Filed under: Holocaust Stuff, Sightseeing | Tags: berlin, dani karavan, holocaust comparisons, holocaust memory, marzahn, memorial sites, roma and sinti
So I’ve been working on this paper about the Memorial to the Persecuted Homosexuals. When Germany started talking about building national Holocaust memorials, it was decided to separate the victim groups out from each other, and the government eventually committed itself to building central but separate memorials to the Jewish, homosexual, and Roma and Sinti victims.
When I was living in Berlin, I went to visit the closest thing the Roma and Sinti have to a central memorial, a memorial stone in the Marzahn cemetery, where a “gypsy camp” was set up to get them out of the way before the 1936 Olympics. This was one of the first steps in a process that would end with the murder of anywhere from two hundred thousand to one million “gypsies.”
Marzahn is a district in former East Berlin and is really far out there, both physically and in the cultural imagination [Was soll ich mit'ner Ledercouch? Ledercouch--schlitz ich auf!], which means that nobody ever sees this memorial without taking a specific trip out there.
This sign is visible at the entrance to the cemetery--it talks about the history of this site as a camp for gypsies.
The memorial itself is fairly difficult to find, and is fairly small and unimportant within the cemetery’s internal hierarchy of monuments–while searching for it, I came across many more memorials both to resistance fighters and regular German citizens who were victims of bombing campaigns.
...this is the sum total of the memorial stone.
I was disappointed, to say the least, and so I think it’s a very good thing that they’re building a larger, more public memorial directly behind the Reichstag building and down the street from the Jewish and homosexual memorials. This newest memorial is being designed by Dani Karavan, an Israeli sculptor who is actually most famous for his monument to the 1948 Negev Brigade.
In stark contrast to the Jewish and homosexual memorials, it’s very hard to find information about this one online, but it is going to be a dark black reflecting pool with a column in the middle which will be lowered once a day–it’s unclear whether it will lower all at once or gradually throughout the day. A new rose will also be placed on top of the column once a day.
Memorial concept photograph taken from above link.
Somewhere on the memorial will be an inscription of “Auschwitz,” by Santino Spinelli, a Roma and Italian poet.
Mouth dry,
eyes dark
lips cold;
silence.
Heart crushed
no soul,
no word,
not even a tear.
That’s pretty much all I can find about the memorial online. I know that people fought for nearly twenty years bout how the victims should be described on the memorial–as “gypsies,” since that’s how they were persecuted, or as Roma and Sinti? I know there was also a lot of strife about what kind of comparisons the memorial was going to make between the genocide against the Roma and Sinti and the genocide against the Jewish people–some historians say that both groups were victims of genocide, but only the Jews were victims of “the Holocaust.”
I’m not sure how either of these controversies were resolved, ane it’s genuinely striking to me just how little information there is about this memorial. Was there a design competition? Did people get angry about the choice of an Israeli sculptor? Has that sculptor said anything to anyone about his weirdly kitschy design?
Are the political energies that went into the Jewish and homosexual memorials being sapped by the fact that people are still deporting the Roma en masse? Doesn’t the continued brutal persecution of this group make the memorial even more important? I know that the Documentation Center for Sinti and Roma, which is based in Heidelberg, has a traveling exhibition that links past and present discrimination, and I hope I’ll be able to see it in the future.
I also hope I’ll be able to see this memorial someday, but right now I have no idea when they’re finally going to get around to building the damn thing.
Filed under: Doing History, Graduate School | Tags: gay history, graduate school is fun!, holocaust memory, memorial sites
I apologize for not posting much recently, but as I was forewarned, graduate school is cotillion for eggheads, and the big end-of-quarter dance is upon us.
These are some of the things that have happened to me in the past two months:
- I now refer to books almost exclusively as “interventions” (into a literature, you understand), and my professors are not “good teachers,” rather they “have a solid pedagogy.”
- The last two movies I watched both inspired conversations about how said movies could be incorporated into a history course.
- Once I went on what I thought was a second date and left with a reading assignment about John Stuart Mill.
I had an idea of what I was getting myself into, and I am both learning a lot and enjoying myself immensely, but those mechanisms of socialization are present in every conversation. I am well aware of what’s happening to me, and how hard it’s going to be if I ever have to leave academia and sell myself in some way that doesn’t rely on my love of bizarre archives, but I have no idea what the correct balance is between absolute pessimism and maniacal self-confidence. Nobody does.
I do know that right now I’m having a lot of fun, and that you can read about the reasons not to get a PhD in every other blog on the Internet, so you know what? I’m going to tell you about how much fun I’m having instead. Right now I’m working on three papers for the end of the quarter:
1. An eight-page proposal for what will turn into my 40-page history of Esperanto in East Germany, which is due on March 18th at 4 PM. This is going fairly well.
2. A 25-page paper about how historians can think through processes of translation. This is kind of the stumbling-block of the three papers, since historians don’t think about translation nearly enough, and this means I have to read a lot of linguists. I would not have made a good linguist.
3. A 20-page paper about the political debates around the Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism in Berlin. This one is really fun, although the universe of things I want to write about in the paper keeps expanding, which is making it hard for me to actually get started writing.
Here’s a funny thought: you know how I was kind of iffy about the memorial when I went to visit it? I found the other proposed memorials on this site, which features extensive documentation about the memorial, and boy howdy, the artists they invited to submit to the competition made some atrocious suggestions.
This large sculpture of a teapot was proposed as a memorial... for gay men murdered by the Nazis.
Does anybody have any idea why an invited artist went to the trouble of creating this? It’s only the worst of many unfortunate ideas, and I’m worried that at some point this paper is just going to lapse into a litany of “What the hell?”s.
First, though, I’m going to have a happy Thanksgiving.
Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: fascism, fiume, gabriele d'annunzio, italian history, italy, modernity and its discontents, music videos, nationalisms, rijeka, yugoslavia
These two songs by contemporary Italian band Ultima Frontiera [warning: MySpace link!] have both become a fairly regular part of my gym playlist.
After World War One and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both Italians and Croats laid claim to Fiume/Rijeka.
While the city’s future was being negotiated in September 1919, Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio led a band of 2,000 nationalist irregulars to take it by force, declaring Fiume to be the “Regency of Carnaro.” Italy demanded that d’Annunzio step down, but he responded by declaring war on Italy, only backing down after a bombardment by the Italian Navy in December 1920.
d’Annunzio ran his self-proclaimed state with a heavy dose of emotional theatrics. He addressed crowds from a balcony, had his supporters wear black shirts and black fezes, introduced what we now know as the Fascist salute, and created the nonsensical chant of “Eia! Eia! Alala!” to rally his supporters.
d’Annunzio also co-authored a utopian charter for his state with revolutionary syndicalist Alceste De Ambris. Carnaro would have been a sort of renaissance city-state, organized into ten all-encompassing professional guilds, committed to equality between the sexes, and prepared to hand power over to a single supreme dictator in times of “extreme peril.” But the most famous passage in the Charter is probably the following:
In the Italian province of Carnaro, music is a social and religious institution. Once in a thousand or two thousand years music springs from the soul of a people and flows on for ever. A noble race is not one that creates a God in its own image but one that creates also the song wherewith to do Him homage.
Every rebirth of a noble race is a lyric force, every sentiment that is common to the whole race, a potential lyric; music, the language of ritual, has power, above all else, to exalt the achievement and the life of man. Does it not seem that great music has power to bring spiritual peace to the strained and anxious multitude?
So we’ll ignore for the moment the whole thing where d’Annunzio is credited with having invented Italian Fascism, and just say that this song, based on a poem that he later wrote about the Regency of Carnaro, may be the most amazing thing ever.
EIA EIA ALALA! EIA EIA ALALA!
The end of that story is that Italy formally annexed Fiume in 1924, and it stayed under Italian control until it was occupied by the German military.
After returning from Fiume, d’Annunzio was essentially forced into house arrest in his villa. He continued to stay away from public life after the Fascists took power, because while he was a major inspiration to Mussolini, with whom he exchanged over 500 letters over the course of his life, he was also a potential threat to Mussolini’s power and an unwanted critic of some of Mussolini’s policies. For these reasons Mussolini mostly bribed him to keep quiet.
d’Annunzio died in 1938 and therefore never saw the end of World War Two, when the city was given to Yugoslavia, and a great number of the Italians in the surrounding area were forced to leave their homes. [I haven't actually read that book and do not know enough about this to tell you what this particular mass movement of Italians should be called, but it would be a place to go if you were curious.]
Some people are still very angry about this, including this band Ultima Frontiera, who have a lot of other songs with Italian irredentist themes.
My favorite of their songs is definitely Terra Rossa, which features the refrain “Istria, Fiume e Dalmazia–né slovenia! né croazia!“:
I don’t actually have an opinion about who should be in charge of Istria, but pretending that I do sure gets me through the last 500 meters of my rowing sets.
Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: aelita, cem yilmaz, everyone loves the wild west, futurism, history in films, russian constructivism, russian history, science fiction, turkish
Sometimes I do things other than read books. This past week I watched two movies, both of which reflect continuing preoccupations of mine.
First was Yahşi Batı, a Turkish film about–wait for it–the WILD WEST.
In the film, two of the sultan’s agents come from the Ottoman Empire to deliver a diamond to President James Garfield, but of course, in the first fifteen minutes the diamond is stolen by a group of outlaw cowboys! Hilarity ensues.
Turkish Circle sponsored the film viewing, and we watched it in Turkish with English subtitles. I think I would have gotten a lot more of the jokes if I understood Turkish better, but as it was, the film was still pretty hilarious–we learn that Coca-Cola was actually invented by Turks, that Turkish men love strong-willed lesbians, and that Native Americans are actually Turks–or are Turks Native Americans?
It was a profoundly silly comedy, yes, but ever since watching this movie I have been spending far too much time deliriously imagining the possibility of a Turkish-German Wild West film and the amazing paper I would surely write about it.
The second movie I saw this week was Aelita, Queen of Mars, a silent Russian film from 1924 and the world’s first full-length feature about space travel. I watched it in the University chapel with live organ accompaniment.
The film is actually available on YouTube in its entirety, in what appears to be Russian, Finnish, and English:
Do you like it when individuals resolve their personal psychosexual complexes by fantasizing about traveling to an aesthetically constructivist Mars to foment ultimately unsuccessful proletarian revolution under a tyrannical Martian regime?
Because if that sounds at all appealing, you should watch this film.
(Although you should be warned that by “psychosexual complexes” I do mean “tendency to beat and occasionally try to kill their wives.” Modernism: it continues to be about naturalizing violence against women.)
Aelita and her favorite maid. Sexy, right?
I’m not going to go into great depth about the plot, because you actually may want to watch this film, but it’s always worth repeating that history and science fiction are great bedfellows, and that science fiction is often a vehicle for political argument.
The narrative structure of the film justifies Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the work of rebuilding Russia while telling us that the time for revolutionary vanguardism is over: when our protagonist goes to Mars, he foments revolution, but that revolution ultimately fails. The oppressed Martian workers (and they are really oppressed–a third of them get put into cold storage during the film) do not actually have class consciousness and therefore can’t sustain their own revolution, so the revolution gets hijacked by the titular Aelita.
Aelita's maid, at the center, has awesome pants--when she walks they make these neat jumping spider motions.
And yet because Mars is so darn seductive, there’s some ambiguity here: I recognize that the revolution on Mars is doomed to fail and that much better work is to be done constructing giant dams and steam engines at home, but look at those pants! Look at those haircuts! Look at those twisty staircases! How could I not want to go?
It’s perhaps not surprising that the film was wildly popular among the Soviet public (evidently a lot of babies were named ‘Aelita’ in 1924), but criticized by the authorities, and that it later fell majorly out of favor with Stalinist censors, by which time a new generation of science fiction writers were coming up with their own ways to sneak subversive messages into novels that looked regime-friendly on the surface.
I own some of those books in Esperanto, and someday I promise to tell you about them. Right now, it’s back to my reading for class.
Ĝis revido! Görüşürüz! À bientôt!
Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: basque!, berlin, germany loves the wild west, multicultural germany, music videos, reggae, seeed
Last week one of the second-year Latin Americanists introduced me to Seeed, a German reggae/dancehall group that sings in German, English, and Jamaican Patois.
I’m unfamiliar with reggae/dancehall as a genre, but Seeed are clearly some super-chill dudes, because they make the German language seem like a never-ending party (with a little help from its buddy Patois). The trio of lead singers (that’s why there’s three e’s in the name) are half-Ghanaian, half-Guinean, and half-French/Basque, giving the group some serious multikulti cred.
“Dickes B” was their first hit single, and the video should inspire nostalgia in anyone who has spent time on the Berlin public transport system:
I also really liked this song, which features my favorite German thing, namely the Wild West:
Oh man, and this one is trippy as all get out:
They were also responsible for the first-ever German-language hit in Trinidad and Tobago.
And check this out, guys, they have a collaboration with Cee-Lo Green!
In short, the department continues to enrich my life in completely unexpected ways, and I am better for it, and now so are you. Happy Monday, everybody!
Filed under: European History, Macht Spass | Tags: environmental history, padraic kenney, poland, political activism, protest movements, smurfs, solidarity
I am really digging A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, which I’m reading for my Contemporary Europe class this week. Padraic Kenney is trying to answer the question of how the 1989 revolutions across Central Europe managed to bring thousands of people into the streets.
He does so by arguing that the post-Solidarity generation in Poland and elsewhere invented a new activist culture characterized by ideological pluralism and pragmatism–icking whatever battles they thought they could win that month, rather than the battles their ideology demanded. Instead of demanding that the regime allow free speech or national sovereignty, they would demand that the regime allow a homeless shelter, a folk music festival, or a support group for recovering alcoholics.
The most important new part of the dissenters’ toolkit was actually environmental issues. Especially after Chernobyl, local environmental hazards were potent mobilizers for people who had never thought of themselves as political before.
I took this picture, of the Prague Mothers' first korzo, from the website linked below. Kenney also uses it in his book.
Mothers could march through Prague pushing children in their strollers, carrying anti-nuclear-power banners, relatively secure in the knowledge that the police would not risk the bad publicity of beating up a bunch of women and children.
Kenney also argues that this new dissent culture was characterized by humor and irony, taste for the carnivalesque This generation of activists had realized that a combative intellectual critique of the regime might get you put in jail, but making fun of the regime by dressing up as elves on Children’s Day and passing out candy to the cops might make you some friends.
Ultimately, then, by mixing a wide variety of issues and by inventing new, less threatening forms of participation, these post-Solidarity activists brought a wide variety of people into contact with their ideas and made those people more willing to flood the streets once the events we now call “1989” began in earnest.
The best thing that I learned is that Smurfs became a symbol of the opposition in Poland during the late 1980s. Police in Poland wore blue uniforms, and as part of this spirit of poking fun of the regime, sometimes dissenters would dress up as Smurfs themselves and start to sing songs like the following, from a 1988 strike in Gdansk:
I’ll be here on Saturday, and Sunday too,
But you Gargamels, you’re smurfed, you’re through!
Let them smurf away, let them run
In hell they’re expected, every one!
Boiling water, bubbling tar
Smurfs will be frying everywhere
Their blue color will boil away
Red looks better on them anyway
This is clearly the most awesome thing ever and outside of Kenney’s book, I can’t really find anything about it on the Anglo/Germanophone Internet.
I did find this steam engine aficionado’s account of traveling around Poland by rail in 1990. He writes that “Żagań depot seemed in earlyish 1990, to have developed a “thing” about those odd blue cartoon characters, the Smurfs. I saw on the smoke deflectors of at least one Ol49, quite skilfully-executed Smurf figures; and on the dashboard of a diesel loco, a splendid blue Smurf effigy. It crossed the mind to wonder whether this was just a random craze; or whether for some strange ideological reason, Smurfs had in Communist times been regarded as unacceptable, and Żagań’s loco crews were now celebrating their freedom to engage in whatever nonsense they might fancy.”
I also found this video, but have no idea who created it or why:
This has been your weekly dispatch from the trenches of historical absurdity.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: aggro berlin, feminist politics, german rap, history of german hip hop, kitty kat, music videos, rape, sexual violence, women are awesome
I was joking with a friend yesterday about how his kitty is totally an “Aggro kitty” because she likes to headbutt people and jump on his stomach to wake him up.
Then we discovered that the record label Aggro Berlin actually had a rapper named Kitty Kat, and that was sort of the end of my productive work day.
Aggro Berlin was a hip-hop label that existed from 2001 to 2009, and this German-language Spiegel article, which describes them as ”the sound of welfare Germany,” gives you an idea of what they might stand for in German culture.
“Bushido hit the nerve of his times: Primed by the success of American Gangsta Rap and fascinated by underclass-theater, which had been doggedly marketed by RTL 2, youth saw in the German-Tunisian the entertainer of the hour. Underdogs had their resentments reinforced by texts about murdered whores and mugged fat cats; middle class kids could shock their parents with outlaw poses.”
Most of the label’s acts were either minorities or lower-class white men, and they were continually criticized for being misogynistic, for using “Neger” in their texts, and even for resembling a racist minstrel show.
As far as I know, the only thing Aggro Berlin ever took a stance against was Turkish-German rapper G-Hot’s song “No Tolerance” in 2004. The lyrics feature such gems as “In my opinion such people don’t deserve to live” and “Be a man, show that you have no tolerance, come together and cut off their dicks!”
G-Hot released the song online and Aggro Berlin subsequently booted him from the label. But it literally took a call to castrate gay men and chop them in two with axes for the label to do this, so you can dimly imagine the rest of the sort of stuff on their records.
(The other thing Aggro Berlin is probably famous for is the best-known German hip-hop feud. Or their flirtations with fascist references–Bushido once rapped “Salute, stand to attention, I am the leader like ‘A’”–which have caused them to be embraced not only by immigrants but also by the extreme right neo-Nazi scene.)
The reason there hasn’t been an Aggro post so far, despite their centrality to German hip-hop in the last decade, is that I didn’t really feel like sullying my blog with hate speech.
For all of these reasons, I was shocked when I ran across Kitty Kat the other day, a female rapper who joined the label in 2006 and was a guest on a few tracks before the label folded and she released her first album under Universal Music.
She was born in East Berlin, but her family fled to Augsburg in 1986 when she was four. She evidently came into contact with American rap as a teenager–I saw a few articles mention Salt-N-Pepa–and turned down a bank job in Munich in 2003 with the idea of moving back to Berlin and becoming a rap star.
I really enjoyed the first of her songs that I found, “Braves Mädchen,” because it’s hyper-sexualized, sure, but it’s kind of a fun upbeat addition to the “Work hard/party hard” genre of songs that you listen to after work on Friday.
But then I came to “Bitchfresse” and I started to feel sick, because this song gets at the heart of the confusion I have about why any women choose to associate with such explicitly misogynistic subcultures.
What are they getting out of it? Why can’t they just have fun running around the Berlin subway system and trying on sunglasses with their girls?
You see, the refrain is as follows:
I’m a woman but if I were a man I would say to you
“Buddy, suck my dick!”
Bitchfresse; Who do you think you’re talking to?
Get your shit together, buddy, who do you think you are?
Bitchfresse; And once more,
If I were a man I would say to you
“Buddy, suck my dick!”
Bitchfresse; Shit, who are you calling a bitch?
This woman is the shit, Digger get out of my face,
Bitchfresse; And once more
If I were a man I would say to you
“Buddy, suck my dick!”
So she’s constantly reminding us that she’s a woman, in fact that’s how she first introduces the refrain, but when it comes to telling people how she actually feels about them calling her a bitch, her response is to adopt the pose of being a man?
That’s the most depressing thought I’ve had all morning.
Then I make the (always) terrible decision of reading the YouTube comments and there’s a couple of people who are calling her “one of the best female MCs ever,” sure, that’s nice, but then there are comments saying “Well, the ugly bitch sure looks like a man” and “Rap is misogynistic, and that’s how it should stay,” and then the top-rated comment is about how she should be raped.
Because that’s the world we live in. Everyone knows that if Katharina Löwel were a radical feminist, or even kind of a feminist, men would be talking about she was an ugly bitch who deserved to be raped.
So she figures “I’ll play along with the system, I’ll be buddies with Sido, I’ll be a tough woman, I’ll tell them to fuck off in a language they understand.”
But is playing within the system and putting on an aggressively masculine drag really going to earn you any respect? Of course not. Because you’re a woman who has just dared to express an opinion in the public sphere.
So men are still going to say “Women shouldn’t be rappers,” and men are still going to make jokes about you being ugly and having a dick, and men are still going to threaten to rape you, and other men are going to cheer them on.
You know why? Because “One female chancellor doesn’t make for an emancipated society, and one HipHop-Kitty no misogyny-free rhyme zone.”
I wish Katharina Löwel all the best, but we still need a revolution.
Filed under: Literature | Tags: ferenc karinthy, metropole, sexual violence, the modern novel
I just finished Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole, written in Hungarian in 1970 but only recently translated into English for the first time.
It’s the story of Budai, a linguist on his way to a conference in Helsinki, who gets off the airplane to find himself in a place where they speak an unknown language, “a language without discernible inflections, a continual jabbering–’bebebe‘ or ‘pepepe‘ or ‘checheche.’”
Budai goes around gesturing and stammering out questions in English, in French, in Russian, in Chinese, in Turkish, in Finnish, in every language he’s ever heard of, but nothing works. He tries to decipher their writing, encouraged by the presence of Arabic numerals, but finds that those numerals are surrounded by a sea of unrecognizable runes–in one scene he tries to record every rune he can find in a book and gives up when he hits 237.
Language has failed our protagonist, and we follow him in painstaking detail as he tries to make sense of the world around him and find his way home. Although he begins to be able to read simple words, like products in supermarkets, he has no success in breaking those words down into their parts, can’t deduce a system, can’t make the sounds that will allow the locals to understand him.
“Could he be mispronouncing the words? That would not be unlikely, having heard the curious, alien-sounding articulations of the locals. Later though, in one of the underground tunnels of the metro, some kind of altercation broke out, and Budai noticed that everyone else was merely shouting and rambling, with no-one paying any attention to anyone else. Could it be that they themselves could not understand each other, that the people who lived here employed various provincial dialects, possibly even quite different languages? In a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each one of them might be speaking his own language, that there were as many languages as there were people.”
The book does an incredibly effective job at inducing panic, alienation, and dread in the reader, but it also has a beautiful and highly visual prose style that is a delight to read. Highly recommended almost all around.
You should be forewarned that there is one scene in the book where our protagonist violently assaults the only woman in the city he has been able to forge any connection with. “He thrashed about wildly, grabbed her hair, beat her with his fists again and again like a madman in utter confusion, forgetting everything and thinking only: she must pay for this, she must pay…”
He then feels sorry and “would have given anything to comfort her,” so he starts kiss her, to caress her, finally to have sex with her, and he finds that this time she “gave herself to him completely… she was tender and attentive and did things for him she clearly never did for her husband. Now she could rise with him to a full climax… there were moments at the height of passion when Budai was tempted to ask whether everything that had happened to him so far was the price that had to be paid for this, and even if it was the price, whether it was not worth it?”
It’s hard to read this passage only a page after flinching at the description of assault, but I was even more upset by how normal I found the scene, by how utterly expected it was at that point in the narrative.
Why, it’s a masterpiece of Central European literary modernism, of course a woman is going to be hurt and of course this will be presented as a natural, understandable, even logical response to masculine existential alienation.
The modern man will be the modern man, don’t you know?
Filed under: Graduate School
I thought this series of pictures summed up my first few weeks in graduate school very well: biking, drinking, reading books, making Marxist puns. Do you guys want to see pictures of my adorable Japanese bike?
Cyclists have nothing to lose but their chains!
Eins geht noch (Just one more, or Have another one, or maybe even One for the road!) was etched into the bottom of this beer glass. I wanted it. Oh, how I wanted it.
"Glück auf!" is the traditional miners' greeting in German. I just like bookstores.
Filed under: Turkish Stuff | Tags: atatürk, music videos, nationalisms, turkey, turkish history, turkish music, turkish war of independence
The Turkish War of Independence began when Atatürk arrived in Samsun on a ferry on May 19, 1919, supposedly to the tune of this “Youth March.” Atatürk later declared that May 19th should be celebrated as “Youth and Sports Day” in Turkey, and today it is probably the most important Turkish national holiday, celebrating as it does the blockbuster combination of Turkish independence, Atatürk, youth and sports.
Turkish pop star Kenan Doğulu rearranged “Gençlık Marşı” in 2009 as part of his project to pass national pride down to the next generation. The music video starts with some Atatürk footage, and you can watch it below. I think it’s a pretty damn catchy song for a military march.
I’m posting this now because we actually just translated the march for class, so this may be less than poetic, but you can at least be assured that it is mostly correct:
The top of the mountain is covered in fog
The silver stream flows without stopping
Now the sun is rising from the horizon
Let’s march forward, friends!
Let the earth, sky, and water hear our voices
Let every place echo with our strong steps!
Where else would there be this sky, this sea?
Where else these mountains and these stones
These trees and these beautiful birds
Let’s march forward, friends!
Let the earth, sky, and water hear our voices
Let every place echo with our strong steps!
