A few minutes later, our dirndl-clad waitress is back with a liter of golden, shining beer. It’s October 4, which means that it’s the last day of the three-week-long Oktoberfest in Munich. Though my American friends and I didn’t make it to the actual celebration this year (terrorist threats, etc.), we’ve managed to spend the last two days hunched inside of the embarrassingly kitschy Hofbräuhaus restaurant in downtown Hamburg, pretending it’s the real thing.

“Why would I go to Oktoberfest?” is the response I normally get from Northern Germans (or any German from outside of Bavaria) when I mention my interest in going. Full of sausage stands, Ferris wheels, and screaming children, the German Volksfest is a state fair-type tradition that many Germans and I dislike. The event is probably best described as “drunk people and bad music,” yet somehow Oktoberfest still manages to hold my interest.

Before coming to Europe, I had a very specific image of what to expect from this continent. I wanted old buildings, horse-drawn carriages, and big museums full of Renaissance art. Moving to Vienna’s Baroque inner city, that was exactly what I got.

Travel shows about Europe are meant to perpetuate the same depiction to Americans. In an episode about Bruges, Belgium, Rick Steves paints a picture of a romantically preserved medieval city. The recurring images of cobblestone streets, old buildings, fine chocolate, and narrow canals create the illusion that somehow Europe never moved beyond the 19th century.

Compare Mr. Steves’s video to Samantha Brown’s depiction of Barcelona. Although some of the traditions may be different, the underlying emphasis on an antiquated Europe dominates. The images are reminiscent of Cinderella’s Castle at Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

My feelings towards Oktoberfest undoubtedly stem from these nostalgic fantasies. From the moment I heard about the beer tents and people dressed in traditional Bavarian outfits singing on top of tables, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I know now that it isn’t the real Germany, but it was one of the first things that made the country interesting to me. When I got to Hamburg I realized the truth: not only does Bavarian culture only exist in Bavaria, but it is frowned upon in the rest of the country.

Although the sixteen German states are legally bound into a federation, culturally there may as well be oceans dividing them. Along with the former East, Bavaria is one of the most shunned regions of Germany. The Bavarians have their own political party (very conservative), their own heavy accent (they are very proud of it), and a country way of life. No matter how open-minded my German friends are, Bavaria is a place they often have difficulty understanding. Perhaps we could compare this to the difference between the American South and the “Yankees.”

Having lived in Northern Germany for more than two years now, I have slowly noticed these biases developing in me. As an expatriate, I believe it’s a typical way of thinking. We want so badly to adapt to the surrounding culture that we willingly throw away certain interests and opinions to feel assimilated. I remember once hearing a story about an immigrant to America who began chewing gum, a habit he disliked, because it seemed American. Knowing the typical German response to Bavaria, this is exactly what I did with Munich. I shunned it.

So, how did I suddenly end up in a beer hall on Sunday actively promoting Oktoberfest?

While in Bavaria this summer, I re-experienced the specific brand of countryside hospitality, Gemütlichkeit, that I had dismissed as cliché. Eat rich food, drink fine beer, and make sure to invite everyone else to do it with you. I was there two times in two cities with two groups of people, and the Bavarians’ welcoming disposition overwhelmed me. It is their standout feature, and as true as any stereotype can be. Returning to the North I had a fresh understanding of why I liked Bavaria and was ready to re-embrace it.

Through our somewhat overemphasized American excitement, we began to engage in a form of passive diplomacy. Before our plans to go to Munich fell through, my American friends and I were determined that our German friends come too. Going to the beer hall on Sunday, we called them again. They weren’t thrilled about the idea, but they came. They didn’t find Bavarian culture interesting, but they were forced to contemplate why others who didn’t grow up with the same prejudices and biases would.

In this case, our American clichés had their time and place. Every role and stereotype does. While in the United States, I often rail against the Bavarian stereotype to promote a more complete German identity. In Germany, embracing my American instincts is often better for everybody’s international understanding. It’s admittedly hard to do; one stands out when one just wants to blend in, but it’s a part of my role here as an expatriate.

Unfortunately, none of my German friends are any more excited about Bavaria than they were before our Sunday excursion. I guess promoting social awareness isn’t as easy as writing an article or inviting people to a brewery. I can try, but in reality, I went to that brewery to get drunk, and I write these articles for me.

Knowing his ability to mix nostalgia with reality, I was surprised when reading the interview he did with Die Zeit Magzin a few weeks ago. Throughout the interview, Regener gave many prize insights on life in Berlin, but his dialogue ran almost exclusively on the side of sentimentality. His description of Berlin is not one of a long-time inhabitant. He plays into the stereotype everyone wants to believe.

“I always found [the image of people sitting at the window and watching the street] cool. It encompasses something Zen Buddhist…[my first apartment] was in a back courtyard of a building with a bombed-out front. We paid 80 mark for two people. Out the window one saw garbage cans.”

This is the romanticized picture of Berlin: bombed-out, garbage-filled, cheap, and therefore Zen-like.

“Poor, but sexy,” are the words Mayor Klaus Wowereit uses to describe it. For many, this makes Berlin the perfect artist’s city. As Regener later relates:

“[In other cities] the people that do what I do [write and make music] are all ten years younger than me. By my age they had long since transferred into the working world. In Berlin, many people my age and older are still doing what I’m doing.”

Nikolas Kulish, German correspondent to The New York Times, seconds this:

“Those low rents famously have allowed industrial artists to find studios for their massive sculptures, and bands to lease rehearsal spaces for their practice sessions.

“Applied on the minute scale, that means ultracheap nooks for the aspiring authors who need room only for a laptop (or, in advanced cases of the writing bug, an antique typewriter) and a precarious stack of books.

“There are cheaper places in the world, though one has to go much farther east nowadays than Warsaw to find them, but none that also have the breadth of cultural offering.”

According to these men, Berlin is a place where the poor starving artists of the world can flourish without the mainstreaming oppression of the Bourgeoisie. Sucked into the myth, people come from all over the world to be artists in Berlin.

That seems to be the modern-day dream. And, to be honest, it is one that I want to buy into. I am a fan of the great expatriate authors that lived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. There is nothing I would love more than to have the new epicenter for such lively activity happening just down the street from me. Anytime I was lacking inspiration, I could simply go get a dose in Berlin.

Unfortunately, as a friend pointed out, this is sentiment and not reality.

“Berlin is cheap, but that doesn’t mean that it is any more artistic than other major cities,” she said. “Look at how much music and art comes out of New York, Paris, and London. What do you know that has come out of modern day Berlin? Art is less developed in Berlin. Berlin is cheap, but cheap just means an excuse for hipsters to hang around and do nothing.”

At first I didn’t want to believe it, but the more I have thought about her words, the more I see what she means.

People often tend to associate art with poverty. This is perhaps because it’s a damn near impossible way to make a living. Berlin’s low cost of living makes it an attractive place for artists to be. In their dreams, they envision themselves sitting in their studios making art all day. The bitter reality is that most people making art still have to work to pay their bills, and there are no jobs in Berlin. With its extraordinarily high unemployment rate, it’s hard for nationals to find work. For expatriates, the figures are even more depressing. The poor starving artists may have plenty of time to work on their art, but the result is that many people actually are poor and starving, often forcing them to leave.

Another problem is that people tend to label cities “creative cities.” The reality is that New York, London, Paris, and now Berlin are simply big Western cities. The fact that a lot of art appealing to Western sentimentalities comes out of those places is as much a statistics game as anything. Traveling to said city will not make one an artist, but it will make you part of the scene.

And Berlin certainly has a scene. Scattered about the hip districts are some of the coolest bars I have been to. Little more than a door with a hand-made sign, these places define the poor-but-sexy Berlin. In the air, one notes the smell of cheap beer and hash, and hears the DJ’s newest beats. On the dance floor the owners of scarves and thick-rimmed glasses shake their hips and speak together in accented tongues. It’s an amazing place to see and be seen, but terrible for productivity.

As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

If other forms of art are anything like writing, then they rarely go hand in hand with a good party. A week after their Berlin feature, Die Zeit interviewed three artists from another German city: Munich. When discussing their studios, the overall impression was one of quiet focus. I would argue that this is the atmosphere for many artists who take themselves seriously. Hemingway, who regularly wrote about drinking (and did a damn good job of it too), never mixed his words and drink. Creation requires concentration and patience. It’s the sort of thing that drives man to frustration and drinking.

Perhaps, then, Berlin is a good place to quit creating.

The attacks here have come on two fronts. Commercial freighters have found themselves in constant danger from pirate groups. The pirates have already taken multiple ships hostage and held them for ransom. From the Ukrainians to the Russians to the Finns, no one seems to be safe.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Swedish-founded political party, the Pirate Party, won a seat in the European Parliament during the June 7 European Parliamentary elections. Since that time, the Pirate Party has spread throughout Europe, with cells actively registered in at least eight other countries.

In today’s Europe, pirates seem to be everywhere: on the open oceans, and in the hipster bar talking politics across the street. Although the gun-toting, ship-robbing pirates (mostly from Somalia) seem much different from the anchor-tattooed iPhone users (mostly from well-to-do families) who idolize them, appearances can be deceiving. These pirate groups have both been at the receiving end of the world’s troubles.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Somali government completely collapsed. With no one left to regulate their seas, the Somali people watched as other nations came to their coast, dumped waste into their waters, and destroyed their once lucrative fishing industry with non-sustainable practices. Furthermore, the region was no longer controlled by a central government, but by clans and warlords. A single country became divided and dominated through violence, with very few reaping any benefits.

Taken together, these two forces meant that the Somali were running out of money.

On the political side, the Pirate Party’s constituents (average age: 29) have suffered the most from the financial crisis. First, the business ethics of their parents’ generation caused them to lose their jobs, but that was only the beginning, especially here in Europe. With the national elections set to take place this September, mainstream German politics is at a complete standstill, despite the havoc the financial crisis continues to wreak on the economy.

Yes, the German government has helped sectors of the economy by bailing out failing banks and subsidizing workers’ paychecks within struggling industries (i.e. Opal), but this has only provided safety for the established generation. For those entering the job market, the stagnation these policies have created means they remain jobless. Decisions need to be made and policies changed, but not before the vote.

It is play-it-safe politics rather than help-the-people politics, and the youngest generations are feeling the brunt of this mentality on more than just the job front. Especially since the conservative party, the CDU, has established itself as a dominant force in German politics, there have been a number of policies that have negatively impacted the German youth. Tuition fees for university (something that was not at all common before, and makes university now too expensive for some people), and a proposal which will give the government censorship control on the internet (we are the “technology generation”) are just a few examples.

Considering most Germans see a regime change as highly unlikely this year, there is little hope of having these issues addressed. Faced with such a situation, what can anyone do?

This is what I find so fascinating about both of these groups. Each one has found their own way to reassert themselves. Although neither has money or resources, they have managed to scare their opposition. The modern sea-faring pirates are no longer the same as the medieval thieves we remember, nor are the members of the Pirate Party and their contemporaries the same “highly protected” and “entitled” (Word doc) children, the researchers named them. They are organized and motivated.

In Somalia, piracy has become more than a group of rogue bandits. Through piracy, they have become political, they are businessmen, and in the end they are philanthropists. When overfishing began to decimate their waters, fishing-town locals turned vigilante. They used their little skiffs, an old rusty grappling hook and a couple of guns, and raided the foreign ships. They took fishermen hostage and demanding payment for goods pulled from their waters.

As these groups began to earn more money, they grew more organized. At this point, they have a power not present anywhere else in the country; the pirates are some of the only people in Somalia who are able to reach across clan lines. Although they started small with fishing vessels, now they are even managing to make Europeans nervous (many countries were, after all, dumping waste in Somali waters).

Two years ago, pirates were something for the movies and the storybooks, but over the last few months, they have been making weekly appearances in the media. True, what they’re doing is not legal, but few reactionary methods are. The storming of the Bastille wasn’t legal, nor was the Boston Tea Party. In the shadow of the rich nations that have come to dominate and exploit a people, sometimes illegal action is the only way to be heard.

To me, Somali piracy seems acceptable, especially since they are also managing to help their local communities. The pirates are the richest members of their communities, and they are incredibly generous with their money. The locals celebrate when known pirates come back into town. The pirates buy in excess, and thereby give back to the community.

As The New York Times quoted in a piece about piracy a year ago, “If they see a good car that a guy is driving,” he said, “they say, ‘How much? If it’s 30 grand, take 40 and give me the key.’ ”

In my hometown, Grand Rapids, MI, the richest families donate money to build hospitals and venue arenas for the people. The pirates buy lamb and automobiles. Although they spent years being overrun by the strength and greed of other nations (including the warlords of their own), through piracy the Somali people have found their voice.

The same is true of today’s younger generation. The Pirate Party is just one symptom of a threat that did not seem to exist even a year ago: the youth.

In 2007, teens and twenty-somethings in the United States were little more than apathetic brats. In Germany, they were, according to an article in the August 27 edition of weekly newspaper Die Zeit, “pragmatically adapted” to the systems in play. At that point in time, we were more of a vanilla annoyance than a threat to the world order.

But then things changed. As I mentioned before, the current political situation in Germany has stagnated. With the politicians all waiting around for the elections to do anything, more and more people are noticing how ineffective the system is. The ever-growing need to change business as usual has caused a group that once seemed “sensible and adapted” to rebel.

While I use Germany as an example, because they are currently at a crisis point, we have all found our means to do so. As Die Zeit, stated, “Through Facebook and Twitter, the activists of the new revolution communicate world wide.” Small parties like the Pirate Party are now growing by as many as 80 members a day. While Obama exposed the networking capabilities of new media, the Pirate Party has shown that this power this can bestow on every individual.

Technology: it is our own form of piracy. It is our power and the source of our “new revolution.” As big companies and bureaucrats fail to help the little man, going around the system may become the only way to be heard. By finding alternative avenues for gaining power, these groups are already becoming a force that the government — national and international — may actually have to contend with.

I hope they’re starting to shake in their booties.

For that, the Munich Regional Court has finally delivered Scheungraber his sentence. 64 years after the act, those ten dead farmers finally found justice.

Or did they?

Scheungraber’s sentence is just one of three cases dealing with Nazi war crimes that the German Courts are currently processing. Heinrich Boere, 88, will be tried at the end of October for supposedly shooting three Dutch civilians, and John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old recently deported from the U.S., will face charges for aiding in the extermination of some 27,900 Jews in the Polish Concentration Camp Sobibor.

All three of these men will almost certainly be convicted for the atrocities they committed. If they did the things they have been charged with, then they certainly deserve to be, but I can’t help but wonder if these proceedings are going about things the wrong way.

The idea here is to find justice, correct? Certainly, Germany hasn’t put these men on trial in order to keep them from striking again.

Demjanjuk, who is ailing under kidney and bone-marrow diseases, was so ill at the time of deportation that the U.S. government had trouble getting permission to transport him. The even older (though already sentenced) Josef Scheungraber will remain undetained until they hear his appeal next year, if he is still alive.

For some, this is about hearing the truth about these men’s actions. For others, the proceedings are about judgment and punishment. But from what I have learned about these three cases, I don’t see how either of these goals are being met.

As Thomas Blatt, a Jewish author who was imprisoned in the Sobibor Concentration Camp, said, “I don’t care if [Demjanjuk] is released; I do care about his testimony.”

This argument reminds me of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings that occurred South Africa in the 1990s. In order to put the country back together after Apartheid, the government wanted to start with a clean slate. Putting everyone in jail was not going to solve this problem. Instead, they founded a committee.

The idea was that through repentance one finds truth and justice.

This is how I understand Blatt’s explanation of Nazi trials today. More than half a century after the fact, sentencing a 90-year-old man to life imprisonment doesn’t really accomplish anything. What’s important is admitting one’s crimes. It’s about showing respect to the victims and finding peace for one’s self.

This hasn’t happened. Scheungraber stated that he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the events described. Demjanjuk’s words were similar.

This is, admittedly, a terrible disappointment for the victims, but the implications of their denials are much wider than their lack of piety.

“There are many people right now who say the Holocaust never happened,” says Blatt.

To all those people who claim the Holocaust never existed, these men’s testimonies should have also proved that it did. By refusing to admit to their actions, Scheungraber and his compatriots have in a larger sense denied the Holocaust itself.

The second principle behind these war crime hearings is the notion that these men need to be judged and punished for their actions. Men like Demjanjuk may have assisted in the murder of thousands of innocent people. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung states, “All Nazi criminals must answer for their deeds.”

I have no problem with this statement. Granted, incarceration doesn’t seem like the most logical penalty 64 years after the crime, but if this is the punishment we find most appropriate, then sure, that’s fine. Everyone needs closure somehow. But the way these judgments are being carried out is all wrong.

If there is one thing we cherish in the U.S. in the legal system, it is the idea that every man deserves to be judged by a “jury of his peers.” These peers theoretically live in the same time, place, and culture under which a crime was committed. This means that those people can stand bravely in front of a criminal and say, “If I were in your shoes, I would/would not have done that.”

In this way, they have a right to judge.

As my housemate recently said to me, we live in a different time and different circumstances than those under which these men acted. Having never experienced the extremes of war, we both decided we did not have the right to say, “I would never have done that.”

Take Solomon Perel for example. Perel is a Jew who was captured by Nazis during the Second World War. His memoir, Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (I Was Hitler Youth Salomon), details his survival. Discovered by the Nazis, Perel denied his Jewish roots and went to a Hitler Youth School in Braunschweig. During his time there, he translated work from Russian to German, befriended Nazis (he even had a Nazi girlfriend), and aided in the capture of Joseph Stalin’s son. He maintained his charade until the Nazis were overtaken.

It was war. This was about survival. He wrote that he was ashamed of himself, but he had no choice if he wanted to live. Now he makes tours around Europe speaking about his experiences.

Many of those, including Demjanjuk, who have gone on to be tried for war crimes had changed their identity and were leading relatively normal lives. They had neighbors, families and jobs. Perhaps this means that – in a normal time in a normal world — they were actually normal people, just like you and me.

Just like Solomon Perel, it could have been the war that made them behave differently.

The idea that these men’s condemnation is coming from people born some twenty years after the war’s end doesn’t seem like true justice. It’s symbolic justice, but not much more than that.

I understand that a lot of people may disagree with me on this issue. It’s not hard to imagine why. The things that happened under the Nazi regime are not really to be defended. They are to be punished. End of story.

But these men were not high-ranking officials. They were not decision-makers, thinking up new strategies for mass-extermination and world domination. Their greatest sin was most likely getting caught up in something unimaginable in today’s world.

I simply ask that we think a little harder about what we are doing.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I say to my friend. “I’m freaking out a little bit.”

I hate large groups of tourists. They completely overwhelm me, and in Barcelona they are everywhere. I don’t know what I expected coming to the fourth most popular tourist destination in Europe (after London, Paris, and Rome). I guess I still hoped to have my own experiences, but everywhere we went, we did so alongside thousands of others.

This is pathetic, I thought to myself. The beautiful Park Güell is useless for reading or enjoying nature, and the Catalonian feel of the historic Barri Gótic is completely lost in the overwhelming screech of English voices.

What has tourism done? Barcelona’s inhabitants are slowly watching their city and culture get taken over. Now even the outsiders (the ones who have taken over) can’t get real feel for the city because they’re the only ones there.

Tourism has destroyed everything in its wake.

Right?

Graffiti in Barcelona.

There are plenty of discussions on the negative effects of tourism on a country and it’s culture. I myself have often accused it of being a form of neocolonialism. A tourist comes in with their rolls of money (read: influence) and runs amok. They buy and demand and spread their influence until the culture adapts to their needs.

But according to Erik Cohen’s essay “The Sociology of Tourism,” this is not necessarily true. Unlike explorers, conquerors, missionaries, or even anthropologists, in a tourist-local situation the locals have the upper hand. A local’s advanced linguistic, geographical, and social knowledge place the tourist at their mercy.

The tourist walks around with a pocketful of money and a map that hardly seems to fit the streets, and the local gets to decide how much he/she wants to exploit this situation.

It is not the locals who are dehumanized and commodified; it’s the tourists.

If we take my time in Vienna — another tourist infested city — as an example, we can see exactly how easily the local population takes advantage of the tourists.

I had to walk directly past St. Stephen’s Cathedral every day. The number of tour groups in this area is uncountable. Besides making the streets noisy and crowded, however, they had no impact on my day. After a while they became no different than the horse droppings I had to walk around.

The men dressed in Mozart costumes, however, preyed on the tourists like hungry lions on antelope.

I think in many ways the ability to ignore tourists is a source of local pride. It differentiates their real city from that of the stupid facade.

“I hate Times Square,” a friend of mine living in New York recently said to me. “It’s so tourist infested. Locals never go there.”

So when a Barcelona travel guide laments the locals’ loss of Las Ramblas — the city’s main promenade leading to the beach — I wonder how much the locals truly feel the same.

Instead of getting used and abused, local society isolates the tourists. I certainly saw this in both Vienna and Barcelona. They have men dress up like Mozart or they put up street performers and tapas restaurants in one area and let the tourists loose. Then they don’t have to be bothered by it.

This then sets up another question: if the tourists are isolated from the locals, how can they learn anything about the city they are visiting? On the artificial island the tourist industry has set up it would seem impossible to have any genuine experiences.

In his essay “The Social Psychology of Tourist Behavior,” P.L. Pearce seems to agree with that statement. He says that tourism is much more about reinforcing what we already know about a city than it is about coming to new understandings.

Sad but true. Most people who visit a city for a week or two without any personal contacts are not going to see much more than the travel channel and guidebooks have already described. And if I’m honest, this is also true for me.

On my first trip to Eastern Europe in 2005, for example, I remember walking around taking pictures of houses with big holes in the roof and missing walls. The whole time I commented on how perfect I thought it was that it was cold and overcast on that particular day. I wasn’t gaining new insights on that day in Bratislava, I was simply seeing what I had expected to see.

One could say that the same is true of my trips to the Ukraine and Paris respectively. In the Ukraine I was more surprised than expected by the extreme poverty, but in seeing a group of people shoveling the streets rather than using a snow plow, I thought to myself, of course.

In Paris I walked through the streets stopping to drink espresso and wine. I meandered most of the day through massive crowds of tourists and stayed in the main tourist districts. In many ways, it was exactly what I expected it to be: the romantic, over-crowded Paris we haven’t gotten to know through books and movies.

Within the short amount of time that I have spent in Barcelona or any of these other cities, it was unrealistic to think I’d discover the true depths of the culture. But although most short trips are laden with preconceived expectations, there are always a few surprises, and these alone were enough to make the trips worth-while.

In Bratislava, for example, there was art everywhere. There were multicolored cows with boobs, a house completely painted in flowery, hippie-esque designs, and beautiful gardens. They may have seemed simple, but they were completely surprising in stark contrast to many of the worn-out buildings and monotonous communist blocks. It showed the city’s growth and its reaction to its past.

The colored cow in Bratislava.

Although the poverty of the Ukraine was striking, my conversation with two wealthier-looking guys from Kiev also defied my expectations. After seeing their new MacBooks and single-lense reflex cameras, I was not surprised when made it clear to us that they spoke Russian (another surprise: most of the Ukrainians we were keen to make distinctions between themselves and their former dictator). My friend and I were surprised, however, when they turned out to be nerdy computer programmers rather than your prototypical Russian mobsters.

In Paris, I must admit that I was surprised by the exact things that I thought would be mundane. The problem with Paris is that it has been featured so often in our media that its image has turned into nothing but kitsch. While visiting I was astounded by how beautiful and noteworthy all of the sights actually were. The tourists still admittedly overwhelmed me, experiencing the city transformed it from something banal to illuminating.

Finally, we come back to Barcelona. While I feel I learned a lot while in the city, the one that struck me the most probably reflects poorly on me:

Spain is nothing like Latin America. This realization is admittedly naïve, but growing up in the United States, I had always associated Spanish-speaking culture with Latin America. This is not true at all. In Spain the people are quite reserved, ride brand new scooters, have beautiful old buildings, and are very wealthy. In every way, the Spanish are European.

These were the things I have learned while abroad. Granted, they are all relatively trivial — sometimes surprisingly so — but that just proves how important it is to visit these places.

I see my visits as a way for me to take a small nibble out of the whole European pie. Each trip has promoted a bit more understanding, and thereby moves each place from the fairy-tale image in my mind to the reality of its inhabitants.

Making these discoveries is a slow process — often times full of tourists — but it is one worth waiting in line for.

Established in Bavaria in 1516, the Reinheitsgebot is a set of laws dictating how to brew beer. According to their mandate, beer can contain four and only four ingredients: malted grain, hops, water, and yeast. Anything else here in Germany would be unacceptable (literally – it would not be legally marketable as beer).

Considering Germany’s renown in the fields of beer development (wheat beer, lager beer, Rauchbier, etc.) and drinking culture (Oktoberfest, schnapps, and brew-houses) the Purity Laws, directly translated as “Purity Commandments,” are now arguably the best-propagated benchmark of beer brewing in the world.

Because we don’t have such strict guidelines in the U.S., we have large breweries like Miller tossing things like artificial foam stabilizers and preservatives (other than alcohol) into their beer. They want to brew quickly and efficiently and are more than willing to throw as many foreign ingredients into our beer as they can in order to do so.

It’s no wonder that the Germans call American beer “disgusting” and “watery.”

In order to protect us from such beer-brewing abuse, I must say that the regulations of the Reinheitsgebot have done their job in Germany: they keep beer pure. But out of this same line of logic comes the problematic myth of the Reinheitsgebot. This is one that many micro/craftbrewing enthusiasts tend to cling to.

I spoke briefly with Steve Dresler, head brewer of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, a California-based craft brewery, who believes in the strengths of the Reinheitsgebot.

“Following the Reinheitsgebot in no way needs to limit a brewers creativity,” Dresler said. “We make a number of beers here, and only use the essentials of malted barley, hops and yeast, and do use some malted wheat at times.”

Sierra Nevada is not the first brewery I have known that does this. On visits to the Red Hook Brewery in Woodinville, WA (now owned by Anheuser-Busch — look out!) and the Deschutes Brewery in Bend, OR, the tour guides respectively proclaimed that their breweries brewed to the standards of the German Purity Laws.

In making this assertion, all three of these breweries essentially claim that the Reinheitsgebot is the only true way to brew beer, although, comically none of them technically brew all of their beers to these standards. (I haven’t found direct literature from the breweries’ websites that mention the Reinheitsgebot, but this fact was unofficially voiced by brewery representatives during brewery tours or in informal conversations.)

In reality, as many American microbrewers will tell you, the Purity Laws are an anachronistic standard that are relatively meaningless in today’s brewing culture. Rather than promoting the production of great beer, they suppress the development of the modern understanding of it.

To begin, the Purity Laws had very little to do with purity in 1516 and much to do with control. Due to poor water quality, alcohol was so important to the health and stability of society that the government categorized it as a “foodstuff.” This put beer into the front line of regulation.

The beer industry needed grain. So did the bread bakers. In order to control who used what, the Reinheitsgebot proclaimed that the brewers could only use barley when making beer (a law they had to reform some years later due to the popularity of wheat beer in the southern German provinces).

The government also needed to tax the amount of beer being brewed and served, which meant amounts and prices needed to be regulated. People often overlook the fact that most of the literature of the Reinheitsgebot has to do with prices. As one excerpt reads, “From Michaelmas to Georgi, the price for one Mass [Bavarian Liter 1,069] or one Kopf [bowl-shaped container for fluids, not quite one Mass], is not to exceed one Pfennig.”

This is not to say that nothing in the Reinheitsgebot contributes cultural value to the brewing industry. In the 16th century, brewing did not aspire to the standard that it does now. The brewers were still trying to grasp what made beer taste good, and in an attempt to find a good seasoning, were regularly adding ingredients like oak bark.

Then at some point, they discovered hops. They knew it tasted good, and the government therefore decided that it should be one of the four essential ingredients for beer. Considering that hops are still a standard for almost every beer brewed in America or Europe, one can tally this up as an important contribution.

The problem with the Reinheitsgebot in contemporary brewing culture is that our brewing knowledge is much more advanced today. Sure, we may need the taxes and whatever, but we certainly have a much more advanced sense of what can go into a beer and make it taste good.

If we were to look at some of the more successful European beers outside of Germany, for example, we would see that none of them meet the standards of the Reinheitsgebot. Guinness, for instance, does not technically qualify as beer in Germany because the malted grains have been roasted. Most Belgian beers also do not make the grade because of the spicing techniques (coriander, cumin, chamomile, ginger), which make their beers so noteworthy.

Especially in America, where I would argue we have the youngest beer brewing culture, it seems totally irresponsible to brew to the Reinheitsgebot. Yes, there are many styles brewed to the Reinheitsgebot worth taking influence from and, yes, we should respect the cultural importance of these laws, but we have the opportunity to do so much more. We have Jasmine IPAs (Elysian Brewery, Seattle, WA), Hazelnut Browns (Rogue, Portland, OR), and barrel-aged stouts (New Holland Brewery, Holland, MI) that are pushing our understanding of beer’s abilities.

We should grab this bull by the horns and run with it, instead of trapping ourselves behind some strange myth of what pure beer should be. As New York Times author John Schwartz says of the moon-landing hoax, to believe in something so nonsensical and outdated “staggers the imagination.”

I think this quote works in both cases.

While the music and the party are undeniably present, the Fusion has more behind it than music and money-making. As the event-planning group Kultur Kosmos states on their website, the Fusion Festival is a politically inspired celebration, meant to promote “the current discussion of racism and violence associated with the political right (especially in Eastern Germany).”

Courtesy of Thomas Charbit.

In some ways, this mission is clear the moment one drives up to the premises. German flags with the bottom gold portion torn off — a symbol of the political left — hang from poles across the festival grounds. A non-profit organization based in Eastern Germany, Kultur Kosmos’s main goal is to put on events for the youth of the former Soviet sector. While neo-Nazism is still a problem all over Germany, its stronghold is unquestionably in the East.

In contrast to the Marshall Plan-fueled success of Western Germany, the East has been suffering under one plague or another since the beginning of the first World War. First it was Fascism, then Communism, and then the struggle to survive under the unforgiving hammer of capitalism. When the wall fell, people fled to the West, leaving ghost towns in their wake. Cheap immigrant workers stole jobs from those under-qualified for some modern work, and the East German currency suffered hyperinflation to the point where people were buying goods with wheelbarrows full of money.

Under these weak circumstances, the neo-Nazi parties, both in the East and the West, found strength in the Neue Bundesländer (New-German States), the politically correct name for the East German states. According the Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, there are approximately 28 neo-Nazi hate crimes committed each day in the East.

Although these hate crimes — and any overt reference to Nazism, like swastikas in plain sight or the performance of the Sieg Heil — are punishable under German law, this subculture still exists in small underground pockets, especially in small villages in the East. Earlier this year, a camp was disbanded for being a neo-Nazi propaganda center. Children were sent during the day and taught old Fascist songs and led through programs discussing the strengths of the Arian race.

That is why Kultur Kosmos has chosen to base their activities here in the rural East rather than in Berlin or Hamburg, where political activism is already well received.

Courtesy of Thomas Charbit.

“By meeting new people and having new experiences in an international atmosphere of respect and tolerance, along with the clear exclusion of Nazis [the Fusion Festival] creates a place where radical ideas of the political right are called into question.”

Ultimately the goal is to expose the youth of these small East German villages to a more positive subculture. If they are able to enjoy themselves at a festival where the ideals they grew up with are not tolerated, perhaps they will begin to reform their thinking. One internalizes ideas best through interaction, not preaching. While Kultur Kosmos has many smaller events and programs, the Fusion is seen as the culmination of theory and praxis.

But whether the Fusion Festival actually accomplishes these goals is something I am a bit more skeptical of. For the most part, I am a habitual cynic, and it’s easy for me to see this event as little more than an excuse for the political left to have another party.

I see this often in Hamburg. Punks, anarchists, and antifascists are very active. Every weekend, “solidarity parties” parade under the guise of spreading political awareness. One week, they had a solidarity party to protest the imprisonment of a member of the Rote Armee Fraktion. Another week they threw one to raise awareness of the education strike in Hamburg.

I have attended some of the solidarity parties myself and am not surprised to report that I have noticed very little political activity at all. In fact, I question whether I have ever heard a conversation at one of these parties about the “action” in question. Usually, it’s just a crowd of Germans dressed in black, drinking cheap vodka, and grooving to the DJ on the dance floor.

Even more importantly, these solidarity parties are often difficult to attend if you’re not a member of the already established antifascist community. As an outsider, I often found it hard to converse with any of the people active in the scene. They are just as closed a clique — if not more so — than many other groups.

Courtesy of Thomas Charbit.

What then are these solidarity parties actually accomplishing other than allowing this private little group to party together? And why am I now praising the Fusion Festival for its political accomplishments?

The Fusion has now been around for thirteen years, and at its inception, I’m sure it was exactly like many of these solidarity parties: a closed event for those already a part of the political left. The first year experienced an attendance of less than 10,000. This year’s attendance, however, was rumored to be somewhere between 70,000 and 85,000 people.

We were approached by three different, excited people as we were packing up the car to go to the festival.

One seemed like a typical Fusion-goer — black cap, black sweatshirt — but the other two were drastically less typecast. One was in ordinary work clothes. The other was an innocent looking waitress at the coffee shop across the street who had only attended the year before for her first time.

“You guys are going over today? I’m so excited, we’re leaving tomorrow morning. Is this your first time? It’s so great! You’ll love it.”

Each year, the festival grows. This year it grew by between 20,000 and 30,000 people. This also means that each year it diversifies. It brings in people together from all sorts of political backgrounds, yet through open political discussion, posters promoting the eradication of Nazism, and a strong leftist leaning contingent, it still stays true to its roots.

Comically, one still hears a great deal of bitching from the Fusion veterans. They say that the festival has gotten too big. Too many people know about it now. There are too many Spießer (German word for an uptight person) here now.

But isn’t that exactly what the point should be? Shouldn’t that be the success of this festival? It is forever a problem within the scene, and one that annoys me to no end. What makes me happy, however, is that those are the people that probably don’t belong there in the first place.

Although the initial lesson plan dealt almost exclusively with learning phrases (“Would you mind if…,” “Do you think it would be alright if…”), the class deteriorated quickly into a much larger discussion of communism and capitalism, community and independence.

In March, I wrote an article praising many aspects of communism. Therein I discussed the levels of trust and community that I experienced while in Lviv, Ukraine, and how these qualities are slowly disappearing from capitalistic society.

A large part of the discussion I had with my students worked to reinforce these points. As Diane, the Russian, said:

“I remember being shocked when I moved to Germany as a child. People are so unfriendly to their neighbors. In Moscow, when you go to your neighbor’s to borrow sugar, they invite you in and you drink tea together, even if the other one doesn’t have much time. In Germany, I went to my neighbor to borrow sugar, and she said, ‘No, no, I don’t have time now. You have to come back some other time.’

“I was so surprised by this. This sort of unfriendliness to a neighbor would never happen in Russia.”

Within the Russian social system, there’s not much movement. According to Diane, families still live their whole lives together in Russia. The grandparents, parents, and children support each other through the different stages of their lives. They stay in the same city where they grew up in and have the same friends they’ve had their entire lives. Even the neighbors stay the same.

In Russia, you don’t have to be best friends with your neighbors, but you had better treat them well; they will be there as long as you are. In Germany, however, the average mid-sized apartment complex (15 to 30 apartments) turns over an average of two apartments per year. In America, my friends from college are spread across the nation. And my father’s job promotions had me living in three cities before the age of twelve.

There is no community in these situations because people don’t stick around. The retired banker of our class, Theo, attributed this mobility to the growing capitalistic way of Western life.

“Here in Germany, we have become so financially independent. When I was young, life was still quite communal, but by the time I was a teenager, it had faded. We do not live as a community anymore, especially in the city. We all have our own separate lives with our own busy things we need to do.”

In theory, I find the lack of community that has developed from our financial independence completely tragic. But when I look back on my actions, I see how little I adhere to the aspects of communism that truly promote community.

I like living my own life and making my own decisions. The thought of staying in the same city I grew up in has always seemed like a boring idea. I also think my parents and I would be at each other’s throats, should I spend more than a couple of weeks living under their roof.

I moved to Europe to try something different and have some new experiences, but living an ocean and continent away, I have sacrificed that sense of community. My mother is constantly telling me I need to come home and visit my sisters. One is in high school, and I haven’t lived with her since she was in elementary school.

When another of my younger sisters came to visit at the beginning of June, she was constantly reminding me just how disconnected I was from her here and now.

“I have the feeling you still think of me as the seventeen-year-old you knew in high school.”

She’s 22 now.

She was here for two weeks, and it seemed we spent the entire first week just getting to know each other again. By the time she was leaving, we had rebuilt our relationship, but now she is off to the states for another six-month stint.

Especially within the expatriate world, any sense of community is fleeting.

Expatriates in Europe are constantly on the move. Aside from those not tied down by long-term significant others, few seem to stay anywhere more than a year or two.

One of my best friends here in Germany will be leaving in the next month or so. I’ve noticed myself passively trying to faze him out of my life. I’ve got to get used to him not being there.

I try to idealize my life and the way I would like to live it but sometimes the separation between the theoretical and my reality is embarrassing. Often because I want a little bit of everything.

I now find myself selling a product I once condemned and celebrating my success.

It would be lovely to think that one could live ones life as a neat philosophy, but it seems to lead more often than not to extremism and dogmatism than enlightenment. Look at what some sects in the U.S. and Middle East have done with religion. Or what the Russians did with Marx’s theories.

So much for the theoretical. Maybe I should stick to grammar.

After the first few pages I understood exactly what he meant — at least for the crap part. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. And quite graphic sex at that. I’ll be the first to admit that sex is fun to read, but it can get a bit old after about 200 pages.

But as it takes place in Havana, Cuba in the mid-nineties, Gutierrez’s memoir is also lightly interspersed with some amazing insights on life for the down and out.

His discussions of race relations (the blacks, the whites, and the mulattos), the economic situation, and the police state are amazingly personalized and surprising in their ability to contradict my preconceived notions of what life was like there.

All through the book, I found myself underlining small clips of wisdom hiding behind the visceral sexual episodes. Some are rather overarching statements on getting through life, while others carry pressing import on my here and now.

One of the latter is his quote about the news media:

One morning in the street there was the body of a woman who had been stabbed… There was a terrible grimace of pain on her face, and her lips and nose were split, smashed, clotted with coagulated blood… This was a simple crime of passion, the kind that is common everywhere. But here it wouldn’t be written up in the papers because for thirty-five years nothing bad or disturbing has been acceptable news. Everything has to be fine. No criminals or unpleasantness can exist in a model society… The thing is, you’ve got to know. If you don’t have all the information, you can’t think or make decisions or hold opinions.

Gutierrez was a journalist who lost his job because he refused to conform to the censorship of Castro’s regime. He wanted to report on the troubling events of the country. He believed they needed to be heard.

I found this quote so interesting because it stands in such stark contrast to what is happening in the Western world at the moment. For us, reports of dead women in the street are nothing new.

A couple of months ago I subscribed to a podcast for the NBC Nightly News. After watching the first three episodes, I was thanking God I had managed to get the hell out of the U.S. In as little as 90 minutes, I had experienced a massive flood, three shootings, a toxic air threat, a volcano eruption, and at least six reports on our doomed financial situation.

In U.S. media, not only would we feature the dead woman, but we’d also have ten other stories just like it. In fact, there seem to be very few of the soft and cuddly stories that Gutierrez fights against.

We in America love the troubling and the traumatic, but the German media isn’t any different. If one were to tally the most frequently reported stories of 2009 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, I can almost guarantee that the German government’s Bailout Packages and Automaker Opel’s harrowing collapse would be at the top of the list.

As people are now reading the headlines every day and the feeling the effects, they become more and more frustrated with the media, the government, and the economic situation.

As a woman riding with me to Berlin two weeks ago said, “In times of crisis we [Germans] hole up and save our money. The media tells us every day that things are still getting worse, and so we just keep not spending. Now we’re killing our own economy.”

It used to be just the academics that bitched about the news media, now its on every street corner (or perhaps every other). Everyone seems to have an ominous outlook now regarding our current financial crisis. Hearing this all the time admittedly makes it hard not to get down on the financial crisis (my workload has, after all, dropped to a third of what it was in January), but at the same time it seems senseless.

One thing that I have also noticed about Gutierrez’s book is that he is a perpetual pessimist. Perhaps because he lived for so long in such a down-and-out state of affairs, it seems hard for him to see the positive in anything. This attitude, however, changes the way he interacts with people, the way he lives in his apartment, and the successes he has.

For example, how can you blame a lesbian for beating the shit out of you after you pull your hard dick out and ask her to fix it for you? This is the sort of thing that Gutierrez did and then complained about. Sometimes it seems that it is Gutierrez rather than the government that makes life hard for himself.

With the constant bitching of those around me and now Gutierrez’s hopeless book, it seems that things will never be good again.

I recently read an article, “Die Krise und Wir (The Crisis and Us),” however, that has given me new hope. The article is a series of short interviews with people from all different walks of life all over Germany, each of them talking about how the crisis has affected them.

Much like most of the babble on the streets and in the news, many people are pretty pessimistic. (The following quotes are my translations from German.)

“Flowers are a luxury article. On Christmas and Valentine’s Day we had a 60-70 percent loss in comparison to last year. Many customers have started buying on credit — upfront payment is becoming scarce. Two to three payment warnings are regular now. If it keeps going this way I see myself under a bridge in five years.” — Anton Forster (52), florist

“I drive by the BMW factory in Dingolfing, and it is at a stand still. I meet laborers in my hometown, and they all have less money and less employment than before. They are all shockingly affected.” — Erwin Huber (62), politician

The never-ending pessimism is everywhere. But this is not the only way to see things, and many of the interviewees seemed to acknowledge this in their responses.

“Even the art market will have to moderate. And it’s really better that way. The prices on the art market are based on pure speculation and have nothing to do with quality anymore.” — Martin Thierer (30), curator and assistant at Schirmer & Mosel

“I have put my own collections, which were all that we had, in the office for the time being. I know now what surrender means. But for me it is easy to go back to basics as long as I can still keep my music and books.” — Dirk Schönberger (42), fashion designer

“I don’t notice the crisis at all. Writers are constantly living in a financial crisis. Now I spend almost everything I have. I’ve got to while it’s still worth something.” — Bodo Kirchhoff (60), writer

These people seem to have taken the right angle on things for the time being. It isn’t a denial of the crisis, but it isn’t capitulation either. There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

To draw once more from Gutierrez, “Life can be a party or a wake.” The economy isn’t dead yet, so we might as well try to party through this one.

Comically enough, despite this international mob thronging to get in, there is not a single sign posted in English upon entry. What is this painting called? Where is the description of this particular movement? I remember this being a problem in the Ukraine, but people still shovel the city streets there by hand. In what is arguably the most famous museum in the world, I had expected something a bit more, well, international.

French protectionism. In the ever-globalizing world, there is a strong initiative to make sure that France stays French.

Is this wrong? We see this not only in France, but everywhere in Europe. In early February, I wrote about protectionism of food culture in the Italian city of Lucca. People work hard throughout Europe to preserve their identity. One of the most significant ways that France has chosen to do this is through language.

Over the last 20 years, the French have put in place EU directives limiting the amount of film, television, and radio allowed to come from outside of the European Union (not more than 49%). They have massive subsidies for the French arts, they create new French words for all foreign words that enter their language (t-shirt = camisol), and they only have signs in French at the Louvre.

Is this snobbery or simply a way to combat the overpowering force that is the English language? As University of Washington scholar Jessica Harrison put it [pdf], “Actions to protect the French language have become an even more pressing concern with the growing numbers of people learning, speaking, and conducting business in English rather than French.”

English is taking over everywhere. In international settings, it is the least common denominator. If you want to become international — whether in music, business or elsewhere — you need to use English. Then the native language becomes less and less important.

Some countries have been prone to embrace this reality, some have not. As seen by my experience in the Louvre, France has not.

Germany, on the other hand, stands at the complete opposite side of the spectrum.

It is very common to hear Germans, especially business people, throwing bits and pieces of English into full German sentences. They have taken English words and made them German, at times with the wrong meaning (the German word for cell phone is Handy). And often times they have signs written in English where completely unnecessary. For example, the bar down the street has a sign that reads “Come in and enjoy!”. I would assume less than five percent of their clientele are people who can’t speak German.

When I hear a German say to me, “Ich muß zu ein Meeting ASAP,” I can’t help but be a bit disappointed. Knowing how much English speaking Western culture has infiltrated the rest of the world, it’s always a bit unnerving to have the reality thrust in my face.

For this reason, I appreciated the absence of English in the Louvre. (It was also refreshing that I didn’t feel compelled to read every sign of every description, but that’s a different story.)

But is this French system of rejection really any better? This exaggerated form of protectionism that puts quotas on culture and invents French words for things that already exist?

It seems artificial. Languages have all developed from the necessary sharing of them. English itself would not be the English it is today if the French had never come to the British Isles.

In the even more modern style “American English,” we see a second wave of infiltration. The dialect is full of German and Yiddish phrases (Kindergarten, Gesundheit, and “I’m shvitzing like a gefilte fish”) along with French and Spanish and every other country now settled in the New World. Is this a raping of our language, or does it simply give it a distinctly American feel?

For this reason, I sometimes think I’m too hard on the Germans. In many ways one could argue that Germany is not being colonized; it is enlightened

As I was doing research for this article, I stumbled on a whole new wave of thought that we seemed to have missed at the university. This idea champions some forms of cultural globalization, arguing that those who allow for globalization allow for new ideas and inspiration.

As French writer Jean Francois Revel wrote:

The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility… The proof of this goes back to the old comparison between Athens and Sparta. It was Athens, the open city, that was the prolific fount of creation in letters and arts, philosophy and mathematics, political science, and history. Sparta, jealously guarding its “exceptionalism,” pulled off the tour de force of being the only Greek city not to have produced a single notable poet, orator…

If you don’t open yourself up to the ideas brought in by others, your culture will stagnate. Exclusivity may preserve contemporary art and culture, but it won’t let it develop.

If Hamburg had never been open to English-speaking music, the Beatles may have never matured to the band they ultimately became. They spent a large part of the ’60s playing in small bars of Hamburg’s red light district and began their climb to fame.

As John Lennon once said, “I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg.” Thank God Germany was willing to accept those guys.

France is admittedly one of the pinnacles of Western culture, and it’s easy to argue that their history is one to protect. Especially with Europe’s small boarders, it is necessary to hold on to one’s cultural identity.

Whether the French identity is actually French, however, is a question we could probably answer by taking a stroll through the Louvre. Although all the signs were all in French, I spent the whole day looking at the classics from the Flemmish and the Italians.