A Bit More Detail

The Deutsche Welle article’s simple title of “East Germany relied on forced labour” has the signal flaw of seeming to communicate conventional wisdom when, in fact, it’s communicating something come new to public attention: East Germany made use of forced labour to produce goods which could earn hard currency. It’s interesting to note that East Germany, arguably the most developed economy of Soviet-bloc Europe, eagerly entered into the sorts of trade relationships with Western countries–low-end manufactures and agricultural exports–which would be typical of more peripheral countries. Also, that East Germany took part in globalization to such an extent, images of autarky aside.

The allegations against furniture maker Ikea that East German laborers for years toiled for the Swedish group started the ball rolling. On May 2, the Swedish television network SVT broadcast a report that gave former prisoners in East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic, a chance to speak. They said that up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, Ikea furniture was made in East German jails, including by political prisoners. It was forced labor in East Germany for a Western company. This was not an isolated case, but a common practice from which many West German companies also benefited. All prisoners in East Germany were obliged to work.

“Prisoners were made to do the hardest and dirtiest work, the work that nobody else wanted to do, under the worst conditions,” said Steffen Alisch of Forschungsverbund SED-Staat, a research institute at the Free University of Berlin that investigates East Germany. He says threatening letters about forced labor were sent to Ikea as early as 1984.

[. . .]

What is known is that forced labor was a fixture of the business plan of the GDR. In the mid-1980s, it was estimated that there were around 20,000 in prison. The prisoners represented “only” one percent of industrial production, but the government “didn’t want to do without it,” said Hildigund Neubert, who is in charge of Stasi files in the state of Thuringia, in an interview with DW. “When amnesties were granted on the GDR’s national day, there were complaints from the ministries. They were afraid that without these workers, the economic plan could not be fulfilled.”

For their work, the prisoners were given only a pittance. But Neubert says the responsibilities of individual Western firms are difficult to determine. He thinks it would therefore be a welcome move if the companies that profited from the dirty business of the slave laborers compensated by making donations to foundations in restitution.

It was common knowledge that Western goods were produced in the GDR. But the people in both German states knew only part of the story. Western companies benefited from the low wages in the GDR, while the West German government had a political interest in trade relations in pursuit of its policy of “change through rapprochement.”

East Germany saw exports to the West as an opportunity to obtain the hard currency it increasingly needed. It had cooperation agreements with Sweden and Japan. “With [West] Germany, that would have been impossible,” said Maria Haendcke-Hoppe-Arndt, an economist and former employee of the Stasi documentation authorities. East Germany wanted to avoid any official connection with West Germany.

[. . .]

“But there were still arrangements as to who should provide what and how,” said journalist Anne Worst, who made “Eastern Products for the West,” a comprehensive television documentary for German public broadcaster MDR. “An important meeting place was the Leipzig Trade Fair. There were plenty of salespeople.”

Worst’s research shows that 6,000 West German companies did business with the GDR. Among them were companies such as catalog merchants Quelle and Neckermann, shoe maker Salamander and cosmetics firm Beiersdorf, but also less-well-known firms such as battery maker Varta and spirits maker Underberg. As long as the Soviet Union supplied the fraternal socialist country with cheap oil, East Germany’s exports of petroleum products were abundant, as were the exports of chemicals, machinery and textiles.

[. . .]

While textiles were the best-known export item from the GDR, they were by no means the most common, Worst said: “The GDR delivered an incredible number of foods to the West, whole sides of pork, fruit and vegetables, which were also partly in short supply in the GDR. When it came to fresh food, all of West Berlin was dependent on supplies from the GDR.”

Bruce Sterling linked to this interesting post at Library of Congress digital preservation blog The Signal by Bill LeFurgy about the dubious prospects facing floppy disks. This storage medium, it turns out, is quite fragile.

Damn. Are the disks at home all pointless? (The same goes, only more so, for my Commodore 64 disks: older and using defunct formats.)

Floppy disks are both a bane and a blessing to digital preservationists. The blessing part centers on their potential for providing digital details from the past, especially from the period before widespread use of the internet to disseminate information. Depending on who used them for what they might contain significant literary manuscripts, rare data sets, revealing presentations or perhaps important family information. In any event, it’s quite possible that whatever is on a floppy is unique.

Bane comes into the picture for just about everything else. Disks may not, for example, have labels or any other clear way to identify their origin or their content. A box of unidentified disks is about as human understandable as a box of rocks. Determining what is on the disks requires very specific computer hardware that likely went obsolete years ago. You’ll need a specialty disk drive with a specialty controller that may or may not work with a modern computer. For that purpose you may need to acquire something like a Catweasel (the computer device, as distinct from the children’s TV show or the pro-wrestler). Or you might have to buy some vintage computer hardware and hope it still works.

The crux of the matter comes down to how good a job a disk has done in retaining the bits entrusted to it. Often the results are unhappy. As one writer notes, “if you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-dependable storehouse are over.” That’s because the disks are fragile constructions that were never designed for permanence. The Florida Division of Library and Information Services describes how the binder glue that is used to hold magnetic particles on a disk can be easily damaged from high levels of heat and humidity. “It can become soft and sticky, or it can become quite brittle… brittle binder flakes off the plastic base, taking the magnetic particles (and thus the information recorded on the particles) with it.” In other words, disks can and do fail with alarming regularity.

Far Outliers’ Joel has recently posted two excerpts from the recent Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, implicitly contrasting the nature of the two polities–the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon–that united to form Spain. Aragon was Mediterranean, mercantile, constitutional; Castile was none of these things.

First, a representative paragraph on Castile.

The Reconquista was not one but many things. It was at once a crusade against the infidel, a succession of military expeditions in search of plunder, and a popular migration. All these three aspects of the Reconquista stamped themselves forcefully on the forms o Castilian life. In a holy war against Islam, the priests naturally enjoyed a privileged position. It was their task to arouse and sustain the fervour of the populace – to impress upon them their divinely appointed mission to free the country of the Moors. As a result, the Church possessed an especially powerful hold over the medieval Castile; and the particular brand of militant Christianity which it propagated was enshrined in the three Military Orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Santiago – three great creations of the twelfth century, combining at once military and religious ideals. But while the crusading ideal gave Castilian warriors their sense of participating in a holy mission as soldiers of the Faith, it could not eliminate the more mundane instincts which had inspired the earliest expeditions against the Arabs, and which were prompted by the thirst for booty. In those first campaigns, the Castilian noble confirmed to his own entire satisfaction that true wealth consisted essentially of booty and land. Moreover, his highest admiration came to be reserved for the military virtues of courage and honour. In this way was established the concept of the perfect hidalgo, as a man who lived for war, who could do the impossible through sheer physical courage and a constant effort of the will, who conducted his relations with others according to a strictly regulated code of honour, and who reserved his respect for the man who had won riches by force of arms rather than by the sweat of manual labour. This ideal of hidalguía was essentially aristocratic, but circumstances conspired to diffuse it throughout Castilian society, for the very character of the Reconquista as a southwards migration in the wake of the conquering armies encouraged a popular contempt for sedentary life and fixed wealth, and thus imbued the populace with ideals similar to those of the aristocracy.

Next, one on Aragon.

It was typical of the medieval Catalans that their pride in their constitutional achievements should naturally prompt them to export their institutional forms to any territories they acquired. Both Sardinia (its conquest begun in 1323) and Sicily (which had offered the Crown to Peter III of Aragon in 1282) possessed their own parliaments, which borrowed extensively from the Catalan-Aragonese model. Consequently, the medieval empire of the Crown of Aragon was far from being an authoritarian empire, ruled with an iron hand from Barcelona. On the contrary, it was a loose federation of territories, each with its own laws and institutions, and each voting independently the subsidies requested by its king. In this confederation of semi-autonomous provinces, monarchical authority was represented by a figure who was to play a vital part in the life of the future Spanish Empire. This figure was the viceroy, who had made his first appearance in the Catalan Duchy of Athens in the fourteenth century, when the duke appointed as his representative a vicarius generalis or viceregens. The viceroyalty – an office which was often, but not invariably, limited to tenures of three years – proved to be a brilliant solution to one of the most difficult problems created by the Catalan-Aragonese constitutional system: the problem of royal absenteeism. Since each part of the federation survived as an independent unit, and the King could only be present in one of these units at a given time, he would appoint in Majorca or Sardinia or Sicily a personal substitute or alter ego, who as viceroy would at once carry out his orders and preside over the country’s government. In this way the territories of the federation were loosely held together, and their contacts with the ruling house of Aragon preserved.

The contrast may exaggerate the differences between the two polities, but difference there actually was. Arguably modern Catalonian nationalism is one of the more notable consequences of the difference.

Over at The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer performs some pretty nice local history in three parts (1, 2, 3), using results from the 1940 census to see just who lived in his childhood neighbourhood of New York City’s East Harlem, and how.

414 East 115th Street then, like now, had five families in it. The first listed is the Squittieri clan. Dominick and Geneviene had been born in Italy in 1888 and 1890 respectively. Dominick ran a grocery store and worked a 60-hour week to earn $1300 per year — $20,800 in 2011 dollars. They rented for $35 a month, or $561 in 2011 dollars. Dominick was listed as having had two years of schooling; his wife had never been to school at all. They lived with their ten children: Carmine, 24; Alphonse, 23; James, 22; Helen, 20; Yolanda, 18; John, 17; Mary, 16; Domenick Jr., 15; Louise, 12; and Gilda, 10.

You can see the lingering effect of the Depression in the statistics. Carmine worked as a painter (a 48-hour work week) for $1190 a year — $19,100 in 2011 dollars. Alphonse was not in the labor force. It isn’t completely clear why: there is a squiggle that is probably an “H,” meaning he was doing “housework.” It could, however, be a “U,” which would indicate “unable,” meaning a disability. He was not a student. His sister, Helen, was also out of the labor force and clearly listed as doing “housework.”

James, Yolanda, and John were unemployed and looking for work. The enumerator put “new worker” as their profession. All three had been unemployed for over a year. Carmine, Alphonse, James, Helen and Yolanda had all dropped out of school in the eighth grade; John had finished one year of high school before dropping out. The four youngest children were all in school.

Of course, it was a different time. I do not know what happened to the Squittieri family, but I bet you they went on to economic success — something that a Mexican-American family with the same statistics today will probably not achieve. But I don’t know: in 2022, it might be possible to try to track them down in the 1950 census.

Amply illustrated, this genealogy of place is a must-read.

Jon Trumbo’s Tri-City Herald article chronicling a Japanese enthusiast’s efforts to document the possibility of prehistoric migration between Japan and the United States, inspired by the controversial Paleo-Indian remains of Kennewick Man and claims of Jomon/proto-Ainu influence across the Pacific, is an interesting artifact.

(Myself I suspect that most migrations that took place between five and ten thousand years ago aren’t at all likely to ever be connected to surmised cultures, but hey.)

By week’s end, Ryota Yamada hopes to slip his sea kayak gently into the Columbia River at Clover Island, embarking on the first leg of a 10,000-mile adventure to Japan.

The retired scientist who did nanotechnological research intends to paddle downriver to the ocean, then via the Inland Passage north to Alaska, and eventually across the Bering Strait to the Asian continent.

It will take him four summers, but if he succeeds in reaching his homeland, Yamada said, he will have shown that Kennewick Man could have made his way by boat 9,300 years ago from Japan to North America.

“That is my main purpose,” he said Monday from his temporary camp on Clover Island in downtown Kennewick.

The 42-year-old Japanese native who lives near Tokyo said the story of Kennewick Man, whose skeletal remains were found on the shores of the Columbia River near Kennewick in July 1996, inspired him to attempt the adventure of a lifetime.

[. . .]

Kennewick Man’s bones, which are being held for research at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum in Seattle, are controversial.

While the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Nation believe Kennewick Man is one of their ancestors, researchers believe the ancient bones are not Native American in origin, but may be genetically linked to the Ainu people, who have lived in Japan for thousands of years and appear to have a genetic link to Northern Europe.

A professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, C. Loring Brace, told the Herald in a 2006 interview that Kennewick Man’s heritage likely connected with the Ainu of Japan, or the Jomon people, who were ancestors of the Ainu.

[. . .]

Yamada said he has been collecting the necessary equipment for his trip since arriving in Washington. He used a rental car to go to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he purchased a new sea kayak that is about 20 feet long and weighs barely 20 pounds.

It will take Yamada about four summers to complete the journey, paddling about 2,500 miles on each leg. He expects to get as far as Whitehorse in British Columbia this summer, including a side trip of about 50 miles up the Yukon River.

The latest installment of the story of John Cabot, the Italian explorer in service to the English Crown who made the first documented trips to what is now Canada–likely Newfoundland–made the narrative all the more interesting. The suggestion that Cabot was drawing Bristol seafarers’ recently-acquired knowledge of lands on the other side of the Atlantic sounds plausible, to be sure–the Grand Banks, with their once-rich cod fisheries, may have attracted fishermen from western Europe from as early as the mid-15th century.

The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears from the historical record after his return voyage to North America in 1498, and is generally presumed to have perished during that expedition.

[. . .] University of Florence history Prof. Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, working closely with two British researchers and funded largely by a Canadian benefactor, has now pieced together the full story of Cabot’s Italian financing and published his findings in the scholarly journal Historical Research.

At the heart of Guidi-Bruscoli’s discovery is a long-overlooked accountant’s notation in records held by a Florentine archive detailing a loan of “nobili 50″ – 50 nobles sterling or about 16 English pounds – to “Giovanni Chabotte vini-ziano” (John Cabot of Venice) “a trovare il nuovo paese” (to find the new land).

Historians have traditionally described the sailor’s voyages, despite Cabot’s Italian heritage, as a purely English enterprise. But “despite the brevity of the entry” in the record book maintained by the Bardi banking family of Florence, “it opens a whole new chapter in Cabot scholarship, introducing an unexpected Europe-an dimension and posing new questions for the field,” Guidi-Bruscoli writes.

Among the questions posed are two particularly significant ones: Did Cabot already know about “the land” he was supposedly setting off to find? And is it possible that other sailors from England, where Cabot had moved to pursue his dream of overseas exploration, had previously visited “the new land” of North America – perhaps even before Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean Islands in 1492 and that epoch-making “discovery” of the New World?

Remarkably, the answer to both questions may be yes, says University of Bristol historian Evan Jones, one of the British scholars working with Guidi-Bruscoli and founder of the Cabot Project research initiative, funded in large part by Canadian philanthropist Gretchen Bauta of the Weston family retail dynasty.

The clue, says Jones, is the ledger’s reference to Cabot’s goal being “the” new land rather than the indefinite “a” or some other less precise phrasing.

“I think we can be pretty certain that ‘the new land’ doesn’t refer to the land Columbus had found – given that the royal patent Cabot was granted was pretty clear about excluding these territories,” said Jones. “So, I think the reference must indicate that the Bardi believed that Cabot was going off to discover/rediscover a land already known about. The use of ‘new’ suggests it was a land which had been found relatively recently – so this can’t be a reference to the Norse voyages.”

• Daniel Drezner outlines what’s known to have happened and what’s likely to have happened with Bo Xilai. Brief version? Bo Xilai’s Maoism nearly disrupted the decade’s-end transition in power in China.
• The Global Sociology Blog answers the question of where sociologists’ commentary on the global economic crisis is by pointing out that a lot of the groundwork on economic inequity has already been done. That, and institutional biases militating against in-depth examination in the context of tenure exists.
• This Lawyers, Guns and Money post arguing that there’s no radical Latin American left because Chavez et al aren’t engaged in complete revolutionary transformations of their societies is silly.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín defines the different segments of the sex industry in Spain.
• Patrick Cain maps the location of marijuana grow-ops in Toronto.
• At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir makes the depressing case that Assad is likely to stay in power in Syria for the next while.
• Steve Munro considers the question of what is to be down with the eastern waterfront of Toronto.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little categorizes the different ways in which historians have analyzed the history of China.

• A BCer in Toronto’s Jeff Jedras argues that the Liberal Party should try to become the party of federalists, inside Québec particularly.
• Centauri Dreams links to astudy suggesting that elliptical galaxies, older galaxies with less dust than our Milky Way, could still support planets and potential life.
• Geocurrents reports on the various problems–economic, environmental, political–facing the timber industtry in the Russian Far East.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen questions Ross Douthat’s arguments about the decline of religious practice and its imports in the United States by wondering how, given the social and economic changes of the post-war period, this could have been prevented.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes issue with a recent New York Times article on the sex trade in Spain. Unquestioned narratives are not good analysis.
• At Personal Reflections, Paul Belshaw considers definitions of the Enlightenment and civilization as seen from different places–West versus non-West, England versus Scotland–with links.
• Registan’s Nathan Hamm comments on the unseemly ties between Susan G. Komen Uzbekistan Race for the Cure, a breast cancer charity that recently featured in the American culture war, and various charities run by Gulnora Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan’s dictator.
• Torontoist’s Jamie Woo makes the point that Rob Ford’s disinterest in doing anything with Pride doesn’t speak to his being very up-to-date.
• Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy notes that the background of the emergent war between the Sudans over oil pipelines proves that clear property rights can diminish conflict.

io9′s Cyriaque Lamar has a delightful post up highlighting the fact that ridiculous cute cat pictures have a history long predating the Internet. Blame the invention of photography. He links to an essay about English photographer Harry Pointer’s sideline.

During the 1870s, the Brighton photographer Harry Pointer (1822-1889) became well known for a series of carte-de-visite photographs which featured his pet cats. Pointer began by taking conventional photographs of cats resting, drinking milk or sleeping in a basket, but from around 1870 he specialised in photographing cats in a variety of poses, placing his cats in settings that would create a humorous or appealing picture. Pointer often arranged his cats in unusual poses that mimicked human activities – a cat riding a tricycle, cats roller-skating and even a cat taking a photograph with a camera. Harry Pointer soon realised that even a relatively straight-forward cat photograph could be turned into an amusing or appealing image by adding a written caption. Pointer increased the commercial potential of his cat pictures by adding a written greeting such as “A Happy New Year” or “Very many happy returns of the day”. Purchasers sent the small cartes-de-visite as tiny greetings cards, thereby publicizing Pointer’s distinctive cat photographs. By 1872, Harry Pointer had created over one hundred different captioned images of cats. Harry Pointer’s series of cat photographs were collectively known as “The Brighton Cats”. The Photographic News reported that, by 1884, Pointer had published about two hundred pictures in “The Brighton Cats” series.

Kitty!

CTV reports on the commemoration, at the battlesite in France, of the 95th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The site of a Canadian military victory over the Germans in the First World War, the success of the Canadian offensive is frequently cited as one of the signal elements in the birth of a Canadian nationality.

I have some qualms about the battle’s role as a reference point–Is referencing a bloody First World War battle as key to nationhood a good thing to do? Can Vimy Ridge continue to serve as a reference point with all of Canada’s veterans dead? Given the opposition of French Canada to the war what does this imply?–but I don’t see any harm in the commemoration as such.

Thousands of Canadians gathered at the site of the Battle of Vimy Ridge Monday, to mark 95 years since the fight in northern France that some say was a turning point in forging Canada’s identity as an independent nation.

Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney joined 5,000 young Canadians for ceremonies at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, which overlooks the Douai Plain from the highest point of Vimy Ridge.

Blaney said he saw some students with tears in their eyes as they toured sites that were once trodden by soldiers from the four divisions of the Canadian Corps that launched their assault on this day in 1917.

“They are really carrying the sacrifice…we can see the emotion,” he told CTV News Channel in a phone interview from Vimy.

Standing on the Vimy monument’s terrace, it’s possible to look down at an expanse of fields and hills, places where Canadians battled and died. Blaney said visiting the spot was a life-changing experience.

“It’s not about the triumph, or only about victory. It’s about the loss of a young nation,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important.”

Canada lost 3,600 men in their bid to capture the ridge that French and British forces had already fought the two years prior to capture at a cost of some 100,000 lives.

It took four days of battle for Canada to seize control of the entire ridge.