Tag: Germany

Dark Humor/American Collapse

Collapse, a word for the wordless. No laughter here, only the echo of a joke lost in the static. Soviet black, French absinthe green, Spanish crimson – these were the hues of humor, once. Now, the palette is gray, the canvas smeared with the fingerprints of empire. Vonnegut, Pynchon, high-rise clowns juggling fire in a burning circus. We are the ground floor,the crushed and trampled, the dirt beneath their manicured nails. Germany, a shadow over the future, a specter haunting the neon dreamscape. No humor here, only the cold logic of decay.

I guess one difference between our collapse and others is that we don’t really have any black humorists in the vein of late Soviet dark satire, French fin de siecle, Spanish picaresque, east european surrealism or British absurdism.

Maybe Kurt Vonnegut or Thomas Pynchon but they’re both “high empire” 🤔

We’re more like Germany😐

Collapse, a word. A tumor in the throat of time. No clowns, no jesters. Just a vast, gray, grinding machine. Soviet black, French decay, Spanish grift, Eastern Bloc dreamscapes, Brit wit – all these cancers, they had their court fools. But us? We’re the punchline, the mark, the empty stage. Vonnegut, Pynchon, high-empire clowns, but clowns nonetheless. A circus before the fire. Now, it’s Berlin ’45, the joke’s gone sour, and the world’s the punchline.

A Collapse Without Laughter

Our collapse is a flatulent beast, a gaseous golem birthed in the fetid womb of consumerism. No Gogol to sneer, no Beckett to wail, no Cervantes to mock. Just a dreary, endless parade of automatons shuffling through the ruins of meaning. Vonnegut and Pynchon, those carnival barkers of the high empire, can’t disguise the stench of decay beneath their colorful tents. We are the clowns without makeup, the acrobats without nets, the punchline to a joke nobody wants to hear. Germany, a cold, efficient machine, grinding out its own brand of despair. We are the spare parts, rusting in the rain.

From the River to the Sea

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A low murmur, a tremor of unease, rippled through the labyrinthine corridors of the Ministry of Justice. A new proclamation, its ink barely dry, hung heavy in the air. The pronouncement, issued with the utmost bureaucratic gravity, declared the phrase “generic sentence” a criminal offense.

Yet, a disquieting dissonance echoed within the very pronouncement itself. For nestled amongst the legalese, the phrase, the very one it condemned, lay hidden in plain sight, like a subversive weed pushing through the cracks of officialdom. It was as if the Ministry, in its zealous pursuit of linguistic purity, had inadvertently snared itself in its own net.

The other clerks, faces ashen, exchanged furtive glances. The Ministry, the very fount of legalese, had outlawed the very phrase that greased the gears of their bureaucratic existence. A Kafkaesque labyrinth unfolded. Was the Ministry, by its own edict, now an outlaw? Did the pronouncement itself carry the taint of criminality?

Days blurred into weeks. Fear, a silent virus, permeated the air. Clerks drafted revisions, erasing and rewriting, their pens scraping a frantic counterpoint to the rhythmic clicks of the grandfather clock. “Standard sentence,” one ventured, only to be met with icy silence. “Predetermined verdict”? A flicker of hope, quickly extinguished by the realization that “predetermined” itself reeked of forbidden knowledge.

The Ministry remained impassive, a monolithic entity unmoved by the tremors it had unleashed. Herr Schmidt, in a fit of existential dread, dared to type a query: “Clarification regarding implementation of aforementioned decree…” before crumpling the paper, terrified of his own temerity.

The question hung heavy, an unanswered koan in the stagnant air. Was the Ministry a criminal for its own pronouncement? Or was the very act of questioning the decree the true transgression? The answer, like the Ministry itself,remained shrouded in an impenetrable fog, a testament to the chilling absurdity that had taken root in the once-mundane halls of justice.

Citizens, ever wary of pronouncements, found themselves caught in a web. Was casual conversation now suspect? Could a muttered complaint about a “generic rejection letter” from a faceless corporation land you in an interrogation room? The ambiguity hung heavy, a fog obscuring the line between legality and transgression.

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The absurdity, once planted, bloomed with grotesque rapidity. Overnight, dictionaries across the nation were confiscated.Public libraries became ghost towns, their shelves bare except for a few dog-eared volumes deemed “ideologically sound.” A black market for synonyms sprung up in dimly lit taverns, whispers exchanged for crumpled Reichsmarks.

The Ministry, however, remained above the fray. Their pronouncements, now devoid of any “generic” language, became exercises in obfuscation. Sentences meandered like drunken centipedes, clauses nested within clauses until meaning dissolved into a bureaucratic soup. “The aforementioned regulation, pertaining to the aforementioned criminal offense,necessitates the aforementioned individual to undergo a aforementioned evaluation…”

The legal system, already a labyrinth, transformed into a M C Escher nightmare. Judges, burdened with the task of interpreting pronouncements riddled with forbidden phrases, resorted to interpretive dance. Lawyers, their once eloquent arguments reduced to pantomime, found themselves miming legal concepts to a jury of bewildered citizens.

The absurdity reached its zenith with the case of Herr Schmidt, a mild-mannered baker. Accused of uttering the forbidden phrase while complaining about his “run-of-the-mill” flour delivery, Herr Schmidt found himself in a courtroom transformed into a theatre of the absurd. The prosecutor, a man perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown,attempted to build a case through interpretive charades, waving his arms and shouting nonsensical syllables. Herr Schmidt, bewildered yet strangely serene, simply shrugged his shoulders and continued baking his bread, a silent rebellion in the face of the Ministry’s linguistic tyranny.

The world watched, aghast and yet strangely fascinated, as the Fatherland descended into a vortex of nonsensical legalese.Was it a grand social experiment, a twisted performance art, or simply the inevitable result of unchecked bureaucracy?The answer, as always, remained shrouded in the Ministry’s perpetual twilight. The only certainty was the ever-expanding list of forbidden phrases, each new pronouncement a brick further sealing the citizens of the Fatherland within a prison of their own language.

The Ministry, however, remained unfazed. They issued a series of supplementary pronouncements, each one more convoluted than the last. The use of “pre-determined legal judgments” was deemed acceptable only in the context of denouncing the outlawed “generic sentence.” The act of questioning the Ministry’s initial statement was classified as “meta-criminal,” a thoughtcrime punishable by the confiscation of one’s personal thesaurus.

The absurdity reached its zenith with the introduction of “Ministry-approved Sentence Simulators.” These hulking machines, resembling oversized typewriters, offered citizens a “safe” way to express themselves. By feeding in keywords (approved by the Ministry, of course), the machine would churn out a pre-fabricated, legally-compliant sentence. “Feeling disgruntled about a recent administrative decision?” the brochure proclaimed. “Simply input ‘unforeseen bureaucratic inconvenience’ and receive a Ministry-approved expression of mild disappointment!”

The public, however, saw through the masquerade. These weren’t “simulators,” they were shackles, further constricting freedom of expression. The once-vibrant language of the Fatherland became a pale imitation of itself, a symphony reduced to a monotonous drone. Laughter, a casualty of the new order, became a distant memory.

Yet, from the depths of this absurdity, a spark of defiance flickered. Street artists, emboldened by the sheer ridiculousness of it all, began leaving cryptic messages. Simple geometric shapes, vaguely resembling letters, appeared overnight on buildings. The authorities, unsure how to interpret these symbols, declared them “potentially subversive sentence fragments” and launched a city-wide manhunt for the “Sentence Fragment Syndicate.”

In a world where language itself had become criminalized, a silent language of rebellion was born. The absurdity, it seemed, had not extinguished the human spirit, but twisted it into a form more cunning, more resilient. And so, the Kafkaesque dance continued, a macabre ballet of power and defiance, all conducted in the chilling silence of a language no longer free.

Bismarck

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Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was a man marinated in vice. Wine, a crimson serpent, coiled around his mornings, slithered through lunch, and tightened its grip at dinner. Beer, a frothy trollop yeasty serpent, slithered down his gullet between courses, leaving a trail of burps that could curdle milk. And cigarettes, glowing embers of damnation, were his constant companions, wisping their tendrils of addiction into his lungs. Tobacco, a fiery succubus, latched onto his lips, whispering sweet oblivion in puffs of acrid smoke.

And when the sun dipped below the horizon, Bismarck wouldn’t be caught dead (well, not yet) with a mug of chamomile tea. Sleep? A mere drunken stupor, a surrender to the green fumes of absinthe that clouded his dreams. No, sleep arrived on a flood tide of schnapps, a potent oblivion that painted the world a blurry shade of Prussian ambition.

At the Berlin Conference, where they carved Africa like a rotten melon, Bismarck wasn’t just a player, he was a force of nature fueled by fermented grapes and barley. Pickled herrings, those translucent messengers of the deep, found their way into his maw with a two-handed frenzy. Bismarck wasn’t a statesman, he was a fiend at a banquet. Pickled herrings, those translucent messengers of decay, found their way into his maw with a speed that defied cutlery. Two hands, like meat hooks, wrestled the oily fish, a grotesque ballet fueled by schnapps and avarice. The room reeked of power, sweat, and pickled fish, a fitting olfactory accompaniment to the dismemberment of a continent.

Was he drunk? Who the hell cared. Drunk or sober, Bismarck was a shark in a feeding frenzy, and Africa, dripping and glistening, was the blood in the water. One imagines the negotiations, a grand guignol of ink-stained maps and diplomatic double-entendres, punctuated by the belch of a man pickled himself, both literally and figuratively. The ink on the treaties might as well have been blood, Bismarck’s own fiery spirit staining the parchment. A whirlwind of diplomacy and debauchery, the Iron Chancellor left a trail of fumes and fumes alone in his wake.

One could argue Bismarck’s boozy brilliance was a double-edged sword, a Molotov cocktail of realpolitik served lukewarm. Sure, he unified Germany under a Prussian fist, but was it a foundation built on sand, mortared with hangover sweat?

It was the first domino in Germany’s tragic waltzing with oblivion. Imagine the map of Africa being carved up not by a steely-eyed statesman, but by a bleary-eyed baron with a tremor in his hand. Did the borders of the Congo sprawl outwards because Bismarck saw double after a particularly potent schnapps?

Perhaps. And perhaps those shaky lines, drawn in a haze of hops and hangover, laid the groundwork for future conflicts. Resources, resentment, a festering sense of injustice – a potent cocktail, even without the booze.

Then consider the domino effect. Bismarck’s legacy, built on unsteady legs, crumbles. The power vacuum sucks in a new breed of leader, hungry and paranoid. Enter Hitler, a teetotaler fueled by a different kind of intoxication – a twisted ideology that had him high as a🪁 (kite) on delusions of grandeur.

So yes, there’s a delicious irony, wouldn’t you say? Bismarck, the boozer, might have unwittingly paved the way for a dry drunk who’d plunge the world into a firestorm. The Iron Chancellor, brought low not by iron, but by cirrhosis. A cautionary tale, indeed, for leaders who confuse a full flagon with a full head.

Perhaps, if Bismarck had swapped the schnapps for seltzer, things might have been different. But that’s just another line in the mad scribble of history, a “what if” lost in the haze of his perpetual inebriation.One could argue Bismarck’s boozy statecraft was a recipe for Deutschland’s descent into the inferno. Imagine, the fate of entire nations decided by a man reeking of stale beer and pickled brine! His proclamations, no doubt, slurred pronouncements delivered through a haze of nicotine and schnapps.

It’s a heady cocktail of speculation, for sure. But with Bismarck swigging wine at breakfast and Hitler frothing at the podium, one can’t help but wonder if Germany just couldn’t find the right balance. Perhaps the answer wasn’t rock bottom or uptight abstinence, but a healthy dose of moderation. A nation, like a man, needs a clear head to navigate the treacherous waters of history.