Bloecker

If you could have something named after you, what would it be? The Wood Workers in Holstein in North Germany were the Blockers, blocking wood. Ein Holzblock. Die Holzbloecke. Auch gut als Unterlage, einem Gefangen den Kopf abzuschlagen. Mit einem Schwert. Was als ehrenvoll galt bei public Executions. Die Kriminellen wurden in der Regel aufgehaengt, wobei die Raben dann die Toten frassen, bzw deren Leichnam. Die Seele war ja in der Hoelle, so die Kirche. The forests all over the globe have been cut down either to harvest the timber or wood, or burning to cook and heat the homes or more. Logging was the word to ship the red cedar trees in Australia along the rivers by steam boats and then via larger Steamers across the ocean to Sydney and Melbourne. One tree was enough wood to build one house. Red Gold - Red Cedar Trees. Nothing left, indeed, but a few National Parks. Look at the USA, look at the Forests in South America. Humboldt went there and was blown away. His brother in Berlin was a linguist like Chomsky. Credit phb | Red Cedar Tree

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LOTE

Languages Other Than English Here is the English translation of the statement: Is learning a foreign languages superfluous thanks to good translation tools and AI? No! 30 March 2026 Dear colleagues, Recently I have been receiving press enquiries with increasing frequency suggesting that technological advances have made learning foreign languages unnecessary. The question posed is to what extent pupils' motivation to learn a foreign language is diminished by ever-improving translation tools — or whether, on the other hand, these tools might actually be what sparks interest in foreign languages in the first place. My usual response is that this topic matters deeply to us as a philologists' association, because it ultimately touches on our fundamental humanistic understanding of education. For Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, learning foreign languages was vitally important because he saw it as a way of getting to know other cultures, and thereby advancing the individual's formative engagement with both themselves and the world. Through language learning — in his day, especially the classical languages — he wanted to enable the individual to "connect as much of the world as possible as closely as possible to themselves." A beautiful idea, and one that captures the humanistic approach to language learning. Foreign language learning is therefore about far more than translation. That is precisely why it remains irreplaceable as part of school education, regardless of how excellent translation tools…

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Apples

The Granite Belt: apple country at the edge of the subtropics The Granite Belt is Queensland's only four-season landscape — an 800-to-1,000-metre plateau of ancient granite, apple orchards, and Italian-German settler memory, three hours west of the Gold Coast yet climatically closer to Normandy than to Brisbane. For a fictional East German woman arriving by motorcycle from the subtropical coast, the region offers an uncanny mirror: Gravenstein apples descended from Danish-German stock, a town whose apple-growing heartland was once named Roessler after a German family (renamed in 1915 amid wartime hostility), and a landscape of frost-bitten orchards and balancing granite boulders that feels nothing like Australia and everything like involuntary memory. What follows is a comprehensive research dossier organized to support authentic Sebaldian scene-writing. The tin miners who became orchardists The Granite Belt's agricultural story begins not with apples but with tin. In 1872, the Pioneer Tin Mining Company triggered a rush to what was then called Quart Pot Creek amiens-qld-history Wikipedia — renamed Stanthorpe that year Wikipedia Queensland Places by Surveyor General Augustus Charles Gregory, from the Latin stannum (tin) and Middle English thorpe (village). Wikipedia +4 Cobb & Co coaches ran twice daily from Warwick. slq Thirty hotels did roaring trade. Chinese miners arrived via ship and rail in such numbers that by 1877 the local press reported "two hundred Chinamen going up the line." Tin valued at £2.5…

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Ein Nachruf

 Tagesspiegel Plus als Quelle (gekuerzt): Im Netzwerk der Zeiten, Menschen und Fiktionen Erzähler, Enzyklopädist, Aufklärer: Ein Nachruf auf den großen Schriftsteller und Filmemacher Alexander Kluge.  Von Gerrit Bartels Stand: 26.03.2026, 16:13 Uhr Es gibt Todesnachrichten, die mag man erst mal gar nicht glauben, selbst wenn der gerade Verstorbene lange das Alter erreicht hat, das gern als gesegnet bezeichnet wird. Alexander Kluge ist 94 Jahre alt geworden, und man ist überrascht: Kluge, tot? Führte er nicht gerade noch durch eine Ausstellung, war er nicht dauerpräsent bei Instagram, hatte er nicht vor ein paar Tagen erst zum Tod seines intellektuellen Weggefährten Jürgen Habermas ein erhellendes Interview gegeben? Und gab es im vergangenen Sommer nicht noch ein ganz neues Buch von ihm, „Sand und Zeit“, ein Bildatlas zwar, aber einer, der mit viel Text versehen war? Und sowieso: War Kluge, wenn man ihm begegnete, nicht immer quicklebendig, quasi unsterblich? 

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Film Review | ARTE

P.H. Bloecker | bloecker.wordpress.com Credit phb | Our Planet and AI More on this Photo above later ... This film is on ARTE | released 1981 There is a particular pleasure available only to the exile: watching a film set in a city you once knew well, from a couch on the other side of the world, and catching the filmmakers in the act of truth. Not dramatic truth — visual truth. The tram that really ran that route. The car that really sat outside that apartment block. The particular quality of Bavarian winter light on wet cobblestones. Laurent Heynemann's Il faut tuer Birgitt Haas (1981) — released in the English-speaking world as Birgitt Haas Must Be Killed, and in Germany, with characteristic bluntness, as Der inszenierte Mord (The Staged Murder) — gave me that pleasure in abundance. And then, with almost studied perversity, it threw it all away in a finale so narratively incoherent that I found myself staring at the screen in something close to disbelief. This is a film of two halves. The first half is one of the more atmospherically convincing European political thrillers of its era. The second half is a study in how badly a clever premise can be betrayed by a screenplay that loses its nerve. Let me begin, as the film itself should have, with what it gets right. Munich as Character: The…

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Peter Sloterdijk

This essay was published in German on my WordPress Blog Higher Education before. Here now follows the English version. Prompted by the Author and drafted by Claude AI. Reading Peter Sloterdijk — An Invitation | P.H. Blöcker Faust | God and the Devil | Credit phb Marlow and Goethe | 2 different versions Essay · Philosophy · P.H. Bloecker, retired Director of Studies Reading Peter Sloterdijk — An Invitation by P.H. Bloecker  |  phbloecker.wordpress.com There are books you open and immediately set aside — not because they bore you, but because you sense at once that something is being asked of you. A certain readiness. A kind of inward breath before the dive. Peter Sloterdijk is that kind of author. And that is precisely what makes him indispensable. I say this after more than four decades in the classroom and at the writing desk — in Berlin, in Windhoek, in Queensland. I have watched many philosophical fashions arrive and dissolve. Sloterdijk is not a fashion. He is a space of thought you enter and from which you do not emerge entirely the same. What a Temperament Is His book Philosophical Temperaments — From Plato to Foucault opens with a gesture that is quiet but revolutionary: Sloterdijk does not ask what the great philosophers of history thought. He asks how they experienced the world. What fundamental feeling drives a way of thinking?…

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Summer in QLD

The long summer vacations start in Australia after the first or second Dec week (Southern Hemispheres) plus Southern Cross. Funny to celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer, when Bavaria measures 1 m of snow or more. So in short and in Tees and Shorts: No ice and snow and not any central heating here at the Gold Coast, where houses are finished in less than one year. Only a bit of concrete and some Dachlatten, a bit of steel and Gips. The rest is decoration, more or less ... Wanna know more about retirement at the Gold Coast? Why not? The Mother of all questions, indeed.

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UN Resolution NY

Credit phb Whose Suffering Counts? | P.H. Bloecker bloecker.wordpress.com  ·  Essays on Life, Literature & Ideas Whose Suffering Counts? Slavery, the Holocaust, and the dangerous arithmetic of atrocity by P.H. Bloecker Gold Coast QLD Australia, 25 March 2026 The UN General Assembly voted yesterday on a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. 123 nations voted in favour. Three voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. 52 abstained — among them all 27 members of the European Union and the United Kingdom. The resolution is non-binding. It is political. And its most dangerous word stands in the superlative: the gravest. Because a superlative implies a ranking. And a ranking of human catastrophes inevitably raises a question that nobody in that chamber spoke aloud — but that everyone present heard: Is the slave trade worse than the Holocaust?And is that even a question we are permitted to ask? I. Frankl and Benjamin Were Jews In recent days I have been writing about Viktor Frankl and Walter Benjamin — two Jewish intellectuals from the German-speaking world, both caught in the machinery of the same annihilation, both witnesses to the absolute limit of human barbarism. Frankl survived Auschwitz. Benjamin died fleeing it, in a hotel room in Port Bou on the Spanish border, on the night of 25 September 1940. Israel voted No yesterday. That is not coincidental. The…

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UN Resolution

Wessen Leiden zählt? | P.H. Bloecker bloeckerblog.com  ·  Essays zu Bildung, Literatur und gelebtem Leben Wessen Leiden zählt? Sklaverei, Holocaust und die gefährliche Arithmetik des Verbrechens von P.H. Bloecker New York, 25. März 2026 Die UN-Generalversammlung hat gestern eine Resolution verabschiedet, die den transatlantischen Sklavenhandel als das schwerste Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit bezeichnet. 123 Staaten stimmten dafür. Drei dagegen: die USA, Israel und Argentinien. 52 Staaten enthielten sich — darunter alle 27 Mitglieder der Europäischen Union und Großbritannien. Die Resolution ist nicht binding. Sie ist politisch. Und ihr gefährlichstes Wort steht im Superlativ: das schwerste. Denn ein Superlativ impliziert eine Rangliste. Und eine Rangliste menschlicher Katastrophen stellt unweigerlich eine Frage, die in keinem Sitzungssaal laut ausgesprochen wurde, die aber jeder im Raum hörte: Ist der Sklavenhandel schlimmer als der Holocaust?Und darf man das überhaupt fragen? I. Frankl und Benjamin waren Juden Ich habe in den letzten Tagen über Viktor Frankl und Walter Benjamin geschrieben — zwei jüdische Intellektuelle aus dem deutschen Sprachraum, beide Opfer desselben Vernichtungsapparats, beide Zeugen der absoluten Grenze menschlicher Barbarei. Frankl überlebte Auschwitz. Benjamin starb auf der Flucht an der spanischen Grenze, in Port Bou, in der Nacht des 25. September 1940. Israel stimmte gestern mit Nein. Das ist kein Zufall. Der israelische Delegierte las denselben Subtext, den jeder aufmerksame Beobachter las: Die Formulierung schwerste Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit ist eine implizite Hierarchisierung. Und diese Hierarchie positioniert den…

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