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(JFK - Berlin - 1963 - Bringing the message to the worlds largest group of shut-ins)

With the Cuban Missile Crisis a fresh memory only eight months earlier, President Kennedy toured Europe in the summer of 1963 and stopped in Berlin on June 26, 1963 to address a crowd of over 150,000 against the ominous backdrop of the Wall that divided the two Berlins.

"Today the proudest boast is, Ich Bin ein Berliner"

The day before, Kennedy spoke at the Assembly Hall in Frankfurt and offered a similar message.

Kennedy: “For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

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All in all, JFK did much to bolster the confidence of the German people, in light of the increased Cold War posturing going back and forth in the divided city. Still, it wasn't until 26 years later that the Wall would finally come down.

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(Willy Brandt, 1961 - You'd chain smoke too if you had the Russian Army staring at you all day)

Since next week signals twenty years since the infamous Berlin Wall came down, I thought I would post a few items dealing with Germany during the Post-War years. Talk of reunification had been going on since 1946, with the Russians vehemently opposed to it at every opportunity. There had been showdowns between east and west at various times all the way up to November 9, 1989. Always Berlin was perceived as the flash point in any heating up of the Cold War and life in Berlin was regarded by many as life under a heated microscope.

But before August of 1961 there was no wall separating the two Berlins. Only miles of barbed wire fence and checkpoints and troops.

Willy Brandt had the dubious distinction of being Mayor of West Berlin during this time. It was certainly no easy task.

On March 12, 1961, Brandt sat down to a panel interview on Meet The Press and asked about the situation as it currently was in Berlin.

Stewart Hensely (UPI): “Mister Mayor, Soviet Premier Khruschev a few weeks ago sent a communication to Chancellor Adenauer which he restated the demands on Berlin and Germany. This came after a period of relative quiet. Do you anticipate that this Spring or this Summer we’re going to see another increase in pressure on Berlin to bring a crisis as we had in ’58 and ’59?”

Brandt: “It’s hard of course to predict what will happen, but personally I’m inclined to believe that we will not have a new Berlin crisis within the next few months. But the memorandum indicates that new pressure might come sometime later this year.”

Prophetic words from Brandt, since less than five months later the Russians constructed a vast and inescapable wall, dividing the two Berlins. Frequently referred to as "The Wall of Shame", it stood in mute testimony to just how tenuous peace was. And it stood there for 28 more years.

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(Paul Hindemith - complicated relationships)

This week's batch of 78's is the Violin Concerto written in 1939 by the German composer Paul Hindemith. It was slated to be premiered in Germany that year, but fate and the Nazi's had other plans and it was finally performed in Holland in 1940, with Hindemith having migrated to Switzerland in 1938 and eventually living and working in New York by 1940.

This recording, made in Paris for French HMV in 1948, features the violinist Henri Merckel with the Lamoureux Orchestra led by Roger Desormiere.

Don't quote me on this, but I think this is the first commercial recording of the concerto.

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(Neville Chamberlain - Peace In Our Time an ironic, faded echo)

(Apologies for not posting this yesterday. Living in Southern California during the Heat and Fire season makes for optional breathing and migraines - both which came in ample supply yesterday)

With Berlin's rejection of Britain's "White Paper", calling for an end to Germany's invasion of Poland and a restoration of Versailles Treaty provisions at the end of World War 1, it was clear Prime Minister Chamberlain had no alternative other than to declare War on Germany - setting the stage for a conflict few thought would be avoided, yet none wanted to face. It was a crushing defeat for the Chamberlain Government and raised an alarming thought that Britain may not be able to survive.

Prime Minister Chamberlain: “This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received. And that consequently, this country is at War with Germany.”

This clip starts with Berlin Radio reacting to the Chamberlain note, followed by Chamberlain declaring War and then ending with a recap from Berlin Radio.

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(September 2nd - The Poles weren't going to take it lying down)

The invasion of Poland was already a day old. Despite continued efforts to bring the conflict to a close, it was already too late. Great Britain handed Germany the infamous "white paper" and time was about to run out for an answer.

The radio was going into overtime reporting the conflict. BBC ran regular news, while Radio Berlin continued to deny they were acting in anything other than defense.

The series of recordings in this entry begin with the BBC and then followed by French Radio and Radio Warsaw. The French and Polish broadcasts are dim and hard to hear, but have been included because of their historic interest. The last segment is Radio Berlin.

Radio Warsaw Newsreader: “The general atmosphere is that of calm resolve to go through this experience (-----) no matter how long it will take. The general opinion of those everywhere is that odds are against Germany in this war.”

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(The Waiting Game)

As the threat of war became increasingly inevitable, the evacuations started, the recall of ambassadors and non-essential personnel, packing and going home. Waiting for the next shoe to drop.

The BBC World service reported the goings on during the day of August 27, 1939.

BBC Newsreader: “Railway traffic in Germany is to be still further restricted, and in future the railways will not undertake to carry any private passengers. The German Traffic Minister in a broadcast said that this step is being taken to avoid the serious delay in bringing food to the big cities. In some places the delay is leading to great disorganization. Germany has assured Denmark and Lithuania that she will respect their neutrality.”

Nobody blinked.

[Script reads: "We Are Creating the New Germany! Remember the victims -- Vote the National Socialist List". Larger image here.]

Following up on yesterday's correction of Rush Limbaugh's historical revisionism, noting that both Blackshirts and Brownshirts made their political bones by beating up on union organizers and socialists ...

From State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, by Steven Luckert and Susan Bachrach, pp. 48-50:

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany was mired in a grave political and economic crisis that left the society verging on civil war. Street violence by paramilitary organizations on the Left and the Right increased sharply. In the final ten days of the July 1932 parliamentary elections, Prussian authorities reported three hundred acts of politically motivated violence that left twenty-four people dead and almost three hundred injured. In the Nazi campaigns, propaganda and terror were closely linked. In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi "martyrs" who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention. Nazi newspapers, photographs, films, and later paintings dramatized the exploits of these fighters. The "Horst Wessel Song," bearing the name of the twenty-three-year-old storm trooper and protege of Goebbels who was killed in 1930, became the Nazi hymn. The well-publicized image of the SA-man with a bandaged head, a stirring reminder of his combat against the "Marxists" (along with other portrayals of muscular, oversized storm troopers), became standard in party propaganda. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that seventy "martyrs" had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions -- set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period -- no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

What a lineup! John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones in 1961 in Germany crushing through 'Trane's modal masterpiece "Impressions". What more could you ask for?

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog had a great post the other day exposing an online sales scheme hatched at the Republican National Committee's website whereby you could search for goods on an "Obama Card" and come up with all kinds of goodies.

So Aravosis did searches for such words as "Jew," "Latino," "Bondage," "Escort" and "Anal" and got some very interesting responses. Many of them are hilarious, actually.

But the one that caught my attention most was the search for "Jew," which you can see above. Among its responses, as Aravosis notes, is "The Jews and Their Lies."

But in the second spot for this search is the video Jud Süß. This was the vicious anti-Semitic film created by the Nazis and used as propaganda to advance the Holocaust as it was occurring in Germany.

The other stuff is incredibly hypocritical, but this material is downright disturbing. Whoever was responsible for compiling the material for these searches had deeply questionable tastes.

No wonder the RNC promptly discarded the whole thing.

This, via All Songs Considered, is downright virtuosic.

Who's the greatest beatboxer in the world? We'll soon find out, when the annual Beatbox Battle World Championship gets underway in Berlin, Germany on May 28. Each year contestants from all over the world flock to the city to lay down some sweet, human-generated beats in hopes of snagging the grand prize. This year's winner will be crowned on May 31.

In the meantime, the BBWC has announced the winner of its wildcard competition. It's Julia Dales, a 17 year-old from Canada.

I can't possibly imagine that anyone can possibly do a better job than this, unless she chokes in front of a crowd and can only make the magic happen in the backseat of a car with a deadpan gaze. This crushes every second of the American Idol finale!

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Sean Hannity loves his analogies. First he opens his segment last night with an analogy comparing the Obama administration to the evil anti-Catholic plotters who are the chief villains of the new Tom Hanks movie, Angels and Demons. All this in the context of Obama's appearance at Notre Dame's commencement this weekend.

Then his guest, Randall Terry -- the man who brought us the Terri Schiavo fiasco -- comes on and tries some analogies of his own. First he compares the Obama appearance to Pope Benedict appearing before Planned Parenthood. Then, at the end of the segment, he goes one better -- Obama's like Hitler:

Can you imagine somebody saying, 'Let's have one of the leaders of Germany come in -- we don't really like what he did with that Jewish thing, but they build great roads, and they gave people hope, and they helped rebuild the economy.' It's crazy.

Yes, it's crazy indeed.