Demon Germans

[waverleyheartbreak 86]

7 hours ago, Jontee said:

@waverleyheartbreak Have you ever kicked the sherrin through the Brandenburg Gate?

That a challenge? 

[waverleyheartbreak 86]

12 hours ago, Rab D Nesbitt said:

Hi Waverley. I stopped over in Berlin for a few days when I moved back here from the UK in late 2014, renting an airbnb near the old Tempelhof airport that they had turned into the most amazing public park that incorporated the runways and old terminal building. I think they converted the place into a refugee camp for a little while recently. A fantastic city that had been on my list of places to visit for a long time. 

Still there, although a lot of pressure to build on it. The refugee camp has now closed as they slowly integrate them into the regular community ( Um, unlike Australia but don’t want to start that discussion here!)

[Fritta and Turner 4,522]

40 minutes ago, waverleyheartbreak said:

That a challenge? 

Why not?

[dieter 3,325]

53 minutes ago, Biffen said:

Swiss Italian.

Lou Reed: Those Italians, they need a lesson to be taught.

[dieter 3,325]

45 minutes ago, waverleyheartbreak said:

Still there, although a lot of pressure to build on it. The refugee camp has now closed as they slowly integrate them into the regular community ( Um, unlike Australia but don’t want to start that discussion here!)

Great point. I've argued with a gent on a history site - a Sassenach, I believe - who wrote that Germany's offer to accept refugees was done 'without the consent of its neighboring European countries'. How shameful!!!!

( Ironically, the term 'Sassenach' is the Gaelic word for the Poms, i.e.Saxons...)

Edited November 20, 2021 by dieter

[Uncle Fester 2,848]

9 hours ago, Stiff Arm said:

Ron Barassi is a good German name

TISM reference yeah? Ron ‘Hitler’ Barassi.

[YesitwasaWin4theAges 6,708]

So does this mean were boycotting Wolf Blass wines? he is also of German heritage hailing from Adelaide.

[waverleyheartbreak 86]

On 11/20/2021 at 10:24 AM, Jontee said:

Why not?

right, gave my Sherrin away on GFD to a young local kid. will find another and put it through the big sticks (Pillars)

[Cassiew 1,903]

Myself am from German decent, my surname was anglicised in the 18th century.

Ich bin ein Demon

[Fritta and Turner 4,522]

On 11/22/2021 at 3:10 AM, waverleyheartbreak said:

right, gave my Sherrin away on GFD to a young local kid. will find another and put it through the big sticks (Pillars)

TBH any shots of berlin landmarks with MFC colours in the foreground would be great.  (We enjoyed Berlin)

[Melb-A-Toast 257]

On 11/19/2021 at 10:12 PM, dieter said:

Since I read earlier this week that Our Own Simon Goodwin is of German descent on his mother's side, I decided to post a side of Demon Germans.

Not a bad aside, at that.

Terlich   Prymke      Rohde

Seecamp  Neitz   Wagner

C. Wagner  H.Mann  Strauss

Wittman    Schwartz  Fritsch

Weidemann Mueller Vanthoff

 

Ditterich, Obst, Pesch

Int: Preuss, Milner, Burgmann, Funcke.

 

Wittman, Mueller and Vanthoff are yesteryear men, all played for Victoria.

 

Nice list. I am an interested follower of family names and their origins. I didn't even click about Prymke (so obvious) and never thought that Seecamp was German.

Though...I thought german is von and dutch is van re Vanthoff. 

[dieter 3,325]

31 minutes ago, Melb-A-Toast said:

Nice list. I am an interested follower of family names and their origins. I didn't even click about Prymke (so obvious) and never thought that Seecamp was German.

Though...I thought german is von and dutch is van re Vanthoff. 

My surname ends on Hoff! 100% German...

[daisycutter 29,701]

21 minutes ago, dieter said:

My surname ends on Hoff! 100% German...

your real name is david hasselhoff?

[Demonstone 22,792]

8 minutes ago, daisycutter said:

your real name is david hasselhoff?

I thought he may have been related to this bloke.

[dieter 3,325]

2 hours ago, daisycutter said:

your real name is david hasselhoff?

No, Dumkhoff

[daisycutter 29,701]

8 minutes ago, dieter said:

No, Dumkhoff

got it,,,,,david dumkhoff then.......nice name

[Stiff Arm 4,419]

On 11/20/2021 at 8:27 PM, dieter said:

Lou Reed: Those Italians, they need a lesson to be taught.

Hitler to Churchill before WW2: "If war breaks out you do realise the Italians will be on our side this time?"

Churchill: "That's only fair. We had to put up with them last time..."

[Deemania since 56 6,714]

On 11/20/2021 at 8:00 AM, MT64 said:

A brilliant "party town". Pub/club scene was second to none and I'm talking back in the 70's.

As the snow wafted down in the gaslights of the town in fairyland reality, as a young man, I had a very romantic night in Heidelberg and a fabulous breakfast the next morning. Hence, fond memories of my own '...student prince...' experience and Germany, in general, several times. 

[Mazer Rackham 14,971]

No room in this team for Robert Flauer, Jakob Steins, or Ronald Deil?

[dieter 3,325]

2 hours ago, daisycutter said:

got it,,,,,david dumkhoff then.......nice name

Thanks. Beats Daisy Cutter anytime. My wife, as I write, is talking to her cousin, Mrs. Cupper, as it heppens...as they say in Greece.

[dieter 3,325]

58 minutes ago, Mazer Rackham said:

No room in this team for Robert Flauer, Jakob Steins, or Ronald Deil?

We don'want no short people or ring ins round here...

[daisycutter 29,701]

59 minutes ago, dieter said:

Thanks. Beats Daisy Cutter anytime. My wife, as I write, is talking to her cousin, Mrs. Cupper, as it heppens...as they say in Greece.

my name is not really daisy cutter.....truly, honest to god

it's actually daisy hellfunken

and btw tell your wife i've just finished james michener's 'poland'. a very good read but a bit depressing.

[dieter 3,325]

25 minutes ago, daisycutter said:

my name is not really daisy cutter.....truly, honest to god

it's actually daisy hellfunken

and btw tell your wife i've just finished james michener's 'poland'. a very good read but a bit depressing.

You find reading Poland depressing. Try living with Poland! 😂🤣😍🤩🥰

By the way, you can buy her novel if you're on a Polish escapade: Archeology of a Dream City. It's available online, published by Balestier, the launch was at La Mama last Saturday. Here is a review: 

Monica Raszewski The Archaeology of a Dream City Balestier Press, London 2021 ISBN 9781913891060 Pb 220pp AUD26.06
Compelled to return again and again to Nadwodom, Raszewski’s protagonist Martha seeks, to graft a phrase from Marx, ‘to awaken the [city]from its dream of itself’ (n.p). The Archaeology of a Dream City is exquisitely attentive to the tears in the fabric of appearances – it’s here that the spectres of a traumatic past move; that shadowy matter speaks its enigma to the eye and to the camera. An aspiring biographer and photographer, Raszewski’s protagonist Martha travels by losing her way, engaging in a mode of dream archaeology via her cousin Klara, whereby fragments suggest what cannot be articulated – the language of ruin and decrepitude – and whereby recurrent apparitions become uncannily alive. From every rift of this fabled city of a fictionalised Poland come emanations of the Holocaust, but Raszewski’s remarkable skill is in oblique evocation, in accruing suggestion upon suggestion, so that one feels the brush of ghostly trajectories down disintegrating stairways of the cousins’ overlapping dreams and through the enigmatic windows of the actual city.
This novel fascinates with allegories, not of fixation, but of elusiveness; the reader finds radiant insight when lost in the tenebrous labyrinth of the forest – for instance, it’s only through being lost that Martha and her grandmother can find their way to the kindergarten where learning might begin. But on arrival, they find that school is over. Belatedness, also a key motif of Benjamin’s, seeds its ironies throughout the narrative. This is how, out of step, out of time, one finds the ‘cool spot’ (Benjamin’s die kühle Stelle) from which one falls into a radically different sense of temporality, where one recognises the ultimate equivalence of all beings – whether ‘animal’ or ‘object’ (Benjamin, p. 110-11). Glimpses of others’ stories, of layered histories within this one, induce space-time warps – things and beings miniaturise or grow according to psychic relativism. This is where one encounters the self as a stranger and the recognition of the other’s pain materialises in shards of traumatic memory.
Here, the subtle exploration of haunting becomes a meditation on artmaking–both photo-graphy, literally light-writing of course, and writing itself, host the traces of others’ lives, allowing the shades of the dead to play again on the walls of the living. Razsewski shows us the past as unresolved and unresolvable visitation – riddling apparitions in the rifts of the fortress of representation. Here the Beatrice leading Martha is the late photographer Marion Porter, of whom she hopes to write a biography, and whose family name, Porter, suggests how Martha is paradoxically carried by the burden of artistic inheritance. Perhaps this also suggests the corollary: that only in assuming the burden and the challenge of the history inherited can one make images respectful of the spectral ever-present dead.
The fabulist spirit of this remarkable work seems to me descended from Kafka, who appears here in the narrative as donor to a distressed Jewish boy artist and scholar; its cultural sensitivity and intelligence recall those of Kafka’s great commentator, Benjamin; and its ethics resonate with those of the great Jewish philosopher of alterity, Levinas. This novella performs with extraordinary skill a fugal approach to the fragmentary narrative, without ever subordinating – in the name of integration and closure – the unknown, and perhaps unknowable, to the known. The work is thus driven by a poetics of the rift and the trace: saturnine, sleepwalking Martha provides the psychic aperture through which the dead return. And how radiant these glimpses grow through all the layers and rips… In fact, the archaeological trope of layering is figured early in in the image of an old dressing gown, almost a magical dreaming gown, which haunts Martha, especially once it is discarded by her mother. Its unravelling quilting is cherished in its very disintegration, in its decrepitude,and makes of it a dream-catalyst, its unstitched layers foreshadowing the delicate archaeological excavation practised by Klara. Together, the cousins offer a healing kind of love, walking finally as ‘one person split’ through Nowadan as archivists of the wounded place, marking the traces of lives painfully rescued and shockingly betrayed (p. 154). But in case this gives the impression that the work is slow and melancholic, I hasten to say that, at every turn, it is graced by delightfully absurdist humour, again in the spirit of Kafka.
Beguiling and compelling, The Archaeology of a Dream City is all the more moving for the subtlety and tact of its beautifully decanted writing, rare qualities that are sure, in turn, to haunt its readers. What is more, this haunting power is amplified in dialogue with Jane E. Brown’s beautiful and subtly surreal gelatin silver black and white photographs. This fascinating photo-essay performs light-writing as the material trace of time in the pocked facades, forbidding doorways, bolted roller-shutters and uncannily stranded objects of a deserted European town: the hush these studies convey is ghostly and most eloquent, as if taken by a melancholic but exceptionally sensitive sleepwalker, just like Raszewski’s Martha.
Works cited
Benjamin, W. (2016). Convolut 9a 7 of The Arcades Project. In G. Richter (Ed.) Inheriting Benjamin. Bloomsbury.
Marx, K. (1943, September). Letter to Arnold Ruge Kreuenach. Marx Engels Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm
Marion May Campbell’s most recent works include the memoir The Man on the Mantelpiece (UWAP 2018), the poetry collection third body (Whitmore Press 2018), the critical monograph Poetic Revolutionaries: Intertextuality and Subversion (Brill 2014), and the novella konkretion (UWAP 2013). Formerly Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, she now lives in Drouin in GunaiKurnai country with her two border collie companions.

Edited November 23, 2021 by dieter

[daisycutter 29,701]

6 minutes ago, dieter said:

You find reading Poland depressing. Try living with Poland! 😂🤣😍🤩🥰

By the way, you can buy her novel if you're on a Polish escapade: Archeology of a Dream City. It's available online, published by Balestier, the launch was at La Mama last Saturday.

thanks, i might just do that. what a coincidence.

before i do though i'll read something a bit more uplifting first.....like red dragon 

[dee-tox 4,835]

14 hours ago, Melb-A-Toast said:

 

Though...I thought german is von and dutch is van re Vanthoff. 

You are right with the von and the van. But one thing to remember is that until a bit over 400 years ago Germany and the Netherlands were the same country. The provinces were split up in the 16th century so there are many von's in the Netherlands and van's in NL. They mean the same thing. Of or from, although Von comes from German nobility and anyone can be a 'van'. So if your name name is van den Berg, you are from the mountain (berg) or Virgil van Dijk you are from the dike!

Edited November 23, 2021 by dee-tox