This post goes out to the whole United Kingdom:
Yes, the most unfortunate thing about Guido Westerwelle is that he does not enjoy skydiving like his predecessor, but we do have the ultimate apology…three words: Mercedes Brabus SL
Jeremy Clarkson will confirm we’re not that bad after all…
cd
Alright, time for another semi-political rant in English.
Many may have noticed we held some elections recently…not necessarily to make things any better, but rather because Germany got tired of complaining about the old coalition running our government, so we wanted a new coalition to complain about for a change…
The first new reason to complain about them is of course a man named Guido Westerwelle. Considering the fact he is the designated foreign minister for the new coalition composed of the Christian Democratic Uselessness and the Fully Democratic Pandemonium he already showed he knows how to handle international business by annoying the BBC. If you’d like to see what happened, check youtube for the video. And you might also want to watch a splendid display of foreign language skill.
Many people seem to wonder why on earth the new coalition chose him to be the new foreign minister if his language skills are obviously insufficient…there is a simple explanation:
I have already written about how the German government works and this case is no exception.
Guido Westerwelle is a fine example to prove my “shit floats” argument. Yes, he’s arrogant…yes, he’s a megalomaniac and yes, his English would not even get him a job at McDonald’s…that’s why he became a politician instead.
So why are we going to make him the foreign minister?
1. The foreign minister’s main job is traveling the world and negotiating things….bottom line is: Westerwelle will be AWAY most of the time, hence he can’t screw up internal matters as bad as he could if he was around all day
2. He has a doctorate in law…seriously…if you had the chance to get at least one lawyer out of the country for the next four years, you would take it, wouldn’t you?
3. He’s gay…not only will that repel the charms of Berlusconi and Sarkozy…we also figured that with Merkel at the helm and Westerwelle at her side, we have to half men running the show which might just be as good as one real man…
4. If Merkel cannot have the better hairdo, she at least wants to be the one looking more competent…
5. His English is substandard and while the parties keep selling Germany’s long history of language deficiencies (Hans Dietrich Genscher is rumored not to have been able to speak any English when he became foreign minister and you sure do painfully remember Helmut Kohl’s and Gerhard Schroeder’s foreign language skills…) as a sign of “cultural identity”, I’m not too worried about that problem…since Schroeder has long joined Gasprom, we do not really need a foreign minister who speaks English as long as we have a chancellor who speaks Russian…
My message to Mr. Westerwelle: If you want to get away with crappy English in a position for which this particular language is key, you’d have to have the personality and political skill of Helmut Schmidt, Willy Brandt or Konrad Adenauer…
As I already said about the German idea of a “Beamter”…incompetence is not a reason to get fired…
But I must add that I am equally disappointed by the BBC…I personally would also have found it quite irritating to be asked to reply to a question in English, but still I would at least have replied IN English to make it clear that the language spoken during a press conference is usually the hosting country’s rather than showing such a nasty lack of diplomatic skill during one of my first public appearances after the elections…yet I would have expected the BBC to send a person more appropriate for the job abroad…what is he going to report about from a German press conference if he doesn’t speak the language? Had it been CNN, I would not have been surprised by poorly skilled reporters…but the BBC…that’s just sad…
I’ll just send him a letter and offer him free lessons, just to spice up my cv…might actually work…
All cynicism aside, I do see a brighter future for Germany…I will love to go to the UK again and again within the next years…just as I noticed people in England stopped asking me about Hitler after George W. Bush had been elected, with Westerwelle I’m sure I will no longer hear any more jokes about Angela Merkel…
As I said…”poets and thinkers”…
cd
Alright, since killing sprees have become all the rage (literally…) here in Germany and since this is a major research field for me and also because most of the available material is in German, I decided to drop the “Dude, you bent my tower” series for a while and start a “Brief history of the killing spree” instead.
While the cases of Tim Kretschmer and Georg R. are far more recent, the Steinhaeuser case is still widely considered “the original school shooting” here. That’s why I start with him.
The following information is taken from the final report of the official investigation conducted by the state of Thuringia. The unabridged report in German language is available for download here.
On the 26th of April 2002 the former pupil Robert Steinhaeuser (original spelling: Robert Steinhäuser) armed himself with a Glock 17 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a Mossberg 590 pump-action shotgun and entered the Johannes Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt, Eastern Germany to take revenge for having been expelled.
He had faked a doctor’s certificate to circumvent an examination but was caught and kicked from the shool by the headmistress (US English: principal).
He shot twelve teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman before killing himself in room 111 with a contact-shot to the temple using the Glock after one of the teachers had locked the door behind him. He did not fire a single shot with the shotgun.
As a sports marksman he was licensed to buy and own both weapons and ammunition of the above type.
On his killing spree he carried a total of roughly 110 rounds of 9mm Luger in five clips and 19 twelve-gauge shotgun shells made by Baschieri&Bellagri (9 in the gun, 10 more in his pocket) with him. Furthermore he had a Cordura-holster for the Glock strapped to his thigh, was dressed all in black and wore a black ski mask and hearing protection.
In one of the restrooms on the first floor the police found a stash of 142 12-gauge shells, 338 rounds of 9mm Luger, a large clip filled with 31 rounds, a small clip filled with 17 rounds of 9mm Luger, a machete and a diver’s knife.
72 bullet casings were found in the building, they had all been fired from Steinhaeuser’s Glock 17 except for one which had been fired by one of the policemen after Steinhaeuser had opened fire on them in the schoolyard.
While a lot of information circulating the internet is correct, I’d like to clarify some things here:
1. NOT A SINGLE SHOT was fired from the Mossberg.
2. The dead policeman was not shot inside the building when he “stuck his head through the door”!
He and his parter arrived second on the scene and observed their colleague firing a shot towards the schoolyard. The victim Go. and his partner waited a short while (“…a while…how long I cannot tell at all…”, p. 112) before proceeding towards the building. On the way Go. was still busy putting on his body armor when he was struck in the neck by a bullet fired from a “window almost directly above him” (p. 112). When he fell, he lost the body armor (it was the type one closes at the side, at least the back part “flipped to the side again”, p. 112) and was hit by three more shots. The fatal one went straight through his chest, from the fact that the fatal bullet was found in his clothing, the investigators assumed the bullet “hit him lying down”.
3. Due to a book which was published by Ines Geipel after the killing spree (“Fuer heute reicht’s”, = “That’s enough for today”, Steinhaeusers last words to the teacher who then locked him into room 111. When Steinhaeuser walked up to him and pointed the gun in his face, the teacher, Mr. Heise said: “You can shoot me now…” ) a lot of rumours spread in the German media that Steinhauser had taken the infamous “Tilidin”, an opioid-based painkiller (a prescription drug in Germany and Switzerland, but illegal in the USA) which is said to be used by various gangs before acts of gang violence. The drug causes rage when overdosed while at the same time it makes the aggressors “almost immune to pain”. Well…it’s a PAINkiller after all…;)
Whether the attributed effects are true in general is a different story, but regarding Steinhaeuser the post-mortem toxscreen was clean. No alcohol, no drugs in his blood (p. 60). They found some weed in his jacket, though…
So the Tilidin-story is clearly a hoax. In the quoted interviews, friends of Steinhaeuser’s admitted, they had “experimented” with various drugs, including Tilidin, LSD etc. The rumour hence is obviously “creative interpretation” which was then picked up by almost every German tabloid paper.
4. The reason for Steinhaeusers killing spree may not be as simple as it may appear to people unfamiliar with the German school system.
I. He was UNLAWFULLY expelled from the school! While faking a doctor’s certificate to circumvent an examination is forgery, this alone would not have been enough to kick him out for good. The headmistress had commited an ultra vires action by expelling a first-time offender rather than just suspending him for a certain time.
II. After expulsion he was left with absolutely nothing in his hands. In 2002 the law in Thuringia required pupils who wanted an intermediate graduation certificate before moving on to higher education (see also: Fun Facts about Education in Germany) to take the necessary examinations at a school of the respective type.
While here in North-Rhine-Westfalia for example one only needs to have a certain average at the end of the tenth grade to be awarded the “Hauptschulabschluss” or “Realschulabschluss” regardless of whether they want to stay in school and go for the “Abitur” or leave, in Thuringia this was not the case at that time.
Steinhauser had attempted the “Realschulabschluss”-exam, but had failed. His only hope now was going on and passing the “Abitur”. Not being a particularly good pupil, Steinhaeuser had had his doubts about whether he would make it.
The expulsion meant, he would not have had either of the possible certificates. Neither the “Realschulabschluss” nor the “Abitur”. Basically a future employer would have treated him as if he had never been to school at all…
I think with this background in mind, the desperation in Steinhauser and the anger towards the school and the teachers who he blamed for his failure becomes a lot more understandable and imaginable.
That’s enough for today….
cd
Alright…since nothing interesting has happened for the past few weeks except one half-baked killing spree and the attempt to eradicate child pornography by simply adding „disallow : child pornography“ to all German firewalls I decided to do another English language rant today…
In the context of the Kretschmer-case one question frequently popped up among people outside Germany: What’s the deal with German gun control?
So here is the German gun control laws explained in a nutshell…or a nutshell casing if that floats your boat 
1. No citizen may bear arms in Germany. Period. No right to defend oneself with a firearm etc…
2. There are very few exceptions to the rule:
1. A member of a (sports!) shooting club who has proven quite some skill may require a pistol/rifle of his own to further improve his skills.
The process is then fairly simple. The person in question must have been a member of the said club for a while and his marksmanship must not only be at tournament level but must be at a level that could be beneficial for the club’s ranking in national tournaments. If that applies, the club must formally state that this guy needs to be able to train whenever he pleases and not just whenever a club-owned gun is available for training and hence needs his own weapon.
Furthermore, this guy then needs to pass the „Waffensachkundepruefung“, an examination leading to a certificate proving he knows where the business end of a gun is, how to lock and load and how not to kill an innocent bystander on the shooting range…
Once both the club’s statement and the said certificate have been issued, he can apply for a „Waffenbesitzkarte“ WBK for short (weapon ownership card) which is issued by the local authorities. Unless they consider him a threat to all mankind he then will be the proud owner of a WBK.
With this, one is allowed to purchase a reasonable amount of weapons and ammunition of the stated type, i.e. if you’re ratified for pistols, you can’t buy 7,62mm FunMetalJacket, but 9mm Paranoid will be just fine…
You can’t buy a shitload of them, but over the years one can accumulate quite an arsenal, as Kretschmer’s dad seems to have done…
The law also requires you to stash them away in a certified „Waffenschrank“, usually a safe-like metal compartment bearing varous DIN and TUEV labels..they come in various flavours and grades…“Langwaffen“ meaning „long weapons“ = rifles…so one has to make sure to have one of those installed in one’s home prior to purchase…
The law furthermore requires one to have the ammunition stored in a secure place „elsewhere“…either in another secure compartment within the „Waffenschrank“ or in another secure place…
Just FYI: Keeping a weapon locked and loaded at your bedside is perfectly illegal here…Kretschmer’s father plainly violated the regulations, the case is not a question of the gun control laws but more one of having them properly enforced…
2. The second exception is a hunting license. The laws are basically the same except that you will be ratified for „Langwaffen“ rather than for pistols…except for the sidearm maybe…but that’s it
3. Full-auto weapons are illegal in Germany, unless you are a soldier or a cop
4.One is never allowed to carry your weapon in a ready-to-fire state. It must be unloaded and in a secure casing, separated from the ammunition….if you think you’re in need to defend yourself at any time, you will have to apply for a „Waffenfuerhungsgenehmigung“, another governmental permit issued to plain civilians only in very rare cases of threat…usually you’d have to be a policeman, a security guard or a soldier to get one of those…
Alright, hope that rant clarified things a bit…
cd
Alright, sorry guys, I promised I’d write more in English and haven’t for about a year..but I couldn’t help but notice that more and more anglophone people seem to be interested in my rants about education in Germany…at least the logfiles say so…so finally, here is another part of the „Dude, you bent my tower!“ series:
Alright, I did mention the PISA-shock in the first and second installment.
I also mentioned that they chose politicians to do the job…and as it is the case just about anywhere in the wold, politicians are usually one’s worst choice when it comes to actually solving a problem..and Germany was no different…
After Germany had recovered from the initial blow of „hero to zero in ten easy lessons“, they came up with a whole lot of bright ideas to save the day…they wanted to dominate…and history tells us that whenever Germany tries to dominate, things get ugly very quickly…
To understand why Germany is completely lost when it comes to things other than designing cars, brewing a decent beer and designing nuclear weapons, you must know the key feature of the German people: They’re whiny and impatient…
Whatever happens, it’s -thanks to the marvellous BILD newspaper- always a complete catastrophe and sure to be the knell for all mankind…you thought Woody Allen was depressed? You haven’t seen a German shortly after the reception of bad news then….and the usual reaction is: We demand our truste(e)d politicians (hey Gerhard, how are you getting on with your Russian lessons?) to change the world…within a second or two…
So here’s what German politicians sold as a „solution“
1. They started discussing whether it still made sense that rules and regulations regarding education were state law, not federal law
The idea of having each individual state take care of its schools all by itself might seem a good idea in a country the size of the USA…you can cross Germany north to south or east to west within a couple of hours….so it might not be such a great idea here…still, the bottom line was that education shall remain a matter of state law…
Some of the states, such as Bavaria and my current homestate North Rhine Westfalia have centralized examinations for the finals and interim evaluations (google „Lernstandserhebung“ if you happen to understand German), while other states do not….in those states every single school has a different final examination leading to the „Abitur“…
But not only that…Bavaria and NRW might have introduced centralized examinations….but do they have the very same ones? NOOO….of course not…that would have made too much sense…so even with centralized examinations, Bavaria still has standards different from NRW or other states….completely ridiculing the reason for having a centralized exam in the first place: standardization! Mind you, to get from my home to Bavaria I’d have to hit the Autobahn and drive for a measly four hours….
So, get this: Germany has standards for just about anything. There’s a shitload of DIN-norms….hell..I mean, there probably is a DIN telling you how to pee the proper German way…if I bought an M4 nut in Hamburg and an M4 bolt in Munich, I would trust my life on the fact they’d fit each other perfectly….but if a child from Bremen is -for whatever reason- forced to move to Duesseldorf, it will most likely have to redo a grade because the syllabus is different…how sick is that?
2. They cut the 13th year
They looked at those countries who had surpassed us in the PISA-evaluation and finally considered the thirteenth year in school unneccessary…
I agree..from a practical point of view the knowledge gained in the final year is less than useless…it belongs to the „nice to know“ category, but not knowing these things would hurt no one…especially when we consider the fact that universities retrain all necessary skills to homogenize the students, since they -as mentioned before- all have different levels of knowledge…
So, guess what they did? They cut the 13th year and let the children be? NOOOO….of course not….they DID cut the 13th year, but kept the syllabus!
Result: Even the eleven-year-olds now have to stay in school from daybreak until late afternoon….they kept the syllabus and crammed it into the remaining 12 years…
Well…that’s how it is in other countries you might say…but wait…there’s more ingenuity involved!
Yes, other countries such as Belgium always had their kids stay for much longer than the usual six periods formerly common in Germany…but…they were PREPARED for this…because there is one more thing children need besides love, liberty and Ritalin…children need FOOD every once in a while!
So, guess what just about any school in Germany DOESN’T have? …a canteen!
Okay…cliffhanger,…stay tuned!
cd
alright…were was I ?
Ah, yes…they gathered politicians to save the PISA-shocked Germans…I think I mentioned how one gets into the ministry of education, didn’t I ?
So they tried to figure out what went wrong and how come the country that once produced marvellously bright people such as Albert Einstein, Wernher von Braun and Juergen Klinsmann suddenly failed so horribly.
In 2000, in our trademark field, the natural sciences even the Czech Republic was better than us. We were number seven, not from the top, but BELOW THE AVERAGE!
Regarding reading comprehension, we made 21st place…regarding the relationship between exceptionally bad and exceptionally good pupils only Mexico, Brazil, Luxemburg and the Republic of Latvia had more illiterate pupils than us and on the good side we still were two places below the average. At least, we were slightly better than France…and no, I won’t mention the results regarding mathematics…
But we also had highscores. No other country had more pupils who stated they didn’t like to read (>40%). And in no other country among the countries which participated your success is as determined by your social origin as it is in Germany…even in Poland or the Russian Federation poor children have a better chance for a good education than in -as we used to call it in German- “the country of poets and thinkers”….yes…I agree…we wrote lots of poems about how good we THOUGHT we were…
Wanna know what happened ? Stay tuned…
cd
Well, here I am again to tell my anglophone readers tales of greatness about education in Germany.
Today’s installment of spoon-fed wisdom shall focus on PISA – Permanent Incompetence Sucks Ass.
First, a little lesson in architectural history. Most of you should know there is a country named Italy. In Italy you will find a place named Pisa. This is famous for its leaning tower. A marvellous piece of medieval civil engineering having become THE metaphor for making the best of a basically good thing having gone horribly wrong. To me this is the reason the Programme for International Student Assessment was given the same name…
To save the tower from collapsing (mainly because then Pisa’s economy would have done the same soon thereafter…) they gathered the world’s best civil engineers to find a solution. Read the story on Wikipedia…
Look at the infamous PISA-shock which struck Germany. The race that once tried to conquer the world (which was an Austrian’s fault by the way…Californians…we warned you…you didn’t listen…you should have considered what the one Austrian leader we ever had did to our country…it’s a miracle that the Governator hasn’t invaded Mexico yet…) was nowhere to be found among the top ranks. The papers were outraged. They published articles about how close Germany’s education system was to a complete meltdown. Oh really? I wouldn’t have noticed…
What did they to do save the day? They gathered politicians…
stay tuned!
cd
Ok, to help you understand why I sometimes can’t help but yell at people for no reason, I’ll start with a brief introduction to what once was a working system…
1. The school system is part of the German government. Employees with a permanent contract usually have the status of a “Beamter“, so teachers are somewhat equal to policemen, judges etc. This is where the trouble starts. Germans are commonly known to be thorough whatever they do…Beamte like to plan thoroughly…they like laws…they like to be strict…they need you to fill in forms for just about anything…then they need to fill in forms too…you get the point…
Beamter is a lifetime-status. To lose it, you must be a child-molester or a mass-murderer. Otherwise you’re set for a decent pension once you turn 67. You cannot be fired for being an alcoholic…you cannot be fired for being a drug-addict…you cannot be fired for calling in sick for a period of two years or for calling in sick about every three days…you cannot be fired for being an incompetent retard…once you are awarded this status, you officially made it…girls, if you want to marry a German, marry a Beamter…you will have to apply for an application form for the permission to have sexual intercourse three days in advance and you will be given permission about two or three months after the day for which you wanted permission to have sexual intercourse on, but hey…you’ll be driving a BMW or a Mercedes…
Did I mention German teachers are usually Beamte, too? Yes…German teachers cannot be fired for being incompetent….
So what can one do? Those of you who work with/for/under/against your country’s government will already know the answer: You write them a report that certifies they’re brighter than Einstein and Hawking together and have them promoted out of your school…the other school does the same…and this usually goes on until they’re at the top of the ministry of education…and just guess how great the legislations are these people pass in this country…
2. There is no such thing as a preschool in Germany. Kindergarten isn’t mandatory, so children may be raised as vegetables until the age of 6 when they are deemed mature enough to be locked away in a classroom to their parents’ delight…
3. after four years in primary school their teachers will recommend what type of secondary school their parents should send them to:
-the Hauptschule (5-6 more grades, lowest grade of education, usually leads to crate-shifting in a warehouse, alcoholism and/or suicide)
-the Realschule (6 more grades, medium grade of education, usually leads to a more or less decent career in an office of some kind)
-the Gymnasium (9 more grades, highest grade of education leading to the “Abitur”, the only grade which allows access to universities)
There is one hybrid school called the “Gesamtschule”, a formerly experimental type of school which coeducates children of any capability and offers all available grades up to the Abitur…some states in Germany consider them a failure and abolished them shortly after their introduction, other states consider them a great invention…
Another special form is the “Foerderschule”, a school for the mentally incapacitated/disabled, children with physical disabilities, children with behavioural problems and educational basket cases, usually leads to having your application rejected no matter how bad the job is you apply for…
4. For those who strive for a non-academic career, Germany has a thing called the “Duales System” (=dual-system, ironically, the same term is used for households dividing their garbage into organic and non-organic and thus needing a grey and a yellow garbage can…). They become an apprentice (if they manage to find a company who offers apprenticeships…) and work for six months, then they go to a “Berufsschule” (“profession-school” = vocational school) for six months, then go back to work for six months etc…after three years they’re done…
So much for the basics, more on Wikipedia if you care…
cd
Hello and welcome to my English-speaking readers!
I made a special category for postings in the English language so from now I will occasionally write something intended for a more widespread audience…
This blog was originally intended to be about GermanAlice, the German version of the popular Alicebot. Since the mailing lists’ lingua franca is English, I decided not to exclude a large portion of the Alice-community any longer and maybe show them bits of my world besides the development of talking machines…
The blog is titled “School – Education – Educational Sciences – Psychology – Violence – The world of madness”.
Over time I will gradually explain why I chose this title.
A brief explanation for now:
I studied to be a school teacher for philosophy and the English language, worked in the university’s department of educational sciences for a while, specialised in educational psychology with focus on more severe disorders such as Borderline and similar personality disorders and juvenile violence, school shootings and the likes, did some research, published some stuff, got a deep insight into the German education system…and you know what they say…what was seen cannot be unseen…
Today, I’m a happy freelancer and I teach the English language to anyone who wants to learn it…I do freelance work for some schools and I have contracts with some firms in the area…
So don’t expect any highly scientific stuff here, I mainly use this book as a means of stress-and-anger-relief whenever Germany and the Germans drive me up the wall again…
cd
