Marshall in Strange Places

Omnibus Blog 3: Mostly Politics

Once again I am cramming several posts into one awesome Omnibus Blog! This time it's all about politics.

Karneval's Political Parade Floats

Karneval is a time for debauchery, but on Rose Monday, it becomes a time for parades. During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, people mount the floats and toss beads and doubloons to the crowds below. In the Rhineland, they take on a political bend.

Tsirpas takes aim at Cyclops Angela in 2015's Rose Monday parade.

In what is my favourite Karneval tradition, the parade floats become gigantic, 3-dimensional political cartoons. This float was applauded by the crowd (this was shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris).

Some floats make fun of topics of the day, like the one above of a cycloptic German Chancellor Angela Merkel and slingshot-wielding a Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsirpas. One of this year's floats pissed off the new Polish government, which is too angry at everything to realize that when you complain about satire about you more people pay attention to that satire.

Many floats target political extremism of Islamic terror groups like ISIS or the increasingly hateful far right-wing fringe of german politics, like the Alternative for Germany or, as shown below, the National Democratic Party of Germany.

These are all things worth satirising and demonstrates that politics belongs to the streets just as much as the legislature.

Trump got the Karneval treatment this year.

The float that angered the new Polish government.

Canadians, please remember NDP in Germany stands
for the National Democratic Party of Germany.

Britain out? Scotland in?

Reading the news lately you would think the European Union is in a lot of trouble. This isn't new. The EU feels so precarious at times – staying together it seems with nothing but hope, a tangled bureaucracy, dental floss, and chewing gum – that it's natural to see every problem as a crisis that will tear the whole thing down.

As of this posting, a British exit from the EU is one such possible problem being blown into a crisis.

During last year's UK election, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on the country's EU membership. Doing this helped him placate his increasingly anti-EU base and arguably win the election.

Using that as a bargaining chip, Cameron negotiated a settlement that allows UK exemption on stop paying welfare and child care benefits to migrant workers and special protections for City of London financial sector.

Despite the lack of political or economic sense to leave the EU, the concessions might be enough for the UK's eternally-angry Euroskeptics or for EU Parliamentarians, who vote on them as well.

Many EU member states already resent the UK's special status and take umbrage to the settlement. And Eastern European member states, where many of those migrant workers come from, are not liking this either.

Now, a referendum on joining the EU in Denmark was narrowly defeated in 1992, which put the whole EU at risk of not being formed at all. A special agreement was reached to gave Denmark exemptions for military independence and keeping its currency, the krone.

The UK's case is a little different. Denmark's referendum threatened to kill the EU before it even began. Britain's exit is an unprecedented problem, but it won't imperil the EU – it's just not so good for the continent's economy.

The tangle doesn't end there. Scotland, which held a referendum on its own independence and voted it down by 10 per cent, is mostly pro-EU. The Scottish National Party also holds the majority in its parliament.

If the UK left the EU, there'd certainly be another referendum on Scottish independence, with EU membership as a central issue in the very near future. If Scottish attitudes toward the EU remained the same, Scotland will vote for independence and likely join the EU shortly after.

This would be a double-whammy for the UK: Exit from the EU closes off a market of 300 million people to its exports and leads to the independence of the region with all the UK's oil and whisky.

In the long run, the EU comes out as the winner. It loses its loudest whiniest, grumpiest member state, which wants the economic benefits of being in the EU without the obeying its rules, while getting a new member with a healthy economy and great whisky.

Karneval For Foreigners

Combine these images in your mind: Mardi Gras. Halloween. Spring Break-style hedonism. Germans.

If your mind hasn't been blown, you should have a good idea of what the days before Lent look like in Dusseldorf, Cologne, and all over Germany's Rhineland.

That is what Karneval looks like.

There are parades, marching bands, folk songs, costumes, and dancing. There are costumes, candy, and fun for the kids. And there is a lot of partying for the older kids.

Our first brush with Karneval was while we were living in Dusseldorf's Altstadt, which meant we were ground zero for the drinking, carousing, dancing, bingeing, pissing, puking that accompanies Karneval.

A younger me might have loved that. But I am an old man now, and I had vertigo, which is not a lot of fun when everyday for five or six days (I lost track) there is either a party for 18 hours or street cleaning machinery for the remaining 6 below my window.

It's important to point out this is not a typical German phenomenon. It's strictly a Rhineland tradition. While the Rhinelanders party, the rest of Germany look on with a mix of surprise and dismay. It is, if we're going to rely on stereotypes, the most un-German thing you can imagine taking place in Germany.

Many non-Rhinelander Germans colleagues pack up and leave the area for an extended long weekend – the same way people in Florida board up with their windows and leave the coast when a hurricane is approaching.

Fun-loving, whatever-goes Berlin endures it, thanks to the government workers who relocated there from the old West German capital of Boon, in North Rhine-Westphalia.

And for Rhineland Germans, you either love Karneval or you hate it. Remember, they've been living with this all their lives, and many develop a powerful hate for the debauchery or the costumes or the Karneval songs (which all seem to sound the same to me).

As a foreigner, I have an advantage and a disadvantage.

The disadvantage is I am an outsider to the festivities. I don't know the songs or the dances or the traditions. I didn't even bother with a costume last year, although Kata did.

But being the outsider also means I don't have the years of hate for Karneval that others have for it. I just don't feel that strongly about it. I loathed the boozy carnage last year – I was also understanding, because I was a wild man once – but I enjoyed the spectacle of the costumes and the politically satirical parade floats.

As a foreigner, it would be easy to take the weekend off and ignore the whole thing. We almost did.

Instead we embraced our outsider-ness, put on costumes (well, just a wig for me), grabbed a few beers, and joined the crowd in Cologne. I might not love it, but I definitely don't hate it, and I don't know where I fit in, but we enjoyed it anyway.

The beer buying experience during Karneval in Cologne.

Daughter of Frankenstein.

A store in Cologne's downtown prepares for Hurricane Karneval.

Heidelberg: A Ruin Done Right

The French could not have realized what a favour they were doing for future generations of Germans when they blew up the castle at Heidelberg.

What some might consider a catastrophe, we can now consider a blessing because Heidelberg's romance comes largely from the castle ruins that rise above the town.

Imagine what could have happened if they left it there. Would a rich guy have bought it and renovated it into some aristocratic pleasure house?

Would someone might have stepped in and "updated" it? Like the medieval and Romanesque cathedral that had their beautiful frescoes and vaults covered with gaudy Baroque gild work.

What we have instead is a ruin done right. No ostentation. No schnick-schnack. Aside from a museum, it's something as close to the real thing as you could get without travelling back in time. Which, when I think of it, would not be a good idea for someone like me: a non-German, Bad French-speaking Anglo.

But, what a ruin it is. The castle sits majestically on a hill just above the old town of Heidelberg. An old town that is actually old because Heidelberg had so little strategic importance that was one of the few German cities spared from being bombed into bits and pieces. A calm river flows in the foreground of the pretty little scene, with an old bridge spanning it.

Still not swooning? Well, the limestone from the area has a pinkish red hue, so when a sunset hits it, like during a sunset, it appears bright red on the green forested hillside.

If you are unmoved by this, that's fine. The castle does not care about you and your stone heart. It had Victorian painters flocking to its battlements to make pretty landscapes. Poems have been lovingly composed on its mountains slopes. Even Mark Twain was moved enough to eschew his usual satirical tone and write about it sweepingly – he saved the his wit for another essay: The Damned German Language.

But if castle ruins are not your thing. Heidelberg has few more things for you:

Ominous-looking Baroque Churches