Fun with the 'On Notice' Board:



I'd gladly be the blind bard who sings this epic.

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”


Dorothy has shown us what to do whenever we encounter a witch, in Oz or elsewhere. We would be well advised always to ask the same about Germans. (DIGRESSION: also Jesuits.)

“Are you a good German or a bad German?”

Like witches, the good Germans are very, very good, and the bad ones are unbelievably bad. Here are a few examples of the best and worst of Germans. (Austrians are included. We are all about inclusion here.)


Good German: the bratwurst
Bad German: breaded, fried, stuffed Palatinate sow’s stomach



Good German: Kafka’s brilliantly brief and imaginative Metamorphosis
Bad German: the 100-volume complete edition Marx/Engels



Good German: the complete line of Krups coffee grinders and espresso makers
Bad German: the complete line of Krups 88-millimeter high explosive shells



Good Austro-German: Mozart’s Requiem (1791)
Bad Austro-German: Falco’s "Rock Me Amadeus" (1985)



Good German: manned rocketry, exploration of space
Bad German: long-range guided missiles, civilian deaths



Good German: Mercedes S-Class
Bad German: 2-cylinder, cardboard-body “Trabant”



Good German: aspirin
Bad German: mustard gas



Good German: Oktoberfest
Bad German: Kristallnacht



Good German: Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”
Bad German: Heidegger’s “Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being”



Best German: JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE: author, artist and civil servant
Worst German: ADOLF HITLER: author, (failed) artist, and “civil servant”

* * * *

Nietzsche was fond of asserting that the best of the Germans are always the “worst Germans”, by which he meant that they were the least patriotic, least typical, the most “European” of their people. All in all, a rather earnest self-portrait on the part of the author.

Nietzsche seems to belong simultaneously to both categories of Germans, though not in the terms as he understands them. His virtues are those of the “good Germans”: brilliant insight to see what no one else has seen (Einstein, Gödel, Goethe), peerless technical and creative mastery of his art form (Luther, Bach, Beethoven, Goethe), irrepressible wit (Hamann, Goethe, Karl Kraus); his vice is that of the Germans at their worst: seduced by the power of the One Big Idea, he sacrifices all humanity and humane-ness to it, or rather, all in him that is inhumane finds nourishment in the One Big Idea, and it grows to grotesque proportions.