All of Europe has now been reduced to Germany. Even books bought from a Spanish store arrive by German mail.
Is there anything left of Europe that exists for a reason other than enriching Germans?
Europe = Germany?
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
From an African point of view no. Tomorrow I am going to a conference here in Ghana. The vast majority of European participants are German. The one and only exception is a person from a German speaking part of Switzerland. So yes Europe = Germany. 😎
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I think there might be a lesson to be learned. Lose the war. 😉
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Finally, Germans have clocked on to the idea that there is no need to go to war to dominate. All that is needed is to sell admission tickets to a prestigious identity label.
The world could have avoided two brutal wars had the Germans figured this out sooner.
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Well from what I remember, it’s straining things to call Germany responsible for starting WWI (and WWII was largely a direct result of WWI and contradictory policies by other world powers).
But basically, yeah, the combination of population size, work ethic, relatively low level of corruption and business acumen of Germany means it will dominate any European alliance it’s part of. No other European country has all of that. If Germany has an economic weakness it’s its attractiveness as a destination for people without the social or educational capital to make economic net contributions.
What’s a little odd is that it’s economic power is balanced somewhat by low cultural prestige – Germany is a cultural non-entity at present producing no writers or other art that is widely admired across the continent… or even in Germany itself from what I can tell (at a time when audiences are hungry for non-American products).
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Germanists are wildly ecstatic about Elfride Jellinek (I might be misspelling) but I don’t get her at all. And she isn’t even German, she just writes in German.
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“Germany is a cultural non-entity at present producing no writers or other art that is widely admired across the continent”
This actually gets bemoaned quite a bit here in Germany, that we ain’t the country of poets and thinkers anymore.
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Hmm. I live in the UK and recently ordered some Lenovo computer bits and pieces. I thought they would come from China, but they were posted in the Netherlands. Not that this proves anything.
You’re possibly right about Germany already and if our present UK idiot government keeps pushing Europe away, we’ll certainly become less and less internationally significant. But some of those idiots think we are still running an empire!!
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Could it be because … ummm … the Germans are the only ones in Europe actually working and producing? How unfair that they work harder than everyone else. Gotta do something about that!
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What’s with the “ummm”? It is impossible to take seriously a comment its own author interrupts with bleating.
To answer your question, no it couldn’t.
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“To answer your question, no it couldn’t.”
Well, that settles it, doesn’t it? But really, how would you explain Germany leaving the rest of continental Europe in the dust, so to speak? And please don’t use the word “Nazi” in your answer.
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“And please don’t use the word “Nazi” in your answer.”
– Jesus. You have weird fantasies, man. What on earth do Nazis have to do with this?
In any case, here is how this worked on the example of a country I know best, namely, Spain. For centuries, Spain has had an image of a not-fully-European country. There is this famous saying, “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” that has produced an enormous amount of shame and discomfort.
In the efforts finally to become fully European, Spaniards sought the entrance to the European Union. The prestige of being called “European” was so painfully desired that the country agreed to destroy its entire productive economy and allow Germans to sell their goods instead of the local goods that weren’t produced any longer. Later on, other peripheral countries did the same.
Germany is now selling admission tickets to a prestigious identity label. To buy admission to this label, one country after another destroys its productive economy and adopts the goods and services of the countries that have positioned themselves as gatekeepers to this identity label: Germany, UK and France. France has mostly taken itself out of the running in the last decade because of its immigration policies. The UK is going in the same direction. So who’s left? Right you are, Germany.
At this very moment, Germany is trying to force Ukraine to buy the identity label and destroy its agriculture to help out German farmers.
Of course, this explanation is a little more complex than the childish blabber about “work ethic.” But this is a blog for people with brains.
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“Germanists are wildly ecstatic about Elfride Jellinek”
Jelinek, and as you note, she’s not German (Austrian). Similarly Herta Müller is originally from Romania, and waaaaay to anti-communist to interest Germanists on a broad scale – I haven’t read her though a close friend of mine is a major fan.
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