etc and therefore covers the same ground as Wieczorek (who is strangely not acknowledged in the notes)

Sasha Adamek’s The Power machine (2013) tries to shine a light into this murky area by focusing first on the two astounding recent resignations of German Presidents and then on the work of lobbyists. Horst Koehler had apparently to go because he was too independent; Christian Wulff for the opposite reason – he was too dependent on and pally with dubious business friends. Adamek suggests that crony capitalism is alive and well in Germany -  

In total, about 18 000 German officers work in Berlin and Bonn ministries. In addition, 620 members of parliament with their average of two employees. Thus nearly 20 000 representatives of government and parliament are facing about 5,000 lobbyists. Statistically, a lobbyist take care of four representatives from politics and government. More than 400 lobbyists paid by corporations or associations also  contribute a desk in the federal ministries.But why we are already living in a corrupt republic? The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was published recently in the 2010 comparative study "Life in Transition Survey II" to the question of how common are experiences of greasing or favors in different countries. Who has made in the past twelve months, an unofficial payment or presents a gift to the other person "like a"? At least ten per cent of the respondents affirmed this specific question. So that more people in this country gave to real acts of corruption as for example the inhabitants of Georgia, Italy or Croatia. The advantage is an integral part of everyday life and thus also the power structure in Germany.

Klaus Norbert is apparently another critical German journalist with several critiques to his name. The title of his latest book is certainly one which I would not normally apply to Germans - Idioten– made in Germany (2011) and shows that restless educational reform is not merely a feature of modern Britain but is also wreaking havoc here in Germany.

Two other books completed my sado-masochistic canter through current German publishers’ lists - Our prosperity and its enemies by Gabor Steingart; and German soil – a participant observation by Moritz von Ustar

The painting is an Otto Dix

German introspection

I’ve spent 7 weeks so far in Koln – Germany’s fourth largest urban district. The same time I spent in Berlin in 1964. It is my first real venture into the country since all of 50 years ago. The bubble in which I existed then and there was, of course, a very different one from the one in which I am presently enveloped.
I was 22 then, just finished University, living in a room in a small Berlin flat and encountering a new civilisation for the first time - as student pressures were building prior to the 1968 explosion. And it was a mere 3 years after I had seen with my own eyes (and from a train crossing East Germany parallel with Russian tanks) the first bricks of the Berlin wall being laid.

Now I’m in an affluent Koln suburb making a daily crossing of the Rhein to receive medical treatment and trying to understand the Germans through bookshops rather than friendships.

Helmut Schmidt remains big here – about 8 of his books spread on a table in the huge 3 storey bookshop on Neumarkt (plus 2 of his late wife's; and 2 of his daughter Susanne's. The latter is a financial journalist).
From a great remaindered bookshop nearby I had last week picked up for 5 euros Deutschland for Beginners which was published in English in 2007 by Ben Donald as Springtime for Germany. It’s a light-hearted romp through the country which seems to have annoyed most of its British readers none of whom seem to have spotted the basic logic of the book’s chapter structure – words which go to the core of German identity such as

• weltschmerz;
• angst
• gemutlichkeit
• gesundheit
• kindergarten
• schadenfreude
• zeitgeist
• lebensraum
• wanderlust
• weltmeister

I'm enjoying the book - which I'm able to read (slowly) in German making my usual pencilled annotations for later checking.

I spotted several “zeitgeist” titles about the country aimed more at a German audience on the Koln bookshelves – such as Stefan Gaertner’s Deutschlandmeise – forays into a crazy country (2012) which seems a rather hurriedly-written set of notes for a satire on German tourist resorts.
Mein Deutschland, dein Deutschland by Stamer and Buhrow (2011) records the first impressions of Germany of a journalist couple after being absent in France and the USA for more than a decade; and a highly controversial tour of Germany - Allein unter Deutschen by New York based Israeli Tuvia Tenenbom (2012) was initially refused publication for its scurrilous accusations about German racism;.
The most interesting, however, looked Die Rupelrepublik - The Bully Republic – why we are so unsociable by Jorg Schindler (2012).