I have been back to Germany for some days and apart from all the e-Mails I also had the opportunity to talk about some things with friends from face to face. And now I know why written documents are more advantageous to distribute information. Oral reproduction and distribution is tiring. It is probably like the story with the 300 snaps of your holiday. At the latest after the second time showing and explaining all the details you will tell every further interested people to watch the photographs themselves and to ask you in case they need to know anything in particular.

I don’t have any idea, how many of the left 380 people (15-20 signed out – yes, this is possible, too J - no problem) really read these e-mails. I assume that the majority will be on holiday and after coming back they will find an overfilled mailbox.  

Before writing about the topic „The Third Reich“ – a topic so important for Germans – I think several preliminary remarks are necessary. From time to time a certain drawback – despite all persistency – is coming up inside of me which asks a warning question: “What, if everything is just conceived, everything is not true?”
Then, I had a good time, some work in vain and everybody will laugh about me. However … humour is if you still can laugh about it. J
Frequently some interlocutors tend to see a certain “paranoia” in me. After the third time I took the Bertelsmann Lexicon and found the following explanation for “Paranoia”: “Paranoia [the; grecian, “Craze”, “Insanity”], psychopathy with a created maniac system which is ordered within itself; as Paraphenie (“Paraphenia” ?) a better stage of schizophrenia. Other forms are the paranoid syndrome and the paranoid psychopathy, which is an abnormal habitude of the personality.”

Olala, what shall one think of that?

Well, I could pal quite well with the abnormal habitude of the personality J Unfortunately, I don’t know how old this definition is and who created it. But, again we came back to the word “normal”. What actually is “normal”? In general, “normal” seems to be someone who isn’t freakish. Were people in the “Third Reich” normal, if they joined in each and everything? Were Americans still normal, if they said the double nuclear bombing against Japan was a human mankind contemptuous (inhuman) act? And today, what is normal today, when 50 % of the population don’t even care whether they have something like a personality at all?  

Sometimes I can hear the sentence „If I doubted and scrutinised everything, I would drive myself crazy.” Then it is better to watch the news of public or private TV channels and to accept the “3-minute-truths” – already warmed up and ready to “eat”.

And then I think for myself:
“It could be so easy. Just close your eyes, Mike. Take a good bottle of wine. Clean your mind with it. Ask those fractious cells of your brain, which “make your life that hard”, that they should belong to those cells that just get killed by the alcohol. Talk to your friends about proper topics – your cell phone, your dog, your car, the woman you have been trying to get for ages or who’s been trying to get you, the latest book of Harry Potter … there are plenty of topics, my dear Mike. Why are you so stupid and insensible and instead dealing with “September 11^th and its consequences”? Just look for a better job and let things and people be what they want to be. Complain with them about the government and hope with them, that the next one would be better. Find your belief in the SPIEGEL again and tell your children in some years time that probably everyone goes through such a phase. But you will get used to it – everything is normal. Just be a normal human being as everyone else is! It is not that difficult – you just have to will it!”

And then I am standing there, with my eyes closed and I find the whole thing really good. Really good! – What a nice dream …

Approximately for 10 seconds. Then I open my eyes again, go to a mirror (to a real one! – not the magazine) and realise, that someone put red-coloured glasses on my nose (oops, maybe this “someone” was the magazine though J). Suddenly I remember some e-mails and the question in them: “What actually is normal?” And then it comes to my mind again – as clear as daylight: “Normalia” is the land, where probably 80-90 % of the population are living. In the cycle of normalities, the eternally periodic problems and sorrows, the constant ups and downs, the questions which will come back again and again, the little joys and the big afflictions.

How easy life could be? Working, sleeping, working, sleeping. Earning money, spending money, Earning money, spending money. Starting relationships, splitting them up, starting relationships, splitting them up. Filling up the tank of your car, emptying it, filling up the tank of your car, emptying it. Constancy is something nice. You can hold on it, because you know the things. But Nature is more clever than all those who consider themselves to be “clever enough”. Someday Nature will knock on the backdoor of your brain asking you: “Do you work for living or do you live for working?”  

Some of you said correctly, that the world has always been like this – no matter if before „September 11^th” or after it. For myself “September 11^th” was just an actuator which made me write and distribute these e-mails. For many else of us it was the beginning of World War II, the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, the construction of the Berlin Wall (yesterday was the 41^st anniversary), the Gulf War or the Civil War in Rwanda or May 23, 2003 or August 14, 2006 (days chosen by random – I won’t have done anything, in case something would really happen J).

I would like to come to an end with some extracts from the latest book of Arundhati Roy “Power Politics”:
„In another essay Arundhati Roy personifies the anonymous Great Powers of Globalization and tries to convince us that a new king came with them to the world:
‘Powerful, pitiless and armed to the teeth. He's a kind of king the world has never known before. His realm is raw capital, his conquests emerging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear. To even try and imagine him, to hold the whole of him in your field of vision, is to situate yourself at the very edge of sanity, to offer yourself up for ridicule.’“
(p.12 or http://www.zmag.org/roy.htm)  

Why she takes care of the less pleasant topics of this our time she explains on page 19 (also http://www.zmag.org/southasia/endofimagination.htm):
“The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.”
"Which means exactly what?"
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

Nothing else to add.

Have a nice, sunny day. Yours, Michael. 

You can also forward this e-mail to people you know – I don’t mind that at all.

PS: And while I am sitting here and writing something about the „clever” Nature, Nature gives the proof immediately and bestows Dresden a high water, which none of the living Dresdeners has ever known before. Let’s hope that apart from the human and financial losses it will result in a rethinking of the people. Whatever we do, Nature will fight back at the end of the day.