Working with weights, German style

[Dave W]

"Please don't copy this kind of action," 

Was this meant to be a lifting exercise, or a personal fidget spinner?

[Pilgrim]

I know Europe has topless beaches, but bottomless gyms?

No wonder it's polite to wipe down the weights after you're through with them!   

[Psycho Bass Guy]

You can thank some early 90's issue of Playboy for me knowing this, but the erect penis is supposed to be able to support. on average, 7 lbs of weight, so the 2.5 kilo may have just been him doing reps to build stamina.  Where he went wrong was in not using Olympic weights. 

[uwe]

You bigots, the weight was legal age and had consented.

[clankenstein]

What? can't a fella practice his cling and jerk?

[uwe]

Gives new meaning to the term athletic support.

[Highlander]

[Pilgrim]

Just another example of extreme physical fitness in Deutschland!

Perhaps we train the sperm to be vigorous und strong, ja?

[uwe]

KRAFT   DURCH   FREUDE!!!

[Highlander]

Wow...

My name is Ken, and I er... enjoyed that video... and I must admit I have memory lapses, especially regarding certain popular types of avian craft...

[uwe]

Rammstein say they regret that video as the only one in their career. Why? Because while they are unafraid playing with all kinds of taboos and of course flaunt an image and esthetics not out of place at a Nürnberg Nazi Party Rally in, say, 1936, they have avoided political connotations in their lyrics. The one policitical statement they have sung is "Links Zwo Drei Vier" which has the lyric (English translation):

They want my heart in a space that's right ...
But if I cast my gaze down ... then it beats to the left ...

- the German original rhymes -

They claimed that they were "talked into" incorporating the Leni Riefenstahl visuals (from her "Olympia" documentary of the '36 Olympic Games in Berlin)



into their Depeche Mode tribute and that in hindsight it was too close for comfort for them. Now Leni was of course a gifted visual artist, no doubt, but her work is forever tarnished by the way she made herself willingly available to the Nazis. She claimed to be "an unpolitical person" after the war, but you don't have to be political to recognize evil.



Her esthetics still raise an eyebrow in Germany to this day - when she photographed the Nuba tribe in the 70ies





criticism in Germany about "her rejuvenation of Nazi visusals" was swift and crushing.

And a Roxy Music album cover of the 80ies



caught some serious flak from the German music press to which Bryan Ferry poured oil into the fire by remarking "Yes, very Leni Riefenstahl, isn't it?" The album title didn't really help matters either.

[4stringer77]

I suppose we can only hope for Germany to finally break free from the shackles of it's left leaning past and vote AfD for a change right Uwe?

[uwe]

AfD?  An illustrious bunch of white trash, conservative has-beens and zombie Nazis



with a doughnut-bumping clam muncheress with a tax haven residence and a female Asian significant other as "the new face of the party", never mind how her compatriots don't like same-sex-marriage or "migrants" or that lesbians adopt kids (like she has).



No doubt she must have worked it all out within herself why she deems AfD to be the party for her. But the AfD will dismember itself just like all right-wing parties before in post-war Germany have or do you have any great lingering memories of Sozialistische Deutsche Reichspartei, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Deutsche Volksunion or Die Republikaner and whatever all these brown outfits were called? Far-righties are incapable of doing decent parliamentary work which is why they always get voted out after one term.

And of course I mail-voted (won't be home on Sunday) for the one and only German party that stood up for democracy in 1933 when no-one else did (and the Nazi thugs were already waiting outside the Reichstag to harrass and attack those who would vote against the Enabling Act/Ermächtigungsgesetz ending German democracy).



No "breaking free from shackles" here, the Hornungs are 4th generation Social Democrats (5th if I count my kids in!).  We're as shackled as it gets. My grandfather, a construction engineer, sent a medal provided to him by the Nazi Party during the war for his "contributions to the war effort" with the remark back "I don't care for NSDAP medals nor will I wear them". As a construction engineer you were important enough to get away with something like that though the family was expecting the GESTAPO at any minute. They never came.

[4stringer77]

That's cool. I don't actually know too much about the AfD but figured it would get you going. I just noticed in the news they might have a chance due to voter apathy. Isn't it a little unfair to label conservatives as zombie nazis? I mean national socialists were still socialists after all.

[uwe]

Conservativism has its place, no issue with that, but the AfD is crap. If you are a conservative in Germany, there are enough decent parties to vote for.

And while the NSDAP did have a socialist element especially in its early days, that was very much pushed back (and its representatives even murdered) as Hitler and his clique rose to power. Of the leading Nazis, Joseph Goebbels was probably the only one with some socialist views (as a young man he had dabbled with joining the communist party), he was therefore never happy with Hitler turning against Stalin (whose ruthlessness he admired), viewing it in 1945 as the one giant mistake breaking the Nazi camel's back.

But Goebbels' influence on the Third Reich is historically widely overrated, Hitler didn't trust him in military matters at all (Goebbels had never served in the army due to his birth defect foot) and held his socialist leanings in check. Goebbels' diaries are full of moaning and whining about Hitler not keeping him informed about war developments and not following his recommendations for wartime domestic policies (Goebbels wanted a tough wartime economy and social life, Hitler, wary of how quickly Germans tired of the war during WWI, tried to preserve and even better pre-war standards of living in the Reich all through WWII). Germans weren't really faced with the dearth of a wartime economy (quite unlike the rest of Nazi exploited Europe) until capitulation in 1945. Supply logistics in the Reich worked well as late as 1944 - things only crumbled in the last six months od the war, but hunger was something Germans only began to experience after the war, especially during the cold winter in '46/'47.

Goebbels was relegated and more and more sidelined as the war went on (would you believe that he only found out about the German attack on Russia in 1941 AFTER it had actually begun?!). However, his irrefutable propaganda talent regarding his own self-promotion (and not just Nazi goals) kept the public in the dark about his continually reducing role. Within the inner party in, say, 1943 he was already a marginalized figure and perceived as such. And he knew it and complained about it, but never lost his almost religious loyalty to Hitler (interesting for a man who was a professed atheist - never mind his Jesuit schooling and his arch-Catholic family upbringing - and generally had an intellectual, if utterly cynical perception of things).