DACH

Germany revisted, in 2009

A couple of days ago, I wondered whether I have somehow not found my true calling; in a post on the recent German general elections I predicted that Angela Merkel would win – maybe I should have gone into political journalism? Rest assured though, this was just a blip, and I’m fully devoted to working as a curator at the BL.

In the same post I was, however, stating that the media in this country does not really show an interest in Germany. Let me retract my statement, as at the moment recent German history is quite prominently covered. I’m alluding to the fall of the Berlin Wall in the days of November 1989, but also the end of an East Germany ruled by a “one-party state”. I could bore you with my personal perspective about this, but just this once I’m going to leave you in the “hands of others”, and point to some interesting web sites covering this part of my former home country’s history.

Focusing on the BBC and their videos online, let’s get the sentimental out of the way first: at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8335918.stm you can also see a video of the three statesmen of that time reminiscencing about the historic events, now 20 years later. Taking the November events of 1989 back to the roots which started the process of change within Germany, the video and text at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8300316.stm will help to jog your memory. We now know how much Margaret Thatcher was against a reunified Germany, but luckily the mistrust against Germans was not shared by all (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8249773.stm), and thanks to Douglas Hurd! Also see this video for hearing Hans-Dieter Genscher speak English. But the initial downfall of the East German regime began in Hungary in September 1989 (where Hungarians opened their borders so that East Germans could leave (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8245485.stm). Let me send you off to two web pages which let you step back in time in a very different way. 1. 24/7 Stasi Live-Haft describes itself as an ‘art performance 24/7 Stasi-Live-Imprisonment’: Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel, a former inmate of a Stasi jail, decided to stay for a whole week in the same cell in which he was detained in 1965, and be under constant “observation” of a web cam. The concept of this political web performance art was that he should stay in his cell for a week – unsurprisingly, he could not cope with the solitary confinement for that long. The video below, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaGfJsnFPv0, is of a press conference given before the beginning of this event (in German only).

My second recommendation, which is less sad and more fun, is the Goethe Institute’s excellent “Reunification 89/90 –The Quiz”. Oh, but be forewarned, this quiz is really tough. Even if you were there or are old enough to know most things, I promise you that you will probably get some questions wrong.
[CG]

Discoveries 1

As I already stated in Dealing with Enquiries sometimes we make the most interesting discoveries prompted by fairly boring or mundane enquiries. This is the first in a series of shorter posts in which I will share these discoveries.

A couple of months ago, whilst checking a shelf in the basement, I found the following book:

Engländertum. (Halle : Gebauer-Schwetschke Verlag Nachf., c1938.) Ac.877.

This little booklet of only 44 pages, contains the three following texts:

• 'Eigenart englischer Kultur' [Peculiarities of English culture] (Lore Liebenam)
• 'A Holiday in the Country' (Reginald William Ford)
• "Engländertum und Gottesgedanke" [Englishness and the notion of god] (Lore Liebenam)

From this information and especially with regard to the date, I was expecting some pretty dire and horrible texts. Okay, maybe not yet fully-fledged Nazi propaganda, but I had my special reading glasses at hand which deflect some of the repulsiveness of texts I come across frequently. However, I think - apart from a naive belief in positivism and a generous helping of national stereotyping - these texts are supposed to be 'semi-scientifically proven' facts on "all things English"; you know, in the way how you adore (and sometimes adoringly mock) a sibling.

A couple of further thoughts:
First, this is number one of a series by the 'Deutsch-Englischen Kulturaustausch' (DEKA) ['German-English cultural exchange']; maybe I will devote a separate Blog post to the use of "England" and "English" as opposed to "Britain" and "British" in German(y), but this is not the place. According to the crest of this organisation (see below), the DEKA was founded in 1930 to 'explore, understand and value the peculiarities of the nations' (a brief aside: the oak leaf equals Germany, as the oak is the German national tree, the middle is an arty arrangement of 'deka' and the rose, well, is the English rose; at first, I was a bit puzzled by the globe, but realised that of course they used the shape of the 1930s "Deutsches Reich" - a form of my country of birth which looks wrong to me nowadays.).

This idea of education, as articulated in the crest, is already in the preface of this booklet, where it states the reason for this publication is: wir müssen 'auch die Engländer zu Worte kommen lassen und hören, was sie über sich und ihre besondere Art zu sagen haben.' [we must also let the English have their say here and hear what they have to say about themselves and their own ways.] The preface goes on to say that luckily they have obliged to the request and that they have shown a ' - for an English person surprisingly - spontaneous readiness to be talkative'. Wow! That's a big one. I don't feel I have to comment on this here (I mean: I don't really need to, do I?).

However, that's where you could come in! Most curators at the British Library do not have enough time during their normal working hours to follow-up such interesting "leads", but maybe one day I will - unless you "beat me to it." If you manage to "get there first" and do research on either the DEKA or specifically this booklet, please email me your findings or the reference to your publication please.
[CG]

Show me your gummy bears and I might vote for you

This post is actually not about gummy bears; or rather it is not about how gummy bears could influence the results of the coming general elections in Germany. If there are regular reader of this Blog out there, they might have discerned that I enjoy to make absurdist statements as introductory remarks, then try to get the reader hooked, in order to get back to the absurdist statement of the beginning, at the end of the post. Well, thanks for having spotted my technique, but here are a couple of things I'm sure you hadn't realised about the general election in Germany.

1. Timing of this post:
Well, Germany is not often high on the British Media/news agenda - and why should it be?! Just to give a broader picture of and foster better understanding of other European states? Let me keep these questions rhetorical, but I'm sure that not many of you are aware that soon there will be a general election in Germany: this coming Sunday. Sunday? I hear you think... Yes, elections in Germany are always on a Sunday - I guess the idea is, you go to church and then to vote; or nowadays: you recover from the previous night out, and are in such a good mood that you want to go voting the next day. Also the folks supervising the election process in a polling booth are not "only" civil servants, but volunteers from across all parties and other members of the public - as it's a Sunday everyone is presumed to be "off work" and on good behaviour.

2. Why now?
General election dates are set months in advance, and the Bundestag (the House of Commons, if you wish to compare it to the UK) is always elected for a full four years - the government's time can be shortened by a so-called "Mistrauensantrag" (a motion of no confidence). This means that the Bundestag, or rather its members will call for voting for the Bundeskanzler (or indeed the Bundeskanzlerin; the male or female "chancellor" who is actually the head of the government) to be certain that s/he still has the support of Parliament. (To those still with me: this also means that it would have been less likely for a "Gordon Brown" being elected in Germany, as the parliament would have had a say in that, when Tony Blair stepped down from his prime ministerial position)

3. How do the Germans do it?
There are 2 votes and proportional representation; or rather: the first vote is for a candidate (1 person per party/or if one runs as an independent then just him/her as a oneperson-band). The person with a majority will go to Berlin and sit in the Bundestag (first person past the post). Now, the second vote is interesting: you can only vote for a party here, or more precisely, a party list. This is a list of candidates, and depending on how many votes one party gets (how high the percentage of the vote for party x is), a proportioned amount of candidates from the top of the list towards the bottom of the list "get's in" too. Now, some people on this list (especially from the bigger and more popular parties) get voted in through their direct candidacy (vote 1), which means the exact number of total parliamentarian is not know, as the next person on the list, vote 2, gets picked - these so-called "Überhangmandate" ("mandates as surplus") make for an interesting uncertainty. You Brits should try this, it's fun.

4. Now finally back to the gummy bears:
If you go to http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/bilder/wahlwerbegeschenke104.html you will see photos of little pressies from parties. That parties in Germany give goodies away is a well-known and frequent feature of German election campaigns - I'm sure that there are certain rules about what they can and can't do, but this is too much for this short post. More importantly, the shape and colour of the gummy bears relates to some characteristic of the party, so the Greens have eco-made gummy bears, the relatively-new Left [Party] has dark-red hearts, ... you get the idea.

Actually, I only found out about their gummy bears after I had sent off my postal vote, but I would have made the same choices, I think. Oh, and don't be fooled by the absence of hype about this election - this election will change the world as we know it. You don't be believe it? Can Germans change the world? Yes we can. It will change the belief  that Angela Merkel was a one-legislation wonder - my guess was that at the time of the election her party, the CDU (and the "sister party" CSU) didn't believe they could win, so they put Angie "up for election" in order to have her fail in a Great Coaltion; and even though I don't agree with her politics she has been a much better politican (searching for a consensus in the Great Coalition of her Christian Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party) than most men before her. Oh, and if Angie can do it again, other women in the world out there can. Anyway, check the news on Monday morning for the results!
[CG]

Photo taken by א (Aleph), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

WESLINE 09 – The Organiser’s Tale

What else do we do?

Occasionally we organise a conference …

I had been asked over a year ago to organise what would become the Fourth Annual WESLINE Conference (2nd to 5th September 2009) – in Durham. WESLINE stands for ‘West European Studies Library and Information Network’, and it is an active and dynamic professional studies interest group for librarians working with West European-language materials, highly-regarded by its membership, and an umbrella group for the individual French, German, Italian, and Hispanic/Latin American studies library groups. And the reason why I had been asked to organise this event in Durham has to do with the fact that whilst I work in the German Section of the BL in London, I happen to live in the beautiful cathedral city of Durham in the north of England. Yes, I am a regular long-distance commuter. (The background to this might be revealed to readers of this blog in a future posting...)

[Photo by Tim Packer]

What makes a good conference?

Already in the first planning stages, I decided to model this Durham conference on the tried and tested pattern of the numerous excellent German Studies Library Group conferences which I have been fortunate enough to attend during my time at the BL. Last year’s WESLINE conference had been organised by two BL colleagues, senior to me, and at their home institution, and I would be organising this conference largely alone and at an ‘away’ institution – so I knew I had my work cut out for me. This conference was to be run over three days, as a residential event in one of the Durham colleges (Van Mildert College, as it turned out). It seemed an excellent idea to have the conference in Durham, a fantastic location and home to one of the UK’s top universities, England’s third oldest – somewhere outside the ‘golden triangle’ (for a change!) The programme would incorporate visits to historical and modern library sites and include discussions on relevant library matters relating to West European language materials. But as its most significant component, it would include papers by members of the academic teaching staff in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, one of the leading schools of its kind.

I aim to be a good organiser. However, as a part-time member of curatorial staff, organising an event away from my home institution, I needed for quite a while to work pretty much full-time (especially in the run up to the conference), and to liaise closely with colleagues at the host institution, Durham University Library.

I aimed to exploit to the full all that Durham has to offer: its wonderful, historic library buildings in a World Heritage site; its fabulous special collections; its buzzing Main Library (in the midst of refurbishments for a planned large extension, which added to the logistics I needed to juggle!); its world-renowned Cathedral and beautiful Cathedral Library; the very special ‘hidden treasure’ which is Ushaw College Library; but, above all perhaps, its expert and friendly academic and library staff, who provided presentations, tours, displays – and a really wide range of content for us all to chew over. I know Durham well – I was a visiting student there from Tübingen University (more years ago than I care to remember) at St Mary’s College, and I had my first library post in Durham immediately after qualifying as a librarian (from Aberystwyth). I knew what a wonderful place it is, but I knew that many delegates would have little or no acquaintance with it, so I was looking forward to their falling in love with it too. I hope that a few of the delegates really have …

Over forty delegates (and speakers) took part, from a wide range of university and research libraries, including the London Library, Senate House Library, the John Rylands, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library and Cambridge’s Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty Library and its Murray Edwards College Library, UCL, King’s College, Glasgow, Aston, Leeds, Warwick, Westminster, and West of England university libraries, plus a contingent of seven from the BL. (It was good to have the moral support of BL and German Studies Library Group colleagues attending.)

The feedback I have received so far has been very positive and hugely encouraging. I know that librarians are nice people (!), but they have all said really, really nice things, so I think the conference has, genuinely, been much appreciated and has been enjoyable and profitable for all the delegates who attended. In short, I loved organising this conference, and now that I’ve just about recovered, would still, I think, say ‘yes’ the next time I’m asked – as long as that’s not too soon!
[DM]

WESLINE 09 – The Delegate’s Tale

Another week, another conference... The first few days of September saw the whole German Section in Durham for the annual meeting of WESLINE, the West European Studies Library and Information Network. Like many of those who attend, I’ve been a regular at these meetings (and in earlier days at those of one of its constituent groups, the German Studies Library Group) ever since I started at the BL, so the conference always involves meeting old friends, as well as welcoming new faces. This year we had an excellent programme of talks, discussions and visits, expertly organised by Dorothea and hosted by Durham University Library. Durham is my alma mater, and it was the first time I’d been back there in nearly twenty years! I was delighted to find the city as beautiful as ever and comparatively unchanged.

Most of the conference sessions were held in the main library building, which brought back memories, but we were also shown round the historic library, set in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palace Green, and the Cathedral Library. The latter visit included a marvellous display of mediaeval manuscripts presented by Professor Richard Gameson of the history department, one of those rare speakers who combines vast knowledge with a real gift for communication.

Back in the main library we heard a wide range of papers: German photography, French manuscript illumination, Spanish theatre censorship and the appropriation of Italy as part of British culture were among the topics and, as is usual at these events, the speakers emphasised how they used library and other information resources in their work. In the context of professional issues there was a presentation on academic liaison in university libraries, which led to some interesting discussion. Although this isn’t of such direct relevance to the BL, it was interesting to hear how colleagues in the HE sector manage this aspect of their work, and how electronic resources are continually changing the ways in which university librarians communicate with academics and students.

Most of the people who attend WESLINE come from university libraries, and for us BL people one of the most sobering aspects of this annual get-together is to realise what pressure they are under. Many universities are cutting back on library staff, and since many are also cutting back on modern language courses, language specialists in university libraries are under particular threat. This year alone Queen’s University Belfast has closed its German department, and the University of the West of England is ceasing to offer modern language degree courses, and I returned to work to find a mailing list post with news of a similar threat to the German department at Leicester. It’s a sobering reflection at the end of a happy and productive few days.
[SR]