Talk:Germany/Archive 2

message: I think the history section is far, far too long. It should be a brief summary of German history, with the details given in History of Germany. Any other votes for condensing it to two or three moderately-sized paragraphs? —Bkell 09:33, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow. Completely removing the entire history section was a bit more drastic than what I had in mind. —Bkell 06:33, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I have now made a shorter version of the history section. Elizabeth A 22:30, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Shorter history section

message: I am astonished by the recently made downgrading of figures for muslims and orthodox christians in Germany. Would it maybe be appropriate to insert references (inside [...]) to something like official statistics?
Meanwhile I restore the old figures, but please understand that I do this without having any knwoledge myself, mainly in order to provoke someone else to point us to the relevant and correct data. /Tuomas 14:59, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of muslims and orthodox christians 

message: Any chance of firming up this sentence: His [Hitler's] policy of annexing neighbouring territories may have been one of several reasons that led to the outbreak of World War II...? Why not "was one of several reasons"? — Matt 03:45, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deweaslification? 

message: In "History" I have changed the sentence
"(East Germany, in West Germany referred to as Middle Germany)"
because normally the average (Western) German said "East Germany" when the German Democratic Republic was meant. There were (and are) some people which are referring these regions as Middle Germany, but these are the persons which a propagating revisionism in fact of the Oder-Neisse-line (and they are a very small minority). Erlando 22:40, 19 Sep 2004 (CEST)
:: Mitteldeutschland means the landscape, see also MDR=mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Central german broadcasting), "der Osten" the former GDR. Osten means simply east. Mitteldeutschland means Central Germany, so it sounds more euphemistic while Germans usually associate Easterness with decivilisation  Western (= Western Europe, USA, "free world"), east = Russia, Former Eastern Block, Far East, the Huns.
It has nothing to do with the Oder-Neisse Line. Eastern is pejorative, so you rahter take Mitteldeutschland = Core/Central Germany, this is what the region traditionally was called, "der Osten" is more a propaganda phrase from the cold war and I guess it is more common in Western Germany while Mitteldeutschland is more common in the "eastern part". So the statement is in deed wrong, as it is quite the opposite.  --145.254.160.195 14:17, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  East Germany? 

message: IMPOV the statement that reunification costs more than 1.5 trillion Euro shouldn't be included without explanation. This figure was critisised heavily on the ground that it just adds up all public payments to the eastern part of Germany, without taking into account that people of the new länder contribute to the funding with their tax payments as well (thus net costs are lower than the number indicated). Another reason why some (including the German minister of finance Stolpe) critisised this figure was that investment in infrastructure (although assumably higher in the east) does also take place in the western part of Germany. Those costs are not attributed to reunification either. Stolpe argues that "pure" reunification costs amount to 15 billion euro a year (in the period between 1990 to 2003). Gugganij 20:38, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Costs of reunification 

message: Someone time and again deletes the phrase about the Holocaust from this article, claiming this is POV. The Holocaust - POV! If this continues I will put a 'disputed' message above this page and ask to take action against vandalism on this page. Why must the Holocaust - in which much of my family was murdered - be omitted from German history? It is after all one of the central events in WOII and German history. Gidonb 22:24, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Since this behavior is continued - before it was done without making clear what was deleted, now under the edit summary "rv pov pusher" - I have put a pov warning above the page. Gidonb 22:27, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I have reverted the vandalism, so there will be no pov message above this article. I understand that user Maria Stella's main activity on Wikipedia is deleting the Holocaust from the article Germany (see user contributions). I hope that this article remains without a pov warning and that negative facts from Germany's history will not be ommitted. There are enough positive facts about the country from 1945 to the present. Without the Holocaust this page will be unbalanced. Gidonb 22:42, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Not a question of balance - a question of fact and notability. Clearly should be in there. Rd232 16:56, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Both answers are correct. Until today even having the Holocaust in here seemed contested (see previous discussions). After I introduced it, time and again it is being deleted, transferred to aftermath or the proprietors are being changed from Germans to Nazis, and the country name from Germany to Nazi Germany. Not because of hard feelings but out of respect to my murdered and otherwise negatively affected family, and the millions and millions of Jews, disabled people, homosexuals, Roma and others, who were left defenseless as against the German brutalities, I will continue to make sure that these very central facts in Germany's history do not get erased from German history again. gidonb 00:54, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: It has been pointed out again and again that the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and WWII are all extensively covered on the pages of the Wikipedia, a fact that User:Gidonb somehow chooses to ignore. It's a vain undertaking trying to represent German history in its complexity through a couple of more or less arbitrarily chosen images of Nazi camp mass graves and heroic American liberators. The image of the Reichsgründung can therefore be nothing more than an introducing image to the article's History section. If you want to see more images of Nazi cruelty and of brave GI Joe, you'll have to follow the links to the respective articles on the Third Reich and the war. And yes, you do need to make a subtle distinction between "Germany" on the one hand and "the Nazis" on the other, in order to avoid simplistic allegations of German collective guilt. Personally I wouldn't even dream of adding images of slavery in the US southern states, of massacres of native Indians committed by white settlers during the colonization of North America, of Hiroshima victims and of Vietnamese children scarred by napalm bombs to the United States article, because (a) I wouldn't want to offend the feelings of my fellow American Wikipedians, and (b) I'm far from being the rude insensitive boor as which User:Gidonb has presented himself. Heimdal 11:45, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Holocaust denial?

message: I think there is a mistake in de "infobox Germany" because - as far as I know - Bonn ("Bundesstadt Bonn" = "Federal City/Town Bonn")  is still also seat of government. There are more federal offices and workers in Bonn than in the new capital Berlin. And a lot of embassies are also still in Bonn.
: Bonn is still the first seat of the Department of Defense (Bundesverteidigungsministerium) which is part of the government. --Pixelfire 07:37, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: But the infobox says "capital" - can a country have two capitals? On the official German site there's no mention of Bonn: www.deutschland.de  Saintswithin 12:44, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Berlin is capital of Germany. There was a short period after the reunification, when Berlin was declared capial, but the government in fact was still situated in Bonn. This was because the infrastucture and facilities needed for the government to actually move to Berlin first had to be build and established first. But until now, almost all of the important parts of the government like the Bundestag (parliament), the Bundeskanzleramt and most of the ministeries are situated in Berlin. Some lesser organisations of government remained in Bonn mainly because it would have been a massive blow to the local economy if they where entirely removed - and maybe because of the high costs for moving. But nevertheless Berlin is the only capital.--80.135.241.129 14:33, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bonn also seat of government 

message: Just in case, the sources for the number of victims are  and  (BSE). Paranoid 02:42, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Victims - references