Dalrymple’s Diaries Part II

by Theodore Dalrymple  (Feb. 2006)

The most famous object in Colmar is the Issenheim Altarpiece, painted by someone the world knows as Matthias Grunewald, though whether anyone of that surname ever actually existed is doubtful. The altarpiece has had a colourful history, having been shifted hither and thither in the last century and a half as a pawn in the cultural politics of France and Germany in their struggle over the ownership of Alsace.

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  – or what Afrikaners, in the days of apartheid, used to call, with regard to the blacks rioting in the townships, ‘fouling their own nest.’ ‘So you think it would be better I they came and rioted in your area, do you?’ I asked her. Needless to say, this was not a question deemed worthy of an answer. She had said what she said only to establish the depth of her own compassion, not to enunciate a truth.)

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In the hotel, which is named after Colbert, the man who first centralised the French state and economy, and who is still regarded as a hero in France for having done so, leaving a legacy that continues, we met a unique man: a Swiss who was domiciled in France for tax reasons.

Presumably, he was dissatisfied with low taxes and wanted to pay higher ones. There is no end to the oddness of humanity. I once had a patient who injected herself with blood that she took from an HIV positive friend of hers. She wanted the illness, too: why should her friend have all the attention?

We cross to Germany. This border, that once gave the world so much trouble, has now ceased to exist. We simply put our car on a little ferry that criss-crosses the Rhine, and drive off at the other bank. There is not a uniform in sight, and we show not so much as a piece of paper

 

What is it all for? Perhaps further growth will give the Germans more choice. But choice of what? Sausages? They already have plenty. Television programmes? They have plenty of those too. Maybe they will have to work less hard, so that they can enjoy life instead: but this seems to me a little like the promise of the paperless office that technology was supposed to bring about. There has never been so much paper and paperwork.

Well, growth of the right sort might mean that there was less rather than more traffic, less rather than more physical hardware to cart around. Personally, I rather doubt it. I am reminded of the story of the Indian civil servant whose desk was piled high with files that were so old than no one ever looked at them, or ever would look at them. They were cluttering up the office terribly, and he asked his boss whether he could throw them away.

    

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