The German Democratic Republic

The GDR, or The Very Shortest History of East Elbia 

East Germany didn't become different because of the Russian occupation of 1945-1989; the Russians occupied the place because it had always been different.

Otto the Great invaded across the Elbe in 935 AD; the Slavs threw the Germans back out in 982 AD; the Germans tried again in 1127 and over the next two centuries they largely (but never completely) succeeded in supplanting the Slavs up to the river Oder. The Teutonic Knights went further until the Poles smashed them in 1410. Prussia was born under Polish suzerainty as an act of revolt again Rome in 1525, rose to fame in battle against Sweden, was made a great power by victories between the Elbe and the Oder, then saved from abolition by the Tsar in 1807. The fatal inability of the western Germans to unite allowed Prussia to conquer them after a single great battle on the Elbe in 1866. Prussia smashed France in 1870; it thereafter dragooned the Germans into providing manpower and money for its bid(s) to settle the 1,000-year struggle with the Slavs. That struggle ended in 1945 with part of East Elbia lost forever and what was left, between Elbe and Oder, a helpless colony of Russia.

With the creation of the GDR, this rump East Elbia formally became what it had always really been: the odd German-speaking man out in a Slavic Eastern Europe. Until the wall went up in 1961, the East Germans - above all, the young and educated - undertook a new Ostflucht to West Germany at an average rate of about 200,000 year on year, about the same rate as in the Ostflucht from the 1850s onwards. If Russia's clients hadn't built and maintained a deadly barrier to stop the fugitives in the meantime, by 1989 there would have been hardly any Germans left beyond the Elbe.

- James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany, Devo, 2017, p.199

See also:
History: Charlemagne's passion for education, 29 March 2022
Germany: NZ posters by young German artists, 30 June 2012

History: The single most successful German ruler, 19 May 2012 

Forgotten memories of laughter and war

Thursday music corner: Juliana Hatfield (b. Maine, 1967) is an American singer-songwriter who first came to prominence in the late 1980s in Boston band Blake Babies. In the early 1990s she was a member of Evan Dando's Lemonheads, appearing on their successful albums It's A Shame About Ray (1992) and Come On Feel The Lemonheads (1993). 

After releasing her solo debut album Hey Babe in 1992, her second album Become What You Are, released the following year as the Juliana Hatfield Three, became a major indie crossover success, spawning the hit single My Sister, which topped the US Alternative chart. Since then she has released albums for a range of labels. In 2023 Hatfield released her twentieth solo album, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, a follow-up to similar covers albums she has recorded for Olivia Newton-John (2018) and The Police (2019).

Sunshine is a breezy, 1960s-influenced pop song that appeared on Hatfield's sixth solo album In Exile Deo, released in 2004. 

Juliana Hatfield - Sunshine (2004)

See also:

Music: Blake Babies - Temptation Eyes (1991)

Music: Juliana Hatfield Three - This Is The Sound (1993)

Music: Juliana Hatfield - Universal Heart-Beat (1995)

Agapanthus

 

The North-South divide in England

The North-South Divide Gets Ideology

At the 1924 election, former Southern Liberal voters went Tory, and stayed there; former Northern Liberal voters went with Labour, and stayed there. This finally locked down the political North-South divide. The Liberal Party was English, with an ancestry going back beyond the Union of 1707. Although it had come to be identified with Outer Britain during the struggles of the 19th century, it never completely lost traction in the South - until now. The Labour Party was a very different animal. It was born of the United Kingdom, its first five leaders were Scotsmen, and for the first two decades of its existence it had zero impact south of the Trent except in the poor quarters of London's vast city-state.

The Conservatives were no longer facing off against a genuine rival English party. The opposition now was the Party of Outer Britain (Northern English + Celts) a.k.a. Labour. This hardened the age-old suspicion among Southerners that the North was somehow not properly English. Essentially the battle-lines were the same as in 1461, 1642 or 1848 (or, for that matter, as when Northern thegns and Welsh princelings had united against the Godwins of Wessex under Edward the Confessor).

The ancient struggle was now window-dressed with fashionable, 20th-century ideologies. Labour, the new incarnation of the Outer British Alliance, claimed its members were all somehow instinctively peace-loving, communitarian, and internationalist. This self-image remains central to many Scots, Welsh, and Northern English.

Men live by their generosities, by their loyalties; not by their interests, and their self-regarding impulses... that is the aim of the Socialist inspiration that gives us power in our Labour Movement.

- Ramsay MacDonald, Labour leader, 1924

Meanwhile, the latest version of the Party of the South claimed to represent a Deep Ethnic England. This vision is still widespread among those who love Barbour coats, the Cotswolds and suchlike.

The preservation of the individuality of the Englishman is essential to the preservation of the type of the race... To me, England is the country, and the country is England... The sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone...

- Stanley Baldwin, Conservative leader, 1924

- James Hawes, The Shortest History of England, London, 2020, p.204-206.

See also:
Books: A NZer makes powerful enemies at the BBC, 28 February 2023
Books: It seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain, 20 December 2022
Books: The rotten boroughs, 2 April 2017

Maybe I'm weak, maybe I'm strong

Thursday music corner: US singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson (b. New York, 1941 - d. Los Angeles, 1994) was famed amongst music aficionados for the skill of his compositions and musical innovation, but struggled both with commercial success in the ruthless pop business, and with personal demons manifesting in the alcoholism that ultimately shortened his life. Famously, his two biggest hits, Everybody's Talkin' (1969) and Without You (1971) were covers of other artists' work rather than Nilsson originals. A friend of several Beatles, Nilsson was a prolific artist throughout the 1960s and '70s. Eight of his singles and three of his albums reached the US top 40.

Nilsson's start in the music business was greatly assisted by the Beatles' press representative, Derek Taylor:

Taylor, who first became enamoured with Nilsson after hearing his song 1941 on a car radio, concluded, “Nilsson is the best contemporary soloist in the world. He is it. He is the something else The Beatles are. He is The One.” To prove his belief, he bought 25 copies of Nilsson’s RCA debut album and despatched them to his favourite industry people, including all four Beatles. At which point, the world sat up and slowly began to notice.

Nevertheless (I'm In Love With You) is Nilsson's cover of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby's 1931 song originally recorded by Jack Denny, which became widely recorded in the 1950s, with versions by the McGuire Sisters, the Mills Brothers, Paul Weston, Ray Anthony, Ralph Flanagan, Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra. Nilsson's version appeared on his 1973 album A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, an album of old standards covers that reached the top 20 in the UK and Australia, and reached number 46 in the US. Nilsson's version of Herman Hupfeld's As Time Goes By was released as the album's single, and performed modestly in the US, Canadian and Australian charts.

Harry Nilsson - Nevertheless (I’m In Love With You) (1973)

See also:

Music: Harry Nilsson - Without You (1971)

Music: Badfinger - Take It All (1971)

Music: Aimee Mann - One (Nilsson cover, 1999)

I've been forcing myself not to forget, just to feel worse

Thursday music corner: Electronic was a supergroup duo founded by New Order's Bernard Sumner and The Smiths' Johnny Marr. They collaborated with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys, and ex-Kraftwerk member Karl Bartok. Electronic released three albums during the 1990s: the self-titled debut Electronic, Raise the Pressure, and Twisted Tenderness. All reached the UK top 10, and the band scored eight UK top 40 singles.

Getting Away With It was Electronic's debut single, co-written by Sumner, Marr and Neil Tennant. The lyrics gently satirise the lyrical themes beloved by Marr's former bandmate Morrissey. Ben Thompson of the NME was impressed by the single, calling it 'the most complete pop record of the week, by an infinite margin...A lovely airy melody drifts in and out of the song; gently weighted with obtuse, lovelorn one-liners...The record somehow manages to be much more than the sum of its parts and stubbornly refuses to give up its element of mystery'. It reached number 12 on the UK pop charts, and number 4 on the US Alternative chart.

Electronic - Getting Away With It (1989)

See also:

Music: Electronic - Disappointed (live TOTP, 1992)

Music: New Order - Vanishing Point (1989)

Music: Johnny Marr & Neil Finn - Down On The Corner (live, 2001) 

Trump's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic

Trump had no idea how to handle [the Covid-19 pandemic]. The virus did not respond to his favorite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful. Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House, a special counsel and even congressional impeachment. But he could not will away a plague. So he tried denial, another favorite Trump tactic. That did not work either.

The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency - his distrust of his own staff and the rest of the government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.

Trump had always been indifferent to most substantive policy matters and skeptical of anything that experts, scientific or otherwise, told him. He turned everything into a political question whose answer was whatever would benefit him politically. And that is how he would approach this crisis too. "From the time this thing hit," said an adviser who spoke frequently with the president, "his only calculus was how does it affect my re-election."

- Peter Baker & Susan Glasser, The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, New York, 2022, p.37

I would be wishing today on a four leaf clover

Thursday music corner: Tyrone Davis (1937-2005), later dubbed 'the king of romantic Chicago soul', was born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago in his early twenties. After joining the soul stable of successful Chicago soul producer Carl Davis in 1968 he attained immediate success with his first release, although rather than the A-side A Woman Needs To Be Loved, it was the B-side Can I Change My Mind that became a million-selling hit. Throughout his five-decade career 14 of Davis' albums reached the R&B top 40, and 35 of his singles hit the R&B top 40. He also achieved cross-over success on the national stage, with five US top 40 pop chart hits.

Turn Back The Hands of Time was Davis' third single, and it appeared on the 1970 album of the same name. Written by Jack Daniels and Johnny Moore, the single was his biggest hit, topping the R&B charts and reaching number 3 on the US pop charts. The album also reached number 9 on the R&B album charts.

Tyrone Davis - Turn Back The Hands of Time (1970)

See also:

Music: Tyrone Davis - Can I Change My Mind (1968)

Music: Tyrone Davis - Turning Point (1975)

Music: Tyrone Davis - Are You Serious (1982)