My mood improved a lot this week. I put a happier picture.
I rested more and worked less than last week. I think that the people saying that sleep can make people intelligent are right.
What did I want to talk about in this post?
Yeah, first I wanted to say that German is a beautiful language (yes, it is!!) and the people that don't agree just never heard a real German person (except the Bavarian and Austrian ones, their way of speaking can be compared to Scottish or Irish people in English, just terribly hard to understand with a weird accent) talking or they never read Goethe in German so I don't consider them able to judge.
I really wanted to say that because I'm really (really!!) pissed off by (how could I explain it?) the indifference of some people that will say to you that Germany is really no fun, just for the pleasure they get to oppose you. In other cases, you just get the feeling that because they are not interested in it, they consider that it is not worth to be liked. It is really weird. Germany and German culture are sure still not as popular as the English or American ones.
It is the important statement that is stuck into my head for some months now. I just happened to have spent something like 8 years in a French-German elementary school and then French-German High School and I am really surprised how French people just don't know anything about German culture. Even though Germany is a neighbouring country, and you can get in Berlin within 1h30 with the plane (only when the airport's (Air france's in fact) staff is not on strike, otherwise you can wait more than 8 hours to get on your flight. And believe me, it's really boring: there's nothing to do in an airport apart from shopping in really expensive high-class shops. You can't even sleep because all seats have really annoying armrests.)
In fact, I like the German past culture better than the German present one. Germany (and Austria) had great writers and poets. Goethe of course, all the philosophers from enlightement (Aufklärung), but not only. I like people like Novalis, Heinrich Heine (Read the Lorelei poem!!), Bertold Brecht (with Mother Courage), Süskind, Arthur Schnitzler (from the time of the Austrian Empire) and others.
My favourite ones would be Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil and the poet Paul Celan. The first one of these authors I hope you know him at least by name (a clue: he wrote The World of Yesterday). I like the book of the second one titled The Confusions of Young Torless that I studied in German class (there are few books that I studied in German class that I actually enjoyed maybe it's because I sort of didn't like the teacher that I had for the last 3 years, still now I think it's a miracle I put up with him 3 years long). And the third one wrote a poem that I think is one of the most beautiful that I ever read (another is the Erlkönig of Goethe, I like the remixed version of Rammstein in the song Dalai Lama too).
Next I think that German way of thinking nowadays is pretty complicated . Here I only speak for myself, what I think resulted from what I saw and heard. German people, still today, are tied up first to the WWII and Nazi past and secondly to the period of the DDR. These two periods of time take a big part in the life of German people today. I think they are deeply traumatised by it.
(Primo Levi, Les naufragés et les rescapés, a good book with some clues about that)
In my High School it was just an obsession, every years we spoke about it, every years teachers explained again and again what happened. Maybe it's because of that German society is so stiff, far less "easy-going" or "relaxed" than the French society. But it is just some of my thoughts, nothing to take as truth.
Artwork by Miggy from the Robot anthology Nr.2.
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