Maru's Mun Journal

In Stuttgart, which is a notoriously peaceful city of industry, engineering, productivity, technical innovation and annoying attention to details (suburbs are home to the headquarters of Mercedes Benz and Porsche, both), an unholy alliance of conservative politicians and a few big businesses (among them Bilfinger Berger, the large construction company implicated in the corruption scandal in Cologne where less materials were used in building a new subway tunnel than was billed, quality checks were falsified, and structures in the middle of the city collapsed in consequence, among them the historical archive, and two people died) is trying to put the train station underground and sell the swathe of inner-city land at a high price for business and residential development.

Usually something like that will be welcome to the Stuttgarters, whose motto notionally is 'Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue', that is 'Work, work, and build your own home' -- people dedicated to industriousness and the self-absorbed increase of their own wealth and security.

However, this projects has met with heavy doubts as a) an expertise conducted by a firm of civil engineers revealing that there are unexpected cavities and potentially unstable gypsum pockets in the city's underground has been summarily ignored by the conservative politicians and the corporations involved, shocking the over-careful, security-minded Suebian bourgeois population with unheard-of arrogance and dismissal of measurable facts, which simply is not done there, b) most of the current main station would be torn down -- and that is a momentous monument of very early modernist architecture, and c) 300 very old trees in the city park will have to be felled.

The volume of protests was remarkable. Anything from school children to old age pensioners turned up in droves every since the first parts of the historical buildings were demolished. At once point, there were 40,000 protesters at one single protest march -- remarkable in a city of 600,000!

German chancellor Angela Merkel, of the Christian Democrats (= conservatives) was quoted with the remarkable words that politicians can't ignore valid contracts, no matter how many people are standing around on the street at one point, but have to enforce decisions made. For great ironic context: Merkel is from the former East Germany and started out her career in the grassroots movement that toppled the East German regime and ultimately the iron curtain, ending the cold war that way, almost entirely through pressure from the street and mass protest of completely ordinary people.

Yesterday, the politicians in the pockets of Bilfinger Berger and the other companies involved sent out the riot police against completely non-violent protesters who were chaining themselves to the trees and trying to stop the destruction of their park. Without warning, they fired tear gas and water cannons at the protesters (the usual mix of school kids, concerned housewives, old age pensioners, students, and some opposition politicians, plus random freelancers like one writer of detective novels quoted in some news blogs, who can pick when they work and when they protest -- the rest of the people who'd come to a demonstration on a Saturday were of course busy with the 'schaffe, schaffe' part of the Suebian lifestyle), broke them up using mounted police, riot batons, armoured and/or sand-filled gloves, and possibly even rubber bullets.

This vid shows random eight minutes from the protests, with a policeman spontaneously spraying pepper spray on people doing exactly nothing at 4:10. Oh yes, and German police don't have to wear name tags, don't have to give their names when asked, and are allowed to cover their faces in any situation. Similarity to Star Wars' Imperial Stormtroopers has been remarked on several times around German language blogs.

Here, for example, is a number of pictures on one of the blogs that come up on my blogroll at Blogger.de, taken by the blogger himself.

Hundreds of protesters were injured, some of them badly; one person had at least one eye shot out by the water cannons.

Scenes ensued that remind you of a) the movie 'Avatar', b) police and army trying to squash the 1989 protests in East Germany which our present politicians laud for its great civil courage, and as the foundation of a renewed and reunified modern democratic Germany, and c) what happened in Iran in the summer of 2009.

For some reason, the horrifying scenes have not yet spread out into international media (even the English language version of Der Spiegel doesn't mention it with a single word as of now -- compare the Love Parade disaster going international within a day!), which is why I offer this write-up. It probably belongs on ontd_political, but I don't like dealing with large and busy comms.

There is one picture from the protests that is already becoming sort-of iconic after only one day. It shows an old man bleeding from his eyes because of the tear-gas, supported by a middle-ages man and a very young man. From their looks, they might be three generations of the same family.

I put it under a cut because nobody ought to have a picture like that sprung on them on their open flist. Nobody died (yet), but other than that, it shocks you in the way video footage from Iran did...

( Picture under cut for serious RL gore and shock value )

Remember, this happened yesterday, in a park, during a protest about a contested infrastructure project, and some old trees.

Something is very wrong here.-

Rollerderby is getting popular in Berlin; it's getting here!

I'll go watch a bout as soon as we get one in Munich...

(Video is in German, but pictures are pictures...)

OMG it is the time of year where I feel some of my ancestors were bears. If I lived in Anita Blake's world, I'm sure I'd be a were-bear.

Damn, do I ever want to hibernate right now! I had an entire package of chocolate-covered espresso beans at work today, and still never managed to wake up completely. If I suddenly fall off the internet tonight, that's what will have got at me.-

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. (Please note: If you simply wish to comment on something I've said but don't want to participate in the meme, that is fine. I will only give you five words if you specifically comment you with 'Words!')

Now, there are some words here that I have done in the first or second iteration of this meme already; but I was curious as to what yet another Milli!mun would give me.

RP: I never played the tabletop version, or computer games (much). I was utterly clueless when I stumbled upon the old Discworld RPG in February 2004. I laughed my head off at the Patrician (as played by BNF copperbadge) going on about V-day, and apped Margolotta the teetotal vampire lady. Then, more charries followed. I probably did everything wrong that anybody can possibly do wrong in RPage. I was never given a manual of the most basic dos and don'ts. Godmoding, terrible sues, random OCs, blurring of IC/OOC divide -- I all did it, more or less. But I learned. The genre of 'journal-based role-playing' was just inventing itself, and we were among the seminal places that later siphoned off their muns into Milliways; another was one called 'Restiturere' from which essayel came. While the Disworld RPG fell silent, Milliways boomed (in its first autumn of existence it had 60 to 90 EPs per day!), and even though I had a DW-RPG pup over there from the first morning of its existence (crossovers from other RPGs were allowed back then, and villainny, one of the two founders of Milliways, had been in the DW-RPG as well), I only let myself be lured over there in November 2004, agreeing to play a villain for somebody else for two or three weeks. That villain was asar_suti, and the rest, as they say, is history. Some of that history is not for public consumption; suffice it to say that I am still there, and so is 'Suti, while other people are long gone and forgotten, and yet other people I used to have problems with have evolved into friendlies, if not outright friends. And I think you do need bad experiences that teach you. I could never deal well with bitches before starting RPage; now, I eat them for breakfast at work and they come back to thank me.

Goth: Yes, please. Big-G Goths, and little-G goths. I'm a bit of both. My family came from an area where the Goths settled for a century or two on their way south from the Baltic sea (if you go with the Jordanes version of their history), and there are people that claim Goths ousted from Italy settled in Bavaria, among other footsore ragtag of the Barbarian Migration (which is a half-joking definition for what the Bavarians really are, as they weren't known as a tribe before they settled here, at all). I balk a bit at the idea that the snarky bastards in the Miserable Village might be desendants of Teja's people, but on the other hand, the Lady Lena and the people in the tiny village where my cats are from? I can totally see it in them. In any case, here was part of Theodoric's realm all right; Felix Dahn makes the point while desribing people at the great assembly at Regeta which elected Witichis by saying they had come from as far as Augusta Vindelicorum, which is Augsburg. Which made me snerk, as Munichers find "Augschpurg" faintly funny...

History: We have that here as a matter of course. And while not everybody is always much aware of it, I have grown up to pay attention to the past, and its important influence on the present. I have grown up with the stories my grandmother told about her childhood, and I have grown up looking for pieces of Samian ware in vineyards along the Rhine, where my father, who is an archaeologist and used to work for the state of Hesse until he retired, suspected that Roman villae rusticae ought to have been. He has this theory that they weren't just private manor houses/large farms, but (up there near the Germanic limes, beyond the Rhine) also look-out posts against a possible invasion from a breached limes, and a network spreading civilisation into the hinterlands of the empire. So, he has studied maps a lot and has theories where (judging from known villa sites) more villae ought to be, to make the lookout posts complete, to be able to see the next villae up and down the lines, and to close the net. So, finding Samian ware on a suspected site was a great achievement! I died with envy at around age ten or eleven when my friend who had come with us for lack of anything better to do found a piece at an important and otherwise virgin site, and I didn't! Also, I have an uncle who is a historian, and have translated articles for him and colleagues of him, which I gave up after one lady made an utter mess of it, kept changing text that I had already translated, and never paid in full. I decided I no longer needed capricious, disorganised professors randomly screwing up my life with their demands, taking large chunks out of it for comparatively little pay.

Reenactment: I don't really re-enact; the Nazgul and I merely visit appropriate events in costumes we try to get historically correct. Kaltenberg we missed this year due to torrential downpours; now we have high hopes for Maxlrain at the end of September, where we would go with the Lady Lena in whose stalble my cats were born. I think I'll make another peplum before that, though. While the dress is all right, I really have all sorts of misgivings about the outer garment...

Germany: I live there. German is my first language, but I started learning English when I was three, from a great-aunt just returned from a year in Washington with her husband, who was a professor of mathematics and taught at Georgetown for a year. He has a Wikipedia entry, but only in German, sorry. It doesn't mention, though,  that he was married twice, and that he met his second wife while they both worked for the German opponents of Bletchley Park. My great-aunt was that fiendishly clever, and later wrote her PhD thesis about Cassiodorus; she was a classicist. It all comes circling back, definitely. Anyway, she taught me English early, and I never ever use the plea of 'not my first language' when interacting with people. Starting at age three gives you no excuse there. Otherwise, it is interesting to live in Germany; there's lots of history here, most of it not actively awful, and situated as it is in the middle of Europe, and one of the founding members of the EU, there is an interesting future, while not really going through 'interesting times' right now.

Here you can find trivia and stats about me in the Real World; I ganked this cute little questionnaire from wiebke because I instinctively found myself answering it while reading hers.

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