"Those f***ing Germans"

The recent elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger of Munich to the office of Pope has been having a lot of people in the media talking about Germany - its history, its culture, and the complicated way Germans fit both within the fabric of the EU and among themselves in a once-fractured, now-uneasily-unified society. (As a sampler, here's one from the International Herald-Tribune, and here's another from the Moscow-based ex-patriate publication eXile.ru [which is where my own entry gets its title].) As regular readers know, the complexity of the modern German is an obsessive subject of study for me as well, so I have naturally been enjoying reading such a larger amount of articles on the subject than one usually sees in the international press.

This is as good a time as any, I guess, to mention that my latest travelogue concerning Germany, Ach Du Heilige Scheisse!, will be published in electronic form in a mere two weeks, and ready for your online readership and/or eBook purchase. The site where the book will be found is already up, for those who would like to go ahead and look through the several hundred photos I took while there last autumn.