Kreuzberg vs. Schröder … Enemy at the Gates 28th of August, 2005 POST·MERIDIEM 03:03

Kreuzberg, where I’m living at the moment, is heavily Turkish, Kurdish and student, and as such the big question about how the election will go here is what the relative order of the left-wing parties will be—the CDU, the centre-right party that’ll probably be running the country in a few months, is barely campaigning.

So, the posters are huge, and many of them are for the SPD, a ruling centre-left party. Here’s one that originally referred to Schröder’s opposition to the Iraq war, but that juvenile ingenuity has made more down-to-earth:

[“Those who want to fuсk, must be steadfast.”]

On another, unrelated note—I watched “Enemy at the Gates” last night. (German title: “Duell: Enemy at the Gates,” a terrible name for a film that doesn’t involve any English-speakers.) This was, as you would expect, very depressing, what with the Red Army—who won, remember—being even less humane than the Nazis. And then today a documentary on Mao’s China. Now considering these three régimes in succession, and considering that one of them running the world was, historically the only alternative to the current hegemony of the US: we got off lightly, folks. Bush may be an incompetent liar, but he is not remotely close to Stalin, Mao or Hitler.

(Yeah, perhaps not that original a thing to say, but I have a tendency to give Americans ѕhіt about their current régime online, and this is mostly a reminder to myself to temper that.)