Tag: Germany

  • Dark Humor/American Collapse

    Collapse, a word for the wordless. No laughter here, only the echo of a joke lost in the static. Soviet black, French absinthe green, Spanish crimson – these were the hues of humor, once. Now, the palette is gray, the canvas smeared with the fingerprints of empire. Vonnegut, Pynchon, high-rise clowns juggling fire in a burning circus. We are the ground floor,the crushed and trampled, the dirt beneath their manicured…

  • From the River to the Sea

    A low murmur, a tremor of unease, rippled through the labyrinthine corridors of the Ministry of Justice. A new proclamation, its ink barely dry, hung heavy in the air. The pronouncement, issued with the utmost bureaucratic gravity, declared the phrase “generic sentence” a criminal offense. Yet, a disquieting dissonance echoed within the very pronouncement itself.…

  • Bismarck

    Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was a man marinated in vice. Wine, a crimson serpent, coiled around his mornings, slithered through lunch, and tightened its grip at dinner. Beer, a frothy trollop yeasty serpent, slithered down his gullet between courses, leaving a trail of burps that could curdle milk. And cigarettes, glowing embers of…