Saturday, October 20, 2012

Civics

There was an interesting coincidence yesterday.  I went to my cellar to look for a series of English Language books for beginners. I didn't find them which means I either gave them away, or threw them into the recycling bin. I did, however, find a nice book about Civics from the GDR.

When I was at school this subject was called Civics so I have translated it as such. My course was designed to prepare we new teenagers for the wonderful world of politics, parties, voting, rights and responsibilities. The GDR book was designed to do the same. I find this a positive thing to do no matter which country, or political system.

As I emerged from the cellar with my GDR book in my hand, I opened my postbox. There I found a really interesting letter from Alan, and a package from Stefan. If you scroll down enough you will find a post about Stefan's visit to Berlin in summer -  before he left for Maine to visit Melanie. Of course you remember!

He sent me a book about German law and regulations in all its wonderful forms and shapes :-) Thanks Stefan. I shall read it when I travel on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn systems to see how the locals respond to seeing me reading this material. Should be interesting!

Both are about Civics with the latter heavily based on law and legal responsibility of the collective in the guise of The State and the individual in the guise of you and me! I have a whole new world of German to discover. I wonder what Frau Fox, my German teacher, will say about this when we meet next Tuesday afternoon.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder how many happy smiley faces in the crowd were reporting to the Stasi on how their neighbours were coming along with their Civics comprehension booklet?

Anonymous said...

I think I know who wrote this :-)
A good question. I guess about one in twenty were doing this based on something I read about the number of informers to the total population. Anyone got a more accurate figure? - John