Lost in Translation – “Feuchtgebiete” and Cultural Excuse March 2, 2009

The article in the Globe and Mail on the book “Feuchtgebiete” by Charlotte Roche is definitively too wonderful of a material for losses in translation to let it be.

One of my favorite passages (of the article) of literary critic turning grotesk in its cultural determinism is as follows:

“I don’t think we should be too quick to blame the Germans for this particular bit of pseudo-porn; Charlotte Roche is British by birth. This is just typical overcompensating expatriate behaviour. Germans love this kind of scatological thing and she’s trying to out-German them, poor thing. If history has taught us anything, it’s that no good can come of a foreigner trying to out-German the Germans. Not that she’s Austrian or anything, but it’s a pretty bad book.”

This line of argumentation is, to say the least, unique…

[Full article "Porn, pseudo-porn or just bad smut?" by ELIZABETH RENZETTI , TABATHA SOUTHEY and MICHAEL VALPY, Globe and Mail (27 February 2009) available under http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090227.wbkwetlands28/BNStory/globebooks/]

Burma: The Credibility of the UN Security Council is Put at Stake October 13, 2007

The current undecisiveness of the UN Security Council concerning the developments in Burma mirrors the inability of the Council to act according to its mission and uphold the normative underpinnings of the UN Charter.

Even though there has been great hope since the end of the Cold War in the 90’s that the time of stagnation might be over and that a time of constructive cooperation has finally come, Burma could be the final turning point from a brief intermezzo of hope to a backlash into united stalemate. Looking at the fragmentation of national interests in the UN Security Council in the light of exlusively distributed vetopower, the calls for a reform, and especially a democratization of the UN could not be any louder than in these days of global despair over the brutal abolition of a peaceful strive by the burmese people for a way out of decades of suppression, fear and tremendous human rights violations.

A UN that misses to react appropriately on this issue will loose its credibility as valuable organisation in the promotion of world peace, once more and very profound.