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A blog census link, for your amusement.

A Quote on Walking

From Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000):

These linked paths and roads form a circuit of about six miles that I began hiking ten years ago to walk off my angst during a difficult year. I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. it is a bodily labour that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. After all those years of walking to work out other things, it made sense to come back to work close to home, in Thoreau's sense, and to think about walking.

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts [. . . .] Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations. (5)

[BRIEF NOTE] On East German Identity

When Germany was reunified more than 13 years ago, it was assumed that the separate identity and history of East Germany would disappear. East Germany, after all, was a state formed without the consent of its population and unable to prevent mass emigration, a mere by-product of the Soviet-Western competition which would give rise to the Cold War, with an utterly bankrupt economy and poltiical system. In the heady enthusiasm of the period, it was assumed that East Germany would be quickly assimilated into the prosperous capitalist economy of the Federal Republic of Germany. East German identity would persist longer, of course, but not much longer as regional identities (Saxon, Brandenburger, Thuringian) reasserted themselves; at worst, it would be another Bavaria.

This didn't quite happen. Economically, for instance, the slight pre-war advantage of the future GDR over West Germany remains overturned. As one researcher observed, "[i]In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%." East Germany remains one of the richest areas in the former Communist zone, ranking alongside independent Slovenia and the Czech Republic; compared to West Germany, though, East Germany is poor. This poverty exacerbates a population crash (PDF link), produced in East Germany's case by a very low birth rate and emigration.

( This emigration has reached very serious proportions, as it threatens to further slow down convergence. )

Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt criticized East Germans as whiners. The East Germans aren't happy.

For, it seems, there still are East Germans. The phenomenon of ostalgie--the nostalgia of East Germans for the benign cultural forms, ranging from consumer goods to cultural traditions--is proof enough of this. Ines Geisler's article at Open Democracy, and the success of the film Goodbye Lenin demonstrate that although East Germans are committed to democracy and memberhsip in reunified Germany, they aren't at all willing to reject everything in their collective and individual pasts before die Wende as inauthentic.

East Germany's separation from the rest of German nation-state for almost 45 years wasn't welcomed, but it left innumerable traces. It has even left practical political legacies, in the form of the Party of Democratic Socialism, descended from the East German communist party. But then again, Bavaria has its CSU.