Is this thing on?

I finally got around to watch Der Untergang (or "The fall of the third realm" in the uninspired Czech translation, the English title "Downfall" is considerably better) a few days ago. Set in the fast imploding Nazi universe in the days before the ultimate collapse, this is a refreshingly real and honest account of madness set upon itself. Real as a story that is, not an arbiter of historical truth. Unsurprisingly, given its subject, the European debate has been on its instrumental role. Will it prevent a rise of neo-nazism? No, certainly not. Neither will it be their The Birth of A Nation.

I rarely visit the cinemas, but this film ought to be seen in one and not just watched on DVD. Partly to reinforce its claustrophobic nature and partly to feel, and not just look at, the shells ripping Berlin and its tattered defenders apart. Meanwhile, down in the bunker, Adolf weds Eva even though the required paperwork that the couple are of proper mateable Aryan descent is waived.

There was an unsettling idea to stage the Nazis' final downfall not in Berlin, but in the fairly impenetrable Festung Norwegen. The several hundred thousand German soldiers stationed there had a relative comfortable and safe existence by the northern bunkers, far away from both the west and east fronts. There was less comfort in the labour camps for the largely Russian prisoners that managed to survive the arctic winters.

The war struck my mother's home, an isolated fishing village a few fjords to the south of Narvik (road connection came twenty years later), by surprise. Outsiders rarely came to visit, let alone Germans with guns. The neighbouring farmboy realized he was going to be drafted when he heard about the invasion. Resourceful as he was he got a friend to find an axe to chop off one of his toes, as it was better to lose a toe than your life. The friend was no expert executioner so his best attempt was met with the yell of "Yow, you cut too far" and a stream of invectives. The "you cut too far" story got better with each retelling, of which there were many throughout the decades. As it turned out the joke was on him, the mobilization order never came and whenever German planes flew overhead and everyone else scurried for shelter (the village was never bombed) he had to hobble around hoping not to get hit.

Post-war reconciliation was swift, except to the British tabloid press perpetually stuck in 1942. West German soldiers trained in Norway as part of a NATO exercise only a few years after the Nazi German soldiers had occupied the country. The scars would remain. As one war survivor put it in an interview fifty years later, he didn't hate the Germans, but he still shuddered whenever he heard German being spoken.

I toured Europe extensively fifteen years ago and then WWII was still raw. After all the Cold War was just an epilogue, and Germany and Japan had won (this was also the time of Japanophobia in USA). The Berlin Wall was being chopped up and sold to the highest bidder and the Anschluss of DDR was in progress, to mixed emotions both inside and outside the country ("I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them"). Even where people were just recovering from the Soviet Russian occupation the memory of the Nazi German occupation laid just beneath. Since The War affected not only every European alive at the time, but also their children, I expected its repercussions would last a century.

Now fifteen years later the healing has happened faster than that. Thirty years from now World War II will cease to be memory and remain part of our history instead.

My travelling companion and favourite publication, New Scientist has a special issue on civilisation (vanity is posed as a prime suspect for the title question). Insightful as always, it still left open the question if there really is any new science to pre-history.

I got a more present puzzle: Why do US IT companies leave civilisation behind? I have arrived at a W3C multimodal working group meeting IBM is hosting in New York, but of course not in the city. Like any other event hosted in the US this is located deep into the suburban wasteland.

European events are in the city centre. Opera for instance is well placed in the middle of Oslo. Admittedly the company started in Kjeller ("Cellar", if you ever get there you would agree the name fits), an out of place that can boast of being the birthplace of object-oriented programming, the first Internet node in the world outside of the USA, inventor of key mobile phone technology, and incubator of Opera. Opera still had the sense to move into my neighbourhood as soon as they got any ambition.

In USA the move would be in the opposite direction. It is not as if New York is a city to avoid, it is rightly recognized as one of the great cities in the world. The communications could be better, but the system is still fairly convenient and efficient.

Instead I am at a highway in the middle of the woods. Mercifully W3C meetings consume most of your waking moments, because the nightlife here is a vending machine.

It is odd to name a continent after a rape victim, even when you consider all the brutality four millennia of European history can muster. More prosaic sources might separate the name's real root from the myth of Zeus and Europa, but the Phoenician origin of Europa reflects the impact that seafaring culture has had on the continent. Different tellings disagree on whether the girl was bullied or eloping, but what matters for posterity is that she left behind the two dominant continents at that time, Africa and Asia, to mother the Minoan dynasty at her new home in Crete.

Heimskringla, the 13th century sagas of the Norwegian kings, states that "the western [part of the world] is called by some Europa, by some Enea.", but Virgil's Roman re-creation myth evidently lost out for the Middle-Eastern princess. You will not find many self-styled Aeneans around anymore.

Neither will you find any New Europeans. I wouldn't blame Donald Rumsfeld for coining the phrase, it served his purpose, but I was surprised to see it take up a life of its own for a while, even in ostensibly European countries like Britain. I take it as evidence that there are journalists that might live in Europe, but who have never been there.

In another sense Europeans are the result of successive waves of immigration and invasion, which ended with the spectacular European radiation when Europeans colonized every other continent in the course of a few centuries. The Eurasian conveyor belt has now reversed back to Asia as the source of migration, conflict, change, and power, giving present Europe a respite from that role, and once again the New Europeans are African and Asian.