The Mysterious Mr.Knaus

I suppose the first thing I noticed about Gerald Knaus, author of the "Merkel-plan" to make Syrian refugees legal via an exchange system with Turkey, was the fact that he frequently mentioned being an Oxford graduate. Not the fact, mind, that he attended the august university - why shouldn't he - clever chap that he undoubtedly is? No, it was more that  he kept on saying he had studied "in Oxford". I have never come across anybody saying that before. You study "at Oxford", certainly not in Oxford.

Which led me to cast a closer look at Mr. Knaus's CV in general. (Liberally shared btw, all over the internet - Mr. Knaus likes to lay open every step of his most adventurous life, and clearly enjoys talking about himself.) But before we do that here, let me tell  you about a the only "personal" exchange I had (via twitter) with him.

Curious as to his time "in Oxford" (and because we might have overlapped there) I asked him which college he had attended. His reply, and I quote verbatim : "The nicest, the one with the Olympic rower". Which of course left me as baffled, as when after this very amicable exchange, I was subsequently blocked by Mr. K. [1]

But let's look at what Mr Knaus is telling more illustrious people than me about his education. An interview he gave the Austrian station ORF provides us with interesting insights. Mr. Knaus tells the audience, he went up to Oxford in 1988 - bafflingly without having done his A-levels. He left school, he said, at age 17 and spent a year in Paris. Having been admitted to Oxford, he sits his A-levels independently, cramming "in cafés". And hey presto, an Oxford undergraduate is born. [2]

We have to pause here and ask how this is even financially possible. Mr. Knaus comes from an extremely modest background. His father was a railway employee.[3]  A scholarship is wellnigh imposssible - as an independent extern sitting A-levels out of context, he would probably not be on anybody's radar. OU offers scholarships, but as far as I know only British nationals are elegible. And here we have to mention a very embarrassing fact which would in any case weigh heavily against Mr. Knaus being offered an open scholarship form Oxford or any other British institution:

Even now, after years of training and speaking, his English is very very poor indeed. His pronunciation is abysmal - he still says "wiff" for example for "with". His vocabulary is restricted. And - most importantly - he cannot express himself well in written English. You can easily check this by looking at his published tweets - his twitter handle is @rumeliobserver. You'll see that some of his English tweets are difficult to make sense of. [4]

So when our man persuaded those Oxford dons to accept him as a fresh-faced 18-year old, his English cannot have been the main reason. Equally baffling as to how it was possible to write twice-weekly essays about a complicated topic. Knaus mentions he was part of the OU debating society, again - I would have loved to hear his contributions as it is hard to imagine that with his halting, faulty, and weirdly pronounced English, he will have made much of an impression.[5]

But hey ho, he managed it all, and by his own testimony - he even got a First!
After that impressive result, our hero dashed off to the Ukraine where he "taught macroeconomics and political economy at the State University of Chernivtsi" according to his own website.

Bafflingly, between the Vienna café cramming, the whirlwind Oxford tour and the Ukrainian lectureship, he also managed to fit in studies at Brussels University (Institut d'Etudes Européennes) and Bologna (John Hopkins University, Bologna Centre).[7]

Such a shame, that given the meticulousness with which he talks about his metereoric academic career, Mr. Knaus has never let anybody into the secret as to which Oxford College it was that he attended.


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Footnotes
[1] All of the rowing colleges, Christ Church, Oriel, St. Edmund Hall, Ballio, Magdalen would have a matriculated Olympic rower, especially bearing in mid there are also female rowers.
[2] ORF : "Der Mann hinter dem Merkel-Plan". ORF Sendungsreihe "Doppelzimmer", Ausstrahlung v. 25.5.2016.
[3] Metapedia, Eintrag: Knaus, Gerald
[4] Twitter/@rumeliobserver
[5] ORF interview, see above.
[6] www.rumeliobserver.eu

Twin Towns

I first heard about twin towns when the Dutch town where I went to school had a German twin called Alsfeld. I never went there, and there is probably not much to see but somehow the concept of a town having a "twin" in another country appealed to me.

Later on, another school, another town was twinned with Chateaudun in France, Motherwell in Scotland, and a Finnish town I can't remember the name of. But precisely this Finnish town exercised a real pull. Everybody who had access to a car drove up to Finland in the summer, and came back full of stories about gnats, lakes,wild camping and the glorious sunsets. It sounded terribly romantic, and many of my school mates moved to Finland, or came back with blond, good-looking girlfriends. It was "otherness" brought into the small world of a small town. In the winter we got an enormous Christmas tree for the market square from that Finnish town, and everybody gazed and imagined how cold it must be up there in Finland.

With Motherwell (now inexplicably called "North Lanarkshire", as if it was a region) a similarly lively exchange took place. People came to our school, and we learned that "Snickers" was a funny word, and "Anne" was pronounced "Unn".My best friend fell in love with a law student from Motherwell, and it was a complicated and romantic affair because his specialisation in Scottish law meant he could never practice anywhere else. This was a great tragedy, and my friend wrote many many letters and cried a whole summer long.

I love twin towns and in any town I live in, I look them up. I also have every reason to be immensely grateful to the scheme. Bonn, where I went to university, is  twinned with Oxford - and therefore both universities are also partnered. This enabled me not just to go to an Oxford college, but to actually be selected to teach there. In itself already a brilliant thing to do at an early age, it was also where I got to know my future husband - time well spent  indeed!

Munich, where I'm currently living is twinned with Bordeaux and Verona (and Edinburgh). I've made great plans to visit both Bordeaux and Verona soon (having already spent a year in Edinburgh, I don't need to visit). Of course, I might have gone to those towns anyhow as they are most attractive in themselves, but somehow the twinning adds extra interest.

So I can only say how ghastly and utterly deplorable I find it, that some English towns (most notably one going by the name of Bishop's Stortford which sounds more like an illness than a place)  unilaterally cancelled twin arrangements which had existed for decades. On the grounds of not wanting to have any ties with Europe anymore. Anti-Europeanism comes in many guises, and has many loathsome and ugly aspects, and what they all have in common is that ordinary people's lives are made poorer, more provincial and more isolated.

I for one would not like to have missed out on the many aspects that all the various twin towns have brought to my youth and later life!

Oxford - Et in Arcadia Ego?

After graduating, I came to England. I had got a job as lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford. The appointment ("tenure") was for 2 years. These two years turned out to be the happiest of my life - after Oxford, nothing ever really lives up to it, you just get used to things because you have to... But that's not what I'm writing about.

I was about 100 years younger than the youngest don there, so whilst officially part of the Senior Common Room (all the teaching staff of a college), my social life happened in the MCR (i.e. the graduate students). I still saw a lot of my colleagues though, mainly at the daily High Table dinner where you wear a gown, Grace is said in Latin, and you make formal conversation over not so good food.

You'd expect an Oxford college to be a hub of academic internationalism. Researchers from all over the world mingling for multinational exchanges. But this wasn't the case at all. I was the only foreigner and one of only two women. Conversation with me at High Table was laboured - Rhine cruises were remembered, and war reminscences (possibly not their own, their fathers'?) offered with the tough duck à l'orange. Narvik featured heavily. It wasn't easy to chime in, I had never been on a Rhine cruise "That must have been so lovely!" and Narvik meant nothing to me "That must have been... terrible!"

Over in the MCR, it was the polar opposite - the graduate students came from all over the world, fee-paying Americans, Japanese, Nigerians, Dutch. In fact I only remember one British national there. It was lively, fun, international - one got to know people and learnt an awful lot.

It struck me, that living in Britain, my life is still organised along those lines: The international background through family, friends, travel, and media. And on the other side there's Britain. Yes, there may be a whole multicultural aspect to it, but that SCR-Britain prevails. British reality is still mono-lingual, awkward with foreigners, still treating "abroad" with polite suspicion. It still chews on that tough duck. Proudly chewing, but inward-looking, and increasingly marginalised.

*)On the photo, the window of my room, second floor on the left hand side, is just about visible.