Robert Storr, dean of the Yale Graduate school of Art and formerly of the Museum of Modern Art, discusses his acquisition of Gerhard Richter’s famous cycle of Baader-Meinhof-inspired paintings for MoMA.

An interview with two of the directors of the sublime and wonderful cartoon Logorama.

As promised in my most recent podcast, here is the sublime Oscar-winning short “Logorama” featuring a shocking appearance by the RAF logo, followed by a short clip from “Rude Boy” starring the clash and a certain T-shirt featuring the RAF logo.

Logorama is worth it to watch all the way through, but if you have ADHD, skip to about 6:40 to get your RAF fix.

It’s hard to believe that this website has been going for more that 12 years now. On September 11, 2001, it already felt like I had been working on the site forever.

Assuming that I would have visitors to my site drawing parallels between the events of the day and what happened in Germany 20 years earlier, I wrote a brief, raw post that day.

My initial thoughts of the attacks show that I could find no parallel between what happened on 9/11 and in Germany. With almost a decade of hindsight, it’s interesting that the national response to the initial threat of terrorism played out almost identically in the US as it did in Germany. A “War on Terror?” Check. A host of new, heretofore unthinkable laws that ostensibly would help catch terrorists but mostly curtailed the civil rights of average citizens? Check. Quasi-legal imprisonments with accusations of torture? Entire new prison structures created to house terrorists? Check. Check. A right wing press outlet dominating the news industry, fanning the flames under the feet of a terrified population? Check. Widespread surveillance of average citizens with little or no connection to terrorism? Check.

It goes on and on.

Some times it disappoints me that the majority of the visitors to my site come from Europe. Because I think that had more Americans remembered what happened in Germany in the 1970s–when international terrorists declared war on America and killed American soldiers–and the these Americans particularly noted how Germany’s War on Terror fundamentally turned the German state into a more restrictive version of it’s former self without really doing much to stop terrorism, they might have thought twice about supporting our own “War on Terror” efforts.

Interesting note: The first e-mail I received in response to my 9/11/01 post was a friendly note from Ron Jeremy. Yes that Ron Jeremy.

Horst Mahler, Baader-Meinhof Gang Co-Founder, former member of the NDP

The CSU party of Germany is pushing a new effort to ban the extreme right wing party, the NDP. In their effort, the CSU is not being supported by their national sister party the CDU.

The NPD’s political fortunes have waxed and waned since their formation in 1964. They are noted for their extreme xenophobia and their adherence to certain Nazi ideology. In recent years they have garnered increased support (securing almost 10% of the Saxony vote in the 2004 elections), causing concern among Germans who have long memories of Hitler’s rise to power.

For students of the Baader-Meinhof era, the NPD is a reminder of the strange history of Baader-Meinhof Group co-founder Horst Mahler, who switched ideologies wholesale in the 70s and 80s and went from the extreme left of the Red Army Faction to joining the NPD party. Mahler is currently in prison, sentenced to an incredible 11 years total for giving a nazi salute to CDU politician Michael Friedman.

It is likely the the 73 year old Mahler will spend more time in prison for his stupid Nazi salute than he did for his role in several bank robberies with the Baader-Meinhof Group.

If there’s one way, in a nutshell, to differentiate German attitudes towards free expression and American attitudes, this story is it. It’s inconceivable that an American would be sent to prison for a hand gesture, or that there would be an attempt to ban a political party based on their belief. But Germans have long memories and little interest in reviving the past…