Saboteur or hero?

OK. Here’s my quick-and-dirty take on the mess the Germans are in at the moment. Anybody with the time for it should look elsewhere for a more knowledgeable analysis of the situation. But for what it’s worth, here’s my understanding of what’s going on.

First off, a primer on the German political scene.

Germany has six major parties – there are more, but they don’t have enough support to pass the threshhold for representation in Parliament (the Bundestag). You have to get a minimum of 5% of the vote to be allowed to take a seat.

Germany’s six parties (with percentage of the vote in the 2017 election in parentheses) are:

1. the far right – AfD (Alternative for Germany) (12.6%)

2. the Conservatives – CDU/CSU – known as The Union (i.e., of Christian Socialists in Bavaria and Christian Democrats in the rest of Germany) (32.9%)

3. the center-right business party – FDP - the Free Democrats (10.7%)

4. the center-left social democrats – the SPD – “Socialist Party of Germany” (20.5%)

5. The Green Party – its official name is a clumsy mouthful: Alliance 90/The Greens – (8,9%)

6. the far left – Die Linke (the Left) – heirs to the former East German communist party dusted off and polished to look acceptable to western democracy – some see Die Linke as “old wine in new bottles," but many find that an unfair characterization. Definitely anti-capitalist, however.

Now even though Merkel’s party came out the winner by a considerable margin, it nonetheless gathered less than a third of the popular vote. That means she has to make a choice – to run the country as a minority party, or once again to govern in coalition with others.

Up till now she has governed in coalition with the Socialists, but in this election the socialists broke loose from the coalition and ran in opposition to her. Things got quite ugly, and Martin Schulz, the Socialist leader, is steadfastly refusing to make the compromises necessary to rejoin the coalition. He has declared the Socialists will now be known officially as “the opposition.”

So, with the Socialists out, that leaves only the FDP and the Greens. Since these parties are quite far from the Christian conservatives in mindset and policy goals, this is a major challenge for everybody involved. Not impossible – if the socialists could do it, there is some hope other left-oriented non-conservatives could as well. So for the past few weeks headlines in the German papers have been all about “Sondierung” – a word which I understand to mean something covering the semantic range between negotiating and haggling with overtones of probing and sounding out. Or, perhaps more accurately the other way around – probing with overtones of haggling.  [Just checked: I believe the standard translation is "exploratory talks."]

Some somber words came down from the President – Germany’s equivalent of the monarchs in Europe’s constitutional monarchies – the guy whose job it is to remain above and untainted by the sausage-making mess that is politics. “Time to forget party loyalty and work for the good of the nation” says President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Apparently right up to the other night, it looked like they were going to make it. There would be an agreement among the three parties, known as the Jamaika Coalition (parties are often referred to by their color designations:  the union is black, the FDP is yellow and the Greens are green – and since the colors of the Jamaican flag happen to be...).

But then suddenly all eyes are on Christian Lındner, the head of the FDP. “No,” he says. “No coalition.”  Lindner’s quotation is one for the history books: “Es ist besser, nicht zu regieren, als falsch zu regieren – It’s better not to govern at all than to govern badly.” And “falsch” hits you in the face, since in German it means not only “badly” but “false” as well.

So unless Schulz changes his mind and agrees to join a coalition once more (highly unlikely) or Merkel agrees to govern with a weak minority body of supporters behind her (also unlikely), there will have to be another election. And that’s bad news all around. People are afraid the nationalist (think “Make Germany Great Again”) xenophobic AfD will only gain more votes and have an even louder voice in the Bundestag. And what happens if everything just stays the same, and the votes come in showing the problem in Germany is the problem in America – that people are seriously divided and not in any mood to compromise?

So much for the naive hope that a Merkel/Macron partnership can lead the EU to present a model for Americans to follow as they seek to rid themselves of the albatross that is Shitforbrains, whose name it hurts me even to pronounce. Who’s left? Putin? The Chinese? 

It’s tempting to see Lindner as a bad guy, a “divider,” the politician who shows up at a party only to piss in the punchbowl. Saboteur. But listen to him. He sounds earnest when he says, “We’ve worked too hard all these years to build up liberal principles to govern by. We can’t throw out all we’ve worked for!” The Socialists lost favor for doing just that and saw their popularity drop dramatically in recent years. Lindner is trying not to make the same mistake.

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible, and democracy works only when its participants avoid becoming hard-liners. Without compromise, nothing gets done. We simply sit on two different sides of the room and glare at each other.

But this would appear to be a time for questioning the assumption that compromise is the only solution. In America, folks on the left are faced with compromising with a party unabashedly taking from the poor to give to the rich, dismantling rather than improving a shakey health care plan, removing safety protections in the workplace, insistence that global warming is a Chinese hoax, and sending signals that invite white supremacists, homophobes and other bigots to come out of the woodwork. Nay, I say. Better the Resistance.

I don’t know enough about what Lindner is holding out for and what Americans are resisting is not what Germans need to resist, in my view.  If I were a German, I expect I would probably vote Socialist or Green. Possibly even left. Not FDP, in any case. But then again, who knows how I’d vote if faced with the realities of life in Germany on a daily basis.

Once again, all I can really conclude from a rather dilettantish following of the German news is that I know it’s not enough just to read just the headlines and watch a talkshow now and again. You’ve got to dig down into the complexities. Is Lindner what his political enemies say he is - a smug know-it-all? Or do we use the word his followers use - a hero?

He's not smug. He's terribly personable.

But heroic?

I really haven't the slightest idea.

Interesting times we live in.

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Good on ya, Australia!

Way to go, Australia!

I wish I could say I’ve been waiting forever to hear the results of the Australian postal survey on whether lesbians and gays should be allowed to marry. Truth is, I've been kind of grouchy about the whole idea of putting civil rights up to a popular vote. Australia is a modern democracy with a highly evolved justice system and I trust they are as capable as any modern democracy of finding the means to protect their gay and lesbian citizens from having their rights trampled on by religious groups who think the church, not the state, should dictate what constitutes marriage.

In the end, I understood the reason for the vote. Proponents of the survey argued that it was likely to reveal Australians were quite in favor of the right of lesbians and gays to marry, and when lawmakers can demonstrate the population is behind a law, they have a much better chance of passing it and keeping opposition at bay. I was concerned about the other side of the coin: if the majority were to unexpectedly vote no, it would give them an excuse for sitting on their hands. I will never forget what a downer it was when in 2008 Prop. 8 in California actually took away the right of gays and lesbians to marry which had been granted them by the courts, and created an absurd situation where some gays were married and some were not entitled.

You don’t leave basic rights up for grabs. Christians once used biblical authority to discriminate against Jews. The Mormons until quite recently found a reason in the bible to discriminate against people of color – and mainstream Christians in America kept the institution of slavery in place on the basis of those same passages for over a century.  So much for “popular opinion.”

All this is now academic. The results are in and Australians have voted 61.6% to 38.4% to allow same-sex marriage to go forward.  Not only that, the yes vote outdid the no vote in every single state. In the capital territory, the vote went 74% yes to only 26% no. The sense of dignity that has come to gay couples in something like twenty-five countries around the world will now be extended to Australians.  I say “something like” because there is always a gap between entitlement and full application of the law, and there is still a lot of contention around the question of adoption. But the sea change in world attitudes toward LGBT rights has left Australia feeling a little embarrassed.

They shouldn't be. Just because their legislators were slow. The population has been progressive on this issue for some time.

Australians have now done their part, and it’s up to their Parliament to carry it home.

Bravo, Australia. 

Good on ya!

photo credit

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500 years and counting

Some thoughts today on the significance of the 500^th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther coming up tomorrow.

For most people October 31 is just Halloween. It’s a day when kids go from house to house extorting people, through fear of violence or through cuteness, into giving them candy. That’s my view, but I’m the village grouch. Others see it as the gay day to go crazy, naked, paint your body and dance in the street. Or as the day when people decorate their houses with witches, ghosts, skeletons and Frankenstein monsters and compete with their neighbors as they do with Christmas decorations to see who has the most eye-catching display.

But I have Lutheran roots, and that means for me the “Hallowed evening,” is the evening (actually the whole day) before the day set aside as All Saints Day when Martin Luther nailed his 95 kvetches onto the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. What was bugging him was the fact that his church was selling forgiveness (no repentance necessary, just cash) for future sins to make money for its construction projects. Because he wasn't alone in recognizing the corruption of the Christian message this business move represented, his righteousness attracted lots of followers and ended up splitting the Christian world in two – Western Christianity, anyway. Put aside the modern day ironic observation that if he had had even greater clout we might not have this marvelous splendor that is St. Peter's with its Michaelangelo-tarted-up Sistine Chapel. OK, so it was rough on the poor folk.

There are earnest attempts (it's called ecumenism) to put them back together now that religion has pretty much lost its clout in Europe, where it all began, and it hardly matters anymore. But Lutherans, at least, will tell you this is a day to remember the great man whom MLK Jr. was named after. Who did more for universal literacy than anybody else in history. Who brought the people of Germany together under a common language. Normally, I’m no longer a church goer – haven’t been for half a century – and the day would probably pass without notice. But this is the 500^th anniversary, and I’m coming across all sorts of references to Luther and am struck with how much variation there is among interpretations of the day's significance.

Most of the Protestant cultures of the world, i.e., the North of Europe and the English speaking countries in large part, go along with the Lutherans. Martin is their hero too. He was the guy who made personal responsibility the heart of morality, not adherence to the papal hierarchy. Who made it possible for the values of democracy and the enlightenment to grow, unfettered, at long last.

When I was growing up virtually everybody in my town went to church. My family ended up in the First Church, a merger of First Baptist and First Congregational. Because the Congregationalists way outnumbered the Baptists, we got a lot less Roger Williams nobody-tells-us-what-to-do history and a lot more pride in being the direct descendants of the Pilgrims. But those were minor distinctions. Mostly this was Connecticut, back before black people and Hispanics came in large numbers, so we were pretty much WASPS from head to toe.

Most of my friends were Catholic, though, and because I would join them for early mass and breakfast every morning before school during Lent, I got a good dose of Catholicism, as well. I even had the Latin mass memorized before long and would probably have converted if I had not also been exposed to my grandmother’s Lutheran church, as well.

Looking back in later years, I think it was this heavy dose of conflicting religious practices that ultimately made it easy for me to stop taking religion seriously. But when I went off to college I was still yearning for certainty, and ended up become Lutheran. The Congregationalists, it seemed to me, had nothing much to offer in the way of doctrine other than that one ought to keep one’s lawn mowed and not say unkind things about poor people. I was looking for serious belief assertion material I could sink my teeth into. It wasn’t long before I became a big fan of Martin Luther. He had it all.  I spoke German with my grandmother and used his Small Catechism to build my vocabulary. I had developed an appreciation for Bach and the music of his church was chalk and cheese to “Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam.” And, as with the Catholic Church, when you walked in the door, you lowered your voice and allowed your attention to be drawn to the Gothic arches and the white alabaster altar. The little queen in me yet to raise her liberated head just loved it. Especially the candles. Loved the altar candles.

Sunday School at First Congregational in my early years was all about Bible stories such as Joseph and his coat of many colors, Jonah and the whale, and Jesus casting out the money lenders. Among the Lutherans now in my late teens, I was digesting the "correction" to the Roman Catholic notion of transubstantiation. Eager to join my new tribe and worship its gods, I eagerly professed the conviction that there was no way an anointed cleric had the power to turn the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus. No, no no. Christ came “in, with and under” the molecules, to use Dr. Luther's choice of words. While others were out playing football, I was sucking up such things as “the priesthood of all believers” and “justification by faith alone.” It wasn’t long before I could explain to the world what “we” believed. I had not only a church to call home. I had the comfort of knowing its doctrine was the right doctrine.

On the Jews and Their Lies
Dr. M. Luth.
printed in Wittenberg by Hans Lufft
MDXLIII

What’s amazing to me now is the fact that in all those early years, I never got a whiff of the fact that Martin Luther was an anti-Semite. Not your ordinary one, but a particularly nasty one. A real Jew-hater. A model for the thugs of the Hitler regime four hundred years later. In 1543 Luther published a treatise entitled, On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he advocates the persecution of the Jews.  Let their “Jewish synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books be destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes burned, and property and money confiscated, … shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection…” and “drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.”  “We are not at fault,” he concludes, “for slaying them.” They are “full of the devil’s feces…which they wallow in like swine.” Adolf Eichmann couldn’t have said it better.

My sources on the character of Martin Luther were so anodyne, in fact, that even his faults were turned into virtues. His heavy drinking and his vulgar language were described as “earthy.” He was a “man of the people.” I came to believe that he generated the modern German language practically single-handed.  

All that good stuff still stands, as I see it. The unifying of the German language may not mean all that much to you if you’re not German/Swiss/Austrian, but the encouragement of literacy ought to be enough to have him count as one of the great figures in the history of the Western world. With that focus on the “priesthood of all believers,” i.e., the claim that all of us are equal before God and have personal responsibility for how we conduct our lives, Luther opened the door to not only the privatization of belief, but ultimately the privatization of the economy. That’s what Max Weber had in mind when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. To be sure, he had Calvinism, more than Lutheranism, in mind, but he recognized that it was the focus on earthly activity that all the protestant groups shared that ultimately fostered capitalism. Didn't create it, but definitely contributed to its becoming the leading political and economic philosophy in the world, alongside its chief rival, Marxism-Leninism, and ultimately winning out over it. No mean feat. If this is how you see Luther, as having made a virtually matchless contribution to Western Civilization and to modernity, you might well want to turn him into some sort of saint.

I had mentors that made sure I didn’t make that mistake. I remember being told by a Catholic friend when I was about ten or twelve, “We worship Jesus Christ; you worship Martin Luther.” So much for a Catholic school education, I thought. I was schooled to have an immediate response to that charge: We don’t freakin’ worship Martin Luther. He was a leader, not a saint. And certainly not a god. You’ve got that wrong. But for all his failings, he was nonetheless a man of heroic proportions.

Over the years since I was a kid, that attitude was pretty much held in place by all the popular treatment of Luther I was exposed to. There are no fewer than eight full-length films on the life of Luther, the first one coming out in 1928, one, in 1953, winning an Academy Award nomination, and one, in 1973, a film adaptation of the John Osborne play, Luther. There are also two TV adaptations of the Osborne play, plus at least two documentaries and a TV travelogue put out by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. There are apparently lots of folks who have a dog in the race and want to keep his memory alive. I still have in the back of my mind the hope one day of joining the 300,000 tourists who make pilgrimages every year to the towns in Saxony associated with Luther, including the two towns that put the word “Lutherstadt” (Luther City) before their official names, Wittenberg and Eisleben.   Eisleben, the place where Luther was born and died, is a World Heritage site and Wittenberg, the place with that wooden door (today it’s bronze) he supposedly nailed his 95 theses to (today there is some doubt) and launched the Protestant Reformation.

It would be years before I would come to find out that there was much more to the hero who got us out from under the heel of the pope and the collectivity of the Roman church tradition to a place of individual responsibility for our actions. He could be – he was – in fact, a mean piece of work, merciless to those who refused to accept his interpretation of scripture and theology, and failed to get in line behind his notion of order. In particular, while Luther rejected the authority of the bishop of Rome, he threw his support behind the various princely authorities of Germany. That meant seeing the peasants who chafed under their authority as enemies of order and thereby enemies of God. By 1525 he was even making the argument that one could get to heaven faster by fighting and killing peasants than through prayer.

Denn die Hand, die das Schwert führt und tötet ist nicht mehr eines Menschen Hand sondern Gottes Hand, und nicht der Mensch sondern Gott henkt, rädert, enthauptet, tötet und führt den Krieg. 

For the hand which swings the sword is no longer a man's hand, but the hand of God, and it is not man but God who hangs, stretches on the wheel, decapitates, kills and makes war.

Let me take a step back just to observe that I’m banging on about something here that is of absolutely no interest whatsoever to most of the people I interact with on a regular basis. Religion, to most people I know, has been dumped on the ash heap of history. It’s an area which was, to begin with, always hard to distinguish from superstition and is arbitrary as arbitrary gets, given the high correlation between your "choice" of faith and the accidental location of your birth. Religion is something you grant your friends the space to diddle with if it gives them some comfort. Or a neutral sphere which works more like a Rorschach test than a truth claim, allowing decent people to store all their natural inclinations to be kind, generous and compassionate, and which gives the insecure folk of the world, in like manner, a place to store their lust for power and certainty and create the illusion they are in the right when most of the world is in the wrong. “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” the great Lutheran hymn starts out. He’s also, to many in the world, a great slayer of dragons. Or infidels. Or people who touch themselves down there, say.

In the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, Columbus Day has pretty much become Indigenous People’s Day. We now focus not on the Italian guy with an imperfect knowledge of geography and a burning desire for wealth and adventure, and more on the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, many of whom have suffered unspeakably through death, disease and incoherence in the face of the European invasion.

Isn’t it remarkable how history can provide you with new ways to frame events? The Stars and Bars of the Confederate flag, the Dixie flag, is not part of a proud American heritage. It's a symbol, like the swastika, of a regime of death and destruction, of human humiliation and degradation, and it's time we let the scales fall from our eyes. The Crusades were once a way to earn your way out of hell. Today they are viewed, even by the descendants of the crusader folk themselves, as an early example of the lust for power that is imperialism. The tribal struggle of People 2 of “the book” (the Christians) for hegemony over People 3 of “the book” (the Muslims), which ended with a whole bunch of People 1 of “the book” (the Jews) as collateral damage.

Lutherans (and other Protestants) in my view don’t need to hang their head in shame over being identified with an angry foul-mouthed anti-Semitic drunk for a leader. Lutheran scholars, the ones I know of, never did feel such shame – they were the first to emphasize their church is Christ-centered, not centered on the sinner who founded it or the sinners who run it.

I’m not sure I’m up for the idea of finding a Lutheran Church to go to, but something in me would love to belt out “A Mighty Fortress” once more as I used to do every year at this time when Reformation Day came around. There are still parts of me which remember fondly the Lutherans of my youth – my grandmother and many others – who taught me how to be a good guy. Even when I wasn’t, I knew what a good guy was supposed to be. That’s got to be worth something.

I’m conscious of how much folly we let ourselves in for when we give in to pendulum swings. When we do something stupid or wrong and then swing the pendulum to the other extreme and end up not fixing it, but doing some folly at the other extreme. One need go no further than look at the people who wanted to get away from America’s messed up political system, who went from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak, threw the baby out with the bathwater – there are so many metaphors to mark the practice.

I'd like to bring Martin Luther back out of that place in history many are now wont to place him, as an awful human being. Not put him back where he was when I was proud to call myself a Lutheran, exactly. But give the historical figure credit for his amazing accomplishments, the merest sliver of which I will never match in my lifetime. If I were king of the world, I'd eliminate Halloween candy. I'd also eliminate the misconception that sitting next to or making nice with a drunk makes you a drunk. Or the idea that acknowledging that Hitler built the Autobahn makes you a Nazi. Or that there’s any reason to reduce your fellow human beings to nothing more than their worst features.

Five hundred years. My, that’s a long time.

 photo credit

T-shirt
On the Jews...

"People like that" don't always kill themselves

Nachtcafé guests - Oct. 22, 2017

I spend a lot of time watching German television, especially the talk shows. My top three used to be the political talks-in-the-round, hosted by women: Anne Will, Sandra Maischberger, and Maybritt Illner. A fourth, Hart Aber Fair (Tough, but Fair), also political, is hosted by Frank Plasberg. Then there’s Phoenix, which is a bit more academic, and also political. Then there are two which are not political at all, but a pot pourri of all kinds of topics dealing with society, sports, and the world of entertainment and culture, where the goal is primarily entertainment, not current events. They can get political when the guests are politicians, but mostly the focus is on simply tossing around ideas and revealing the lives of people with interesting stories to tell. The discourse is at a higher level than American shows like “Ellen” or “Oprah” or "The View" and more "German" somehow, in that there is less of a need to have a laugh a minute and a feel-good conclusion every time.  One of these is the powerful and fast-paced Markus Lanz Talkshow. The other, the one I want to talk about here, is the more leisurely and laid back Nachtcafé (Night Café). It’s a theme-oriented program with a very congenial host named Michael Steinbrecher. Steinbrecher has a talent for keeping the conversation going on a broad array of topics having to do with family, personal identity and relationships, social relations, art and theater and public life. Often the topics (death, divorce, failure in life) are sensitive and the guests include an expert to contextualize and expand the topic being discussed. Nachtcafé airs on Friday nights at 10 p.m., and becomes immediately available online. 

Last Friday’s program was entitled: “Von Macken und Marotten: Leben leicht verrückt” (Quirks and Idiosyncracies: Living a bit crazy). The guests included a TV comedian noted for her loud mouth and brash interactional style, Hella Kemper, who goes by the name “Hella von Sinnen (Hella out of her mind).” Hella is married to the daughter of a former President of Germany, and the two authored a book which apparently gave the program its title. Another guest collects and sells insects. A third is obsessed with the Swedish royal family. A fourth appears in public nude to bring home the feminist insistence that a woman has the right not to be abused, even if she’s stark naked. A fourth spends her life entering (and winning) contests. The guest that really captured my attention, though, was the final guest of the evening, a man named Oliver Sechting.

Rosa, right, in New York

First, a brief digression here. LGBT people familiar with Germany will know who Rosa von Praunheim is. He’s one of my gay liberation heroes, along with Harvey Milk, Dan Savage, Barney Frank, Ellen, and many others. He was born to a prisoner in German-occupied Latvia, adopted and given the name Holger Bernhard Bruno Waldemar Mischwitzky, but decided at some point that he would go by the name of Rosa von Praunheim. Rosa is German for pink, the color of the triangular tag that homosexual prisoners had to wear in Nazi concentration camps. Praunheim is a district of Frankfurt/Main I’m assuming he feels a particular affinity for. He is a filmmaker with more than seventy documentary and feature films under his belt, an in-your-face AIDS activist who, like Larry Kramer, alienated many gay people by hounding them on the topic of safe sex. Subtle he is not. One of his early films (1971) carries the title, It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the society in which he lives.

Another of the many times he caught my attention was when he appeared on the Anne Will show (she’s one of the political talk show hosts I mentioned above, whom I still watch regularly) back in 2010 along with the catholic Bishop of Essen, Franz-Josef Overbeck. Overbeck made the mistake of claiming that homosexuality was a sin. Since the official church position is that it’s not “being homosexual” that is sinful, but “doing homosexual,” Overbeck made a fool of himself and Rosa von Praunheim called him out on it.

Bishop Overbeck, Rosa von Praunheim on Anne Will in 2010

Rosa von Praunheim: Homosexuality isn’t a sin.

Bishop Overbeck: It is a sin. We know with absolute certainty that it is a sin. It goes against nature. The nature of man is based on a man and a woman being together.

RvP: Bullshit. You don’t even believe that yourself.

Forgive me for going out on a tangent to the tangent I’m already on, but I have to mention in passing that it was this encounter that Catholic theologian David Berger claims prompted him to come out and to write his book, Der heilige Schein (Sacred Illusion), which I reviewed on this blog soon after it appeared. And which put me in touch with people who have since become very good friends.

But let me get back to the topic. I was talking about the last guest of the evening, Oliver Sechting.  For a while there it appeared as if the producers of this edition of Nachtcafé had made a terrible mistake – all of the eccentricities the guests displayed were harmless, and quite entertaining. There was little for the guest psychiatrist to talk about except to say, “If it doesn’t hurt anyone, why not?” But when it came to Oliver, the mood suddenly changed. Oliver has a severe form of OCD – obsessive compulsive disorder. Most people, when they hear OCD think of behavior compulsions - people who have to wash their hands until they become raw, or wipe doorknobs with bleach before touching them, or people with tics like head or shoulder jerking. But some OCD sufferers, like Oliver, have “thought disorders” that are not immediately evident to strangers. As a result, they often suffer in silence or have trouble getting people to take them seriously. Oliver can be traumatized when he comes across the number 58. And when he sees the color red on a black background.

Fortunately, over time, he has developed strategies for coming to terms with these behaviors. He has come up with numbers (7 and 34) to “neutralize” the “bad” number 58. And if he can spot something white after seeing red on black, he can ease the tension to some degree. Life can still be hell – imagine what it’s like for him to walk the streets at night and come across a red “do not walk” signal on a street lamp, where the background appears black. Struggling with this OCD has hospitalized him with depression at times.

Rosa von Praunheim; Oliver Sechting

The Nachtcafé program ended with the question, “Well, Oliver, how are you doing these days?” You could hear the silence, as everybody waited for the answer. I thought we were going to end on a very sour note. Instead, however, Oliver smiled, and began telling the story of having met a wonderful man who has turned his life around. A much older man, somebody with “loads of life experience” who seems to know how to deal with his hangups just right, he says – not patronizingly, not overdoing it, but by being understanding and a terrific listener. That man, it turns out, is Rosa von Praunheim.

Oliver became Rosa’s assistant at some point, worked as his assistant on the prize-winning Die Jungs vom Bahnhof Zoo (The Boys of Bahnhof Zoo - English title: Rent Boys) (2011) and more recently has even directed some of his films. Since the two began working together they have become life partners and now live together in Berlin.

I’m such a sucker for happy endings.

Photo credits:

Nachtcafé, October 22, 2017: https://www.swr.de/nachtcafe/bilder-aus-der-sendung/-/id=200198/did=20494294/nid=200198/1uby4jx/index.html

Rosa in NY: http://phoenix.de/content/startseite/dokumentationen/684621

Oliver with face covered with numbers is taken from his book, Der Zahlendieb: Mein Leben mit Zwangsstörungen (The Number Thief: My Life with OCD)  https://www.psychiatrie-verlag.de/buecher/detail/book-detail/der-zahlendieb.html. Posted on his blog page:

http://oliversechting.de

Rosa and Oliver: http://5-oliver-sechting-rosa.blogspot.com