But looking back at the fears that were expressed in 1989 and 1990 about German reunification (many of them expressed by Germans themselves), there is something to it as well:
“The fear was that this thing in the center of Europe, if it were allowed to become unified, was going to be a cancer once again and lead to Act III of the great European tragedy,” said Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation and an ambassador to NATO under President Bill Clinton.'Solved' is a step too far.
Instead, Mr. Hunter said, “the German problem, which emerged with the unifying of Germany beginning in the 1860s, is one of the few problems in modern history that has been solved.”
But the article suggests that after its tumultuous, violent, and sometimes horrifying past, Germany might have become a bit, well, normal and boring.
Boring is good. Boring is just fine.
4 comments:
Germany boring and normal? You haven't been to that restauarant on Ruegen that's decked out like a submarine and has a trio singing there on saturday nights, have you? Certainly not boring, and definitely, definitely not normal. I think its called Nemo's.
Caspar David Friedrich would be spinning in his grave ....
'Boring and normal' in a political sense.
Not in the zany restaurant sense.
Never been to Rügen. In fact: the whole Ostsee is undiscovered country from my perspective.
Is the food as good as the atmosphere?
Actually, Nemo's was really good, and did an excellent veggie option. A good night was had by all. In Stralsund the next morning we discovered a restaurant that billed itself as Mecklenburg's ONLY veggie restaurant, which I'd guess might have been true. Our train ticket to Hamburg was, if I remember rightly, 48€ for 2. And we were allowed another 3 persons on the ticket (a Meck-Pom Traveller, it was called). No wonder the trains were full all the way.
Seriously, the Ostsee was well worth going to - even the Turkish stall at the Real south of Rostock where we got veggie Kebabs.
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