The German identity card lists the holder’s name, date of birth, address and a few other facts. Section 5 of the Identity Card Act also lists the Doktorgrad, the doctoral degree. A doctorate is the only academic qualification that can appear on the card, whatever job the holder does.
Everything You Must Know
In 1999 the literary scholar Dietrich Schwanitz published Bildung. Alles, was man wissen muß, Education: everything you must know. The book reached number one on the Spiegel bestseller list in 2000. One sentence drew sharp criticism: Naturwissenschaftliche Kenntnisse müssen zwar nicht versteckt werden, aber zur Bildung gehören sie nicht. “Knowledge of the natural sciences need not be hidden, but it is not part of education.” In 2001 the science historian Ernst Peter Fischer answered with a book of his own, Die andere Bildung, the other education.
The Educated Middle Class
German has a name for a social class whose rank rested on what it knew: the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle class. German Wikipedia describes it as an influential class defined neither politically nor economically, but by administration and culture. Its members included pastors, professors, teachers, doctors, lawyers, judges and senior civil servants. In these circles, the article says, the possession of knowledge counted as capital.
The Poison Cabinet
German libraries call their restricted holdings the Giftschrank, the poison cabinet, after the locked cupboard for poisons in a pharmacy. These are books that are not open to all readers. In East Germany, the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig decided centrally which books were restricted. They appeared in the catalog, marked with an inconspicuous triangle, and were available only under special conditions. After 1990, most of these holdings were opened and moved into the general collections.
The Reading Room
From 1 February 2016, members of the Bundestag could read the confidential negotiating texts of the TTIP trade agreement between the EU and the United States in a reading room in the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs. The Green parliamentary group described the conditions in a parliamentary question. Members were not allowed even to discuss what they had read with their own staff or with experts. Staff of the parliamentary groups were not admitted.
Four Weeks Ahead
Members of the Bundestag can commission studies from the parliament’s research service, the Wissenschaftliche Dienste. The study then belongs to the member or committee that ordered it, as a rule exclusively for four weeks. Only afterward does the Bundestag publish it on its website, a practice it began in 2016. Before that, they were not routinely published. In June 2015 the Federal Administrative Court ruled that they must be released on request. One of the cases concerned papers that Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had used in his doctoral thesis.
“Comrades, We Must Know Everything”
Genossen, wir müssen alles wissen! “Comrades, we must know everything!” That, according to the German Federal Archives, is what Erich Mielke, East Germany’s minister for state security, once ordered his staff. The Archives used the sentence as the title of a reader on everyday life in the GDR, published in 2014. The Stasi records it holds today run to more than 111 kilometers of files, plus more than 1.7 million photos, and cover all areas of public and private life.
Siegfried’s Weak Spot
In the Nibelungenlied, the medieval epic written around 1200, the hero Siegfried bathed in dragon’s blood and cannot be wounded, except for one spot on his back where a linden leaf lay. His enemy Hagen gets his wife Kriemhild to tell him where the spot is. He asks her to mark it on Siegfried’s clothing with a small cross, so that he can protect him in battle. With that knowledge Hagen kills Siegfried from behind with his own spear.
Rumpelstilzchen
German children learn the verse from the Grimm fairy tale Rumpelstilzchen, number 55 in their collection. The little man dances around a fire in the forest and sings: Ach, wie gut ist, dass niemand weiß, dass ich Rumpelstilzchen heiß! “Oh, how good that nobody knows that Rumpelstilzchen is my name!” His power over the queen lasts only as long as his name is his alone. A messenger overhears the verse in the forest, and the queen says the name. The little man cries out that the devil told her.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Wer wird Millionär? has run on German television since 3 September 1999, with Günther Jauch as host from the first show. The first contestant to win the top prize of one million marks, on 2 December 2000, was Eckhard Freise, a professor of medieval history. Public television has its own quiz shows. Wer weiß denn sowas?, “Who knows something like that?”, reached 4.64 million viewers on Das Erste in February 2018. In Gefragt – Gejagt, contestants play against professional quiz players called the hunters.