Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Uncle Who's What?

From a Slate column on racism in the world of the rest of the world (read it if you give a shit) we link you to the good part, a Kraut fish & chips wrapper w/ an interesting headline/photo. The best part, however, comes at the end of the SpiegelOnlineInternational story.
Although "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is well-known in Germany, ordinary Germans are not always aware of the controversy surrounding the book. Visitors to Berlin are often surprised to find there is even a subway station in the city called Onkel Toms Hütte, after a residential district which was named in tribute to the novel.
Huh? Wha'? When was this residential district named? Pre- or post-Hitler? And why? Uncle Tom's crib wasn't exactly a paragon of comfortable living. (Scheiss like this is why we at Just Another Blog™ don't make too much of our Bavarian ancestry & use a Froggy pseudonym, even though we, sadly, haven't a Gallic gene anywhere in our genome.)

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