Five Things: Weimar, Europe, Thirst, Rodeo, Protest Songs
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
The end of summer is near and next week school starts again in Hamburg. And while elsewhere every retailer is focused on a big back to school campaign, German retailers are thinking ahead and planning for the inevitable.
Christmas is just four months away! Of course we briefly need to focus on a newfound German tradition and get everything pumpkin and halloween themed in October before Christmas is then suddenly there. But when I’m in the mood for christmas cookies, the shelves will be empty already. Like every year.
Grab a gingerbread cookie and read these Five Things now!
Warnings from Weimar
No democratic constitution is self-enforcing, not even ones much older than the Weimar Republic was in the early 1930s. Citizens and leaders must defend democratic institutions whenever they are threatened and whatever the scale of the threat.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections. Mainstream political leaders had many opportunities to push back. But Hugenberg believed he could use Hitler to revitalize his conservative movement. Von Papen believed he could control Hitler after making him chancellor. Kaas believed that capitulating to Hitler’s demands would protect his party and buy time for a more significant resistance. They were all wrong.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but we should learn from it. The USA is sliding into a fascist state while the band keeps playing and everybody is dancing.
Europe Is Losing
Ten years ago, four European companies ranked in the global top 10 by revenues. Today, the continent’s biggest company by market value, German software firm SAP, ranks 28th. America’s share of global stock market valuations has held steady at 48% since 2000, but the EU’s has fallen from 18% to 10%, and the U.K.’s from 8.3% to 2.6%, according to Deutsche Bank.
Europe’s economic slide has been accompanied by shriveling military prowess. The continent’s share of the world’s military power is also at its lowest since the Middle Ages, after decades of focusing on welfare spending instead of defense. Though European leaders are now vowing to take defense more seriously in the face of a revanchist Russia, they are struggling to build up their forces. Britain’s entire army can fit comfortably inside Wembley Stadium.
This continent is pretty awesome, but we are too focused on keeping what made us great instead of figuring out what kind of change we need in order to keep the status quo.
What Does It Mean To Be Thirsty?
Water is the medium in which all chemical reactions in an organism take place, and those reactions are finely tuned to a narrow range of ratios between water and salt, another essential ingredient in life’s chemistry. The cells in your body are permeable to water, so if the water-salt balance of the surrounding fluid — blood, lymph or cerebrospinal fluid, for example — is outside its healthy range, cells can swell or shrink, shrivel or potentially burst. An imbalance can cause brain cells to malfunction, losing their ability to manage ion concentrations across their membranes and propagate action potentials.
Remember to drink your water, your brain will thank you!
The Man in the New Boots
Here’s one way I might explain all this: there are these cave paintings of bulls, in shades of apricot, tallow, and flint, that I look at on my phone when I have trouble falling asleep. Usually the artists gather the animals together in rows and herds, “flowing in long strides down some run of time through the silence of the mountain’s hollow,” as Guy Davenport once described the paintings. Occasionally, though, one creature is pared off from the rest, and it is only in these situations that man enters the picture. In what is likely the earliest image of a man and a bull, in the Chauvet cave paintings, the head of a bison merges fluidly into the lower body of a woman, as though the two beings had for a moment melded wills, or come together in a perfect ride.
I’ve never been to a rodeo, but it is on my bucket-list of things to do before I die. Obviously, I just want to go as a spectator.
Can Jesse Welles Revive the Protest Song?
Every era needs its voice of the people, and through timing, luck, and talent, that person may be Welles. “There’s a lot of people protesting different things in their own way, which is a beautiful thing about America, and something we can’t forget — that we have the great gift to be able to sing these songs, and I don’t have to worry about my life,” he says. “No one will come and kill me.” But like Dylan and others before him, will they look to him for answers?
There is so much to protest against and musicians can help funnel the outrage. This can only be the beginning of a large wave of protests.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico