CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

What's the evolutionary advantage?

[Chad]

Grandparental involvement in child care?

[Mick Harper]

A depressed grandparent more likely to sign up, you mean? Speaking as a parent myself I'm not sure I would sign off on that one. Although, speaking as a non-parent myself, I was in surprisingly great demand as a baby-sitter.

[Chad]

“Listen luv, me and the lads are off out, to do a bit of mammoth hunting. While I’m gone, you can tell them miserable old sods, if they want feeding when I get back, they can help keep all these little buggers out of mischief... you never know, it might actually cheer them up a bit.”

[Mick Harper]

It always seemed to me that my popularity in this role was not primarily because of my suitability in loco parentis but because I came free.

[Mick Harper]

The bonds of friendship made with the young 'uns stretched long into adulthood and indeed, for the most part, exist to this day. Though obviously we've had to knock the sex on the head.

[Mick Harper]

It's the summer of '39 and poor old Adolf is juggling Poland, England and Soviet Russia plus having a country to run (three countries by this stage) when in bursts Magda (Goebbels) who promptly bursts into tears and confesses that she's been having it off with the Permanent Secretary at the Min of Prop even though not three months before she and Joseph had agreed to give it a go thanks to his (Adolf's) patient family therapy. "Ach, mein liebchen," says Adolf, "do you really want der No 2?" but cuts Joseph out of the war planning because he really does not want to get involved.

Meanwhile up in Berlin (this is all happening at Berchtesgaden where Adolf has gone to recharge his batteries after a particularly draining season of Wagner, indeed with Frau Wagner, at Bayreuth) Joseph is distraught because the love of his life, a twenty-one year-old Czech actress, wants to go home but can't because Prague is now part of Germany. He doesn't get the memo about Danzig and Polish atrocity stories are still being restricted to two columns but unflattering pictures of his rival Herman in fancy uniforms, which Joseph knows Adolf hates, can be given front page treatment which in turn leads the British ambassador in Berlin to write a dispatch...

[Mick Harper]

It was the first birthday of the dear-departed (if you see what I mean) and the widow-and-kids threw a party to celebrate it/get through it. It was just like any other drinks-and-quiche gathering except for a ten minute lachrymose thank-you-all-for-coming interval. After my barnstormer at the wake, the widow turned to me and said, “Have you anything to add, Mick?”
“... er ... not really,” I said, not being a natural off-the-cuff performer. “Anyway I forgot my onion.” (ragged laughter)
“Someone start singing Dolly Parton, that usually sets him off.” (ragged laughter)
“Tell them the duck story,” prompted the widow.
“...er... well, I was looking over these mudflats in Anglesey one night when I heard a cry of “Mick! Mick!” and I thought it was Tom reincarnated as a duck wanting to give me a message for Annie and the kids.” (ragged laughter)
“Tell them how you followed it down the road in the dark,” prompted the widow.
I had clean forgotten. My stories tend to have alternative versions and it's hard to keep up. “... er... I wanted to have sex with it...” I extemporised wildly.
Cries of ‘That’s disgusting’, ‘Honestly!’, ‘Quite inappropriate’ etc etc.
I had to recapture my audience. “Not at all. I thought it was Tom, remember?” (ragged laughter)
“Another slice of quiche, anybody?”
Modern life keeps presenting one with unfamiliar situations.

[Mick Harper]

This Week's Guardian Instructions (in order of urgency)

Don't Allow the Right to Use Child Refugees as Scapegoats (Rachel Shabi)
There are Fewer Jobs - But Don't Blame the Robots (Aaron Benanav)
Without the BBC We Could be Facing a Post-Truth Dystopia (Jonathan Freedland)

These are the headlines on a single page of the Op Ed section. I just noticed they were all by Jews though I'm guessing Aaron Benanav is an Israeli which doesn't count. What does it all mean? That I should stop getting the Saturday Guardian. Yes, but apart from that.

[Mick Harper]

I'm a bit of a recluse and I don't have many friends but if I ever feel the need to chat to one of them I just have to get into the bath. Even going to the toilet can do the trick on occasion. When, O when, are we going to have bathcam installed as standard en suite so we can avoid these infuriating clashes?

[Mick Harper]

Goebbels really had fallen out of intimacy with Hitler because of the Magda imbroglio and this really did play a part in why we are not speaking German today.

In 1940-1 there was the question of who was going to control propaganda in eastern Europe preparatory to Barbarossa. Technically it ought to have been between Goebbels (as Minister of Propaganda) and Ribbentrop (as Foreign Minister). Since Ribbentrop was responsible for the Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact and its renewals right up until June 1941, he was unsuited, and with Goebbels out of favour, Hitler turned to Alfred Rosenberg, at this time the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories (i.e. Poland) but before that the editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party newspaper.

Rosenberg was no more anti-Semitic and anti-Slav than Goebbels (i.e. virulently) but they were different in that one was led by his ideology and the other wanted his ideology to succeed. It’s a vital distinction....

[Mick Harper]

Hitler took the view that the Soviet Union would collapse like a house of cards as soon as you kicked in the door. And he was right. We think of the USSR as monolithic today but in 1940 it was far from it. The three Baltic Republics had just been traumatically annexed, the Ukraine had just suffered millions dying from a Soviet-induced famine, and the Russians themselves had every reason to hate the regime from the abolition of their religion to consumer goods figuring a long way behind re-armament and heavy industry in the latest five year plan. Plus the Cheka made everyone sigh for the good old days of the Okhrana.

No wonder the Germans were greeted with bread and salt ceremonies every time they approached a village in the USSR. Goebbels kept writing Hitler memos to make sure this carried right on until they reached the Volga and could then turn round and tell everyone, “Oh, by the way, it’s brown bread and salt time.” No, Rosenberg insisted it had to be a war of annihilation from day one and the poor old citizens of the Soviet Union had no alternative but to fight to the last (Ger)man.

[Mick Harper]

I don't want to appear too pro-David Irving but the policy of killing Jews on an industrial scale was started by the Baltic Republics not by Germany (who were 'merely' relocating them). Goebbels' diaries make it clear that genocide simply wan't contemplated by the Nazis at this time no matter how much everything else was. I find this relatively comforting about the human condition.

When Stalin occupied the Baltic Republics in 1939 the Soviets relocated/ killed the local intelligentsia on an industrial scale. Soviet Baltic State specialists were mainly Jewish. When the Nazis 'liberated' the Baltic states in 1941 the locals started relocating/ killing Jews on an industrial scale in, as they saw it, reprisal. A pattern that was to be repeated, at a much lower level, in Hungary in 1956.

[Mick Harper]

Stalin did put one over on Goebbels. The rather ponderous German news broadcasts used to pause between items to emphasise the gravity of it all, so the Russians built a transmitter on the same frequency and started making satirical comments on what had just been said. Goebbels had to order the pauses to cease. So the Russians would start barking stuff in between sentences. So Goebbels ordered these pauses to cease. But such is the German language, with the verb at the end and complex and novel portmanteau nouns (especially in wartime) that it just can't be hurried. More Soviet ribald interjections. In the end the poor old German newsreaders were gabbling in a most unseemly manner.

PS The British were much more sporting. They only broke into the air defence channels to give fake directions to German aircraft so the Luftwaffe were reduced to interrupting programmes on the main broadcasting channels (which were too powerful for the British to jam) to tell their fighters where to go.

PPS It was during the war that the British started introducing their newsreaders by name -- it had been considered too populist to do this previously -- in case the Germans started to fake BBC bulletins. However, consternation was caused one night when Wilfred Pickles was chosen to read the main six o'clock news. That's not an English name and that's not an English accent.

[Mick Harper]

Our abiding image of Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews is a mix of disorganised mass killings (like Babi Yar) and very organised mass killings (like Auschwitz) with mass dying by neglect (in ghettos and work camps) continuing in the background. The change from chaos to order, if that is the right word, is generally held to have taken place at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. But Goebbels Diaries remind us that even the Nazis had to operate in a Rechsstaat of sorts