My brother just Twitted me from Triest, he’s watching tonight “The lives of others”, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s incredible movie on RAI1.
We saw the film at the cinema when it came out and then I bought a DVD in the Original Version. In German of course it’s more impressive. Since then I’ve collected and listened to the RADIO2 and RADIO3 STASI programmes over the past months (See Wall section) and more importantly, I’ve read Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland.
I was wondering tonight, what the STASI would have been like, if Twitter had existed back then. A STASI Twitter, where Erich & Erich would be the sole administrators, being able to see all sorts of tweets from unofizielle Mitarbeiters...”Frau Schumann now out with her grey shopping bag – Herr Peters entering the ironmongers’ – Official: Erika Schmidt has an affair with her professor” and so on…
Anna, Natalia, Anastasia. Tomorrow in Piazza del Popolo, we’ll be there for them and for the other journalists who lost their lives.
We will be there for supporting all journalists who are doing their work in the world, those who report the facts. They fight for our freedom. They are our new partisans.
And we will be protesting against those journalists who hide the facts. The collabos.
Months ago MeinMann and I bought our flight tickets in ordet to “sei dabei”, to be there, in Berlin, on November 9th.
There are many reasons to it. The main one is to be physically there, since in 1989 I lived the events (fall of the Berlin wall, but also velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia) through the letters of my DDR and Czech pen pals but I wish I could have been there, side by side with my friends.
And of course we want to join the party, and live the Stimmung, the atmosphere of such a special day.
But there is also another reason. We want to escape to the viruses which are already incubating in Italy. I have already spotted extreme-right posters with the small icon in the corner: “against all walls”.
There are people here, in the Banana Republic, ready to hijack the celebrations. We don’t want to be in Italy on those days, even if we are very well equipped with firewalls against these viruses. We don’t want a beautiful day to be stained with Banana Republic rhetoric.
As Tabucchi says in an interview today “The end of totalitarian governments is a good thing to celebrate, but you have to be careful. Someone could use it to scrutinize other conquests and other freedoms”.
The laboratory of post-democracy, Italy, is not the place where I want to be on that day.
Well, there’s a lot to report on this Berlinese summer. Still, the humid heat in Rome does not invite to using keyboards and to have warm laptops on one’s lap…for the time being just a bit of jingle, right from the soundtracks of the Mostra del Cinema di Venezia. Do you remember “Duel”, by Düsseldorf group Propaganda?
The first cut won’t hurt at all / the second only makes you wonder / the third will have you on your knees.
Suzanne Freytag’s 80s spiky hairstyle is still groovy and mischievous. If after a dire recession – ike 82’s, like this one – you get this great hits…and DM, and many others, then we’re in for a major music new wave.
It’s exactly what I wanted to elaborate yesterday in my post (but we had an invitation to dinner and had to rush ).
The economist Loretta Napoleoni tells it very clearly today on D di Repubblica. “Is internet shutting activism down?”. Check out the article here (and babel-fish it, it’s in italian), issue n.652, page 19.
Basically, what she says is that participation (to democracy) is not the same as being connected online. You do not discuss themes which impact society in the same way if you are at dinner with friends, online or in a public gathering (a political party meeting or an assembly). Some things need to be done by being physically there, in the street.
On the other hand, two important events this year.
The Obama election. He’s no Gandhi, ok. But maybe this time the grass-roots movement (especially for the financing of the campaign) really made the difference. And the fact that he was online. The web was not a sticker on this candidate product. It was part of him.
Second event, the Tehran events on Twitter. When I read an account of the precise events of Paris, May 1968, what struck me is the fact that demostrants had to resort to Ancient Greece methods to communicate, namely: run. Run between one barricade and the other, bringing messages and information on where the police was. Even in the WWI trenches the transmission of messages was more efficient. But hey, these boys and girls could just use telephone boots and tennis shoes. Now Twitter brought us the events unfolding in Tehran before CNN. If we want to talk things italian, since we are approaching another G8, it’s on YouTube that you can find the reportage of what really happened in Genoa that night at the Diaz school and in the barracks of Bolzaneto (english witnesses).
I guess that social networks should be an additional mean towards participation and information but not an objective per se. I blog, I twitter therefore I can act. But sometimes the illusion of “feeling in touch with others” can be predominant and annihilate participation. As Napoleoni says “in the end, you are in your pajamas, at home. Alone”. So get in those jeans and get out and meet those people.
Because the Divided Cities exist. The fact is that the wall is not a vertical one that you can stumble upon when walking. It’s horizontal, above our heads. And we move like little ants or busy bees under the slab of grey reinforced concrete that we call “democracy”.
PS
I just saw by browsing on bora.la that the foreign minister Frattini is Twittering from the G8 in Triest…beware…
In the press they talk about The Great Deal (Fiat-Chrysler), talks are underway today in Berlin on the future of Opel.
But only on Beppe Grillo’s blog I can read today some news on the price increases applied by the italian motorway companies. Oil is cheap, and it won’t last long. So toll rentiers seize the opportunity today to levy more taxes on the italian public.
Alitalia and Air One are lame ducks, public transport does not get the necessary investments, people who need to be on the move are forced into using the car.
In the meantime our real unemployment and our real inflation are figures never published in the press…not only the politicians but also the journalists indulge in abundant Schadenfreude, about the 6% GDP fall estimate for Germany, the 20% unemployment rate in Spain but…what about us? No real figures on our own inflation and unemployment, Keine Weltanschauung for the way forward.
Listen to the Sage from Omaha. He says that the only certainty about our future is inflation…(or read “Weimar, utopia and tragedy”).
Two posts ago, we were the 1980s, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were there and I was in love with both John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Geez…I could not make up my mind! In Cold War attire, Le Bon had a bon enfant sovietique spy attitude.
So it seems quite appropriate, after last week’s full immersion on STASI’s Eric Mielke, to get to know more about Markus Wolf.
Stasiland, an incredible book by Anna Funder. The italian translation is very good, pity only for the title “C’era una volta la DDR”, which sounds a bit silly, actually.
Funder starts in a casual way to ask people how things were during the DDR years, and she ends up conducting a very intriguing reportage.
Beyond stereotypes and beyond Ostalgie, “between Kafka and Monty Python” Funder contacts victims of the regime and former Stasi officers, Mitarbeiters and talking heads. She visits the places were citizens were detained and subject to police interrogations. She smells the stale air of these rooms, where the odour of terrified people, dossiers, senile power and outright paranoia still lingers.
For 10 years the letters that my DDR penpals and I were writing each other were intercepted, opened with special W-shaped steam devices, read, copied and filed.
My friend Michael went up to the Archive and got the letters, just after the fall of the Wall. Just like those people you see in the film “The lives of others”. Just like the protagonists of Anna Funder’s reportage.
We were teenagers and loved Duran Duran. We were discovering Madonna. I worshipped Radio Caroline, we met over Radio Free Europe.
My friends in Brandenburg and Saxony were longing for freedom. They travelled a lot across the Socialist countries. We had freedom in Triest, but I had never travelled. Freedom meant different things for us.
I wonder if I can go there, and feel the blow, of seeing my letters in a file, imagine them through the eyes of a Stasi zealous Mitarbeiter, filed and numbered, in a box. I have the sinister impression that somewhere, someone knew a lot about me.
Sophie Scholl – The last days. This is one of those movies that I could see over and over, as if I were at the theatre, and discover every time a sentence, an expression that I didn’t notice before.
I had missed this film on Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement at the cinema when it was released in 2005 and it was on my movie ‘to do list’ since a while. I found the DVD on my desk in the office yesterday, after a friend had told me that the film was impressive.
The first thing you notice in the film is the detail. The brown flowers on the wall paper. The clothes. Not “oh so 40s!” but normal. The locations, enormous buildings, resonating with echo. Offices and buildings, not “standard nazi” but still imperial, with a smattering of nazi decoration (portraits, geographical maps of Third Reich Germany) scattered about the rests of three layers of systems of power.
When you exit from your reality, your living room, and start to dive into the plot, the theater comes out. The actors have long takes and they act in front of you as if they were on stage. Julia Jentsch is grossartig and really magnetic.
The beauty of the DVD is the special content, and in the interviews you can understand the great deal of preparation that both the director and the actors put in the film. Preparation is the most recurring word. The story is well-known in Germany, and they wanted to convey all the new material emerged from the archives in order to bring new angles to this important episode of German history.
Conscience versus an illegal legal system. The paranoia of power. These are the elements which stand out from the police interrogations.
Yesterday I finished reading an incredible book, where the paranoia of power, the conscience of a woman against the aberrations of an illegal legal system stand out. But I will talk about that in another post.
Tomorrow is April 25th, the Liberation anniversary in Italy. And the scrap of paper left by Sophie Scholl on her bed before going to trial had one word scribbled on it: “Freiheit”.
Tomorrow I will be disgusted, once more, by those who will tarnish once more the meaning of liberty and the memory of those who died for it, be them partisans, military or civilians, just like Sophie Scholl. Because in Italy the paranoia of power is back. In a cushioned, muted, sometimes obscenely farcical way, it is here. And also in a brutal way, let’s not forget about it.
My brother just Twitted me from Triest, he’s watching tonight “The lives of others”, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s incredible movie on RAI1.
).
and I was in love with both John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Geez…I could not make up my mind! In Cold War attire, Le Bon had a bon enfant sovietique spy attitude.
