Über die Freiheit / de libertate

I meant to comment on this when it came out, but I forgot. Packer, who apparently is somehow a journalist, is living in Berlin and apparently doesn’t understand a damn bit of it.

Germany held an election yesterday, though you might not have noticed if you don’t live there. I barely noticed, and I’ve been in Berlin for the past three weeks. True, there are posters of candidates’ faces on streetlamps around the city—charmingly un-slick posters like those of a race for county commissioner in central Ohio.

1. Though voter turnout is low, it was clearly evident. Television news covered it extensively and there are more posters per capita than in the United States.
2. There is absolutely nothing unslick about the posters here. Indeed they are better than American posters which inevitably are merely red, white and blue.

I keep wondering what happened to German nationalism. For about a century it was one of the most powerful forces in the world, a spirit of risk and command and achievement, pride and aggression, and, in the belief that such things never disappear entirely, I find myself looking for traces of it in unlikely places—bike lanes, for example. Berlin’s streets are almost everywhere lined with narrow red paths—brick or painted asphalt—that tell you a tall slender dirty-blond man in glasses, sitting very high on the seat, is bearing down on two wheels, bell madly clinking, and you’d better get the hell out of his way. Nothing is quite so withering as the icy glare of the indignant Berlin cyclist, and after a couple of incidents I learned to stay off the red paths.

3. German nationalism is alive and well. It’s just cultural nationalism.
4. It took more than one time to realize that you should stay off clearly marked bike paths?

If German nationalism has indeed been so tightly squeezed and pressed and bottled that the full might of it comes down to the jolly little phrase with which Germans bid one another goodbye (“Tschüss!,” or, more phonetically, “Chuz!”), it’s an extraordinary feat of self-suppression, and something for other peoples—yes, I’m thinking of my own chest-pounding countrymen—to emulate, not take advantage of.

5. What the fuck are you talking about?
6. “Tschüss” is not a phrase, it’s a word. And it’s rarely pronounced like “Chuz”, it’s generally pronounced “Chooss” and this is even more evident by the use of “tschüssi.”

 But as for the Germans in the audience, they were too polite to fight back…

7. It has nothing to do with politeness.

Even Tyler Cowen thinks I chose correctly:

A loyal MR reader requests the following:

If you were exiled from the United States and had to go live semi-permanently in some other country, which country would you choose?

Another reader asks:

Let’s say you had enough cash (would 10 million do it?) and needed to disappear. Where would you go? Option one, you only spoke English. Option two, you could endow yourself with any language(s) you wished.

Secondary question: would 10 mil be enough?

[…]

I pick either Berlin or Cologne, the latter for its central location in Europe.  In either city there would be plenty of art and music, lots of smart people to talk to, access to other good locales, and the near-certainty of public order, yet with bearable winters and good health care.  The key question between the two would be whether I need my Germany to be on the Rhein and conquered by Romans.