About German magazines

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In the past few days, two German magazines have put out covers depicting two right-wing foreign leaders in highly unflattering guises. That said, the difference in tone suggests that one of the countries in question, as awful as its current boss might be, still needs to be taken seriously. The other, perhaps not so much.

PS: More stuff:

PPS: “...how the others must see the faker...”

PPPS: And, by David Foldvari:

About the DDR

One of my favourite museums in the world is the DDR Museum in Berlin, a magnificent, pocket-sized attempt to replicate the tragicomic saga that was the East German state. So I’m lapping up this splendid Stasi guide to all the scary youth subcultures that threatened the Marxist paradise. Although by 1985, you’d think teddy boys and goths would be the least of their problems...

Cornelius Gurlitt and the banality of availability

Most of the coverage of the art haul found in a Munich apartment focuses on the mechanics of how it all came together, the extent to which it was appropriated from its rightful owners and how Cornelius Gurlitt managed to sell bits of it off over the decades without alerting anyone to its existence. Which is all right and proper of course. This bleak period in German history is objectively more significant than a bunch of pretty pictures; and there’s a certain grim satisfaction of probing the cognitive dissonance of Nazis who railed against degenerate art but at the same time desired to possess it.

That said, assuming that some or all of the paintings do end up in public view, in galleries and museums, postcards and tea towels and fridge magnets, will their mysterious provenance affect our response to them? For a while now, I’ve been interested in the way some things – from the stolen paintings allegedly destroyed by Olga Dogaru to the World Trade Center – suddenly become more interesting when they cease to exist. Do others – the Gurlitt collection, for example, or the recently recovered episodes of Doctor Who – lose their charm because they cease to be myths and are now boringly accessible?

PS: The German government is being a bit less cagey about the pictures in the flat and has actually started releasing images. I do like this one, mainly because it looks remarkably like a baby photo of my dad.

Stainless stealing

I’m intrigued by this article from Germany about the industry in ghosting PhD theses. It seems that the problem is not so much ethics as one of quality control; if someone with no academic grounding in a subject can knock up a thesis worthy of a doctorate in a matter of weeks, how low exactly is the hurdle that needs to be jumped? The guy actually doing the work – I see a potential film script or a novel in here – has an attitude that veers between cynicism and honesty:

The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through... A proper doctoral supervisor would be able to tell that the style and intellectual level of the text could never have come from the person sitting across from him during consultation meetings... If the universities functioned properly, my job wouldn’t exist.

Maybe we’ve got to the stage where the battle’s just not worth fighting any more. A student or journalist might put in all the honest grunt work, but what if their properly attributed source material is itself debased? Are you contaminated if you’re protected by six degrees of plagiarism? I was recently editing an article in which a piece of text set off several alarm bells and when I threw a few sentences into Google, it appeared to be pretty much lifted from a website. The journalist claimed innocence, but did admit that the interview had been done by email. It turns out the interviewee had plagiarised his answers. What do we do when that happens?

PS: Duh, there is already a book (at least partly) about a character who ghostwrites academic material: How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. It’s pretty funny.