In seven steps: How Richard Wagner created the most patriotic fries in the world

How Wagner created the most patriotic fries in the world

Step 1: Once flying Dutchman with extra cheese!

Like no other, Wagner's name in German culture stands for a work of sensuous intensity that satisfies a deep hunger, an oeuvre of impetuously rising sensations that pile up into the gloomy skies like a storm-swirling spray, and just as abruptly in a more tender melting Harmony to combine a delicious enjoyment that allows only one conclusion: "Really a damn good frozen pizza!"
But in addition to popular frozen delicacies such as the Wagner Piccolinis (three cheeses), Wagner Steinofen Vegetaria (five crispy grilled vegetables) or Wagner Big Pizza Boston (36 Weight Watchers points), there was also Richard Wagner. Born on May 22, 1813, died on February 13, 1883 in Venice, in between universal genius, anti-Semitic and much excused pork chop.
At the tender age of 13, he began working on his first play, at 16 he composed his first sonatas, four years later he performed his first opera aria. He worked with tireless zeal: as a playwright, conductor, bandmaster and theater reformer, as a writer of political writings - and confused antisemitic machinations such as "Judaism in Music." He was also known as a masterful Schnorrer: According to Thomas Mann, the composer was a "Pumpgenie", constantly fleeing from his creditors. Wagner managed to wet even the crazy Bavarian King Ludwig II, until the people went to the barricades.
Despite these unsympathetic features, the composer became a legend. Operas such as "Tristan and Isolde", "The Flying Dutchman" or the "Ring of the Nibelung" cycle made him one of the figureheads of German cultural history. And not only the German. For on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, about a century after Wagner's death ...

2nd step: Overlord of cozy skirt

... a young American musician named Jim Steinman discovering his passion for the German Romantic - and creating something completely new from his work: Wagner Rock.
Steinman, who modestly calls himself "The Lord of Excess," had a penchant for bringing art and pop culture together early on. Already as a college student in 1968 he had composed a musical adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play "Mann ist Mann". The central turning point of his career came four years later: Together with his friend Barry Keating, Steinman created in 1972 a musical version of the opera "Das Rheingold" from Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen" cycle. He had discovered his enthusiasm for the German composer - and he should never let go of him.
His second love was a music revolution that had been sparked during the 1970s in England by bands like Judas Priest, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and stormed across the Atlantic into the US: Heavy Metal. In this music he discovered the same passion that fascinated him about Wagner. Steinman's hair grew longer, his coat blacker, the guitars more distorted in his tracks.
The fusion of his two passions finally succeeded, when he met the young singer Marvin Lee Aday. With him, he brought out in 1977 a record that holds to this day among the best-selling albums in music history: "Bat Out of Hell." Then they mixed pompous orchestral sounds with screaming guitars, organs and choirs with drums fills. And above all hovering with always dramatic Vibrato Adays singing. It was a big break for both of them: The "Los Angeles Times" named Jim Steinman "Richard Wagner of the Rock". And for Aday began under the stage name Meat Loaf a world career. He celebrated charting success with songs like "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth" or ...

3rd step: fairytale castle? Räkelerregend!

... later with his hit "I'd Do Anything for Love" , which appeared in 1993 on the album "Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell". In 28 countries, the single rose to the top of the charts and brought Meat Loaf a Grammy. In the text of the Twelve-Minute-Sleaze-duck, a man conjures his adored that he has only noble feelings for them and will not allow any missteps. As she sings her fears, how her love will develop.
The music video, however, tells a different story: In a bonbonbunten "The Beauty and the Beast" Variation it shows Meat Loaf as a disfigured lord of the castle, who sees a woman in the forest and flees to hide his appearance. But she follows him to his home, where he hides from her. She lures her once provocatively in a bathtub, and then lolling provocatively on his bed, until she finally recognizes her immortal love for him - as she just provocatively lolling on a floating divan. For some reason, both then pursued the police. Then she kisses him - and suddenly his blemishes are gone. Finally, they drive on the motorcycle in the sunset, whose eye-blazing orange-red glow is probably explained only by an underweight director, who must have fallen asleep shortly before the deadline on the color saturation controller of the image mixer. The name of this young, then unknown director: Michael Bay.
Before Bay made later than Hollywood's highest-paid pyromania with trash fireworks like "Transformers" (2007) millions, it earned itself 1993 only its spurs. The meat-loaf music video helped a lot - it became his most famous video clip. And through Bays music video work producer Jerry Bruckheimer became aware of him and helped Bay ...

4th step: poison gas bumblebee attacks

... to jump from the music video to the movie director. Bruckheimer engaged Bay first in 1994 as a director for "Bad Boys". In the buddy action comedy, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence portrayed two Miami police officers investigating the disappearance of $ 100 million in drug-trafficking money. It became Bay's first blockbuster: the film grossed more than $ 140 million at the box office, with a budget of around $ 19 million. In one fell swoop, Michael Bay had risen to become the first pack of Hollywood directors entrusted with multi-million dollar projects. The budget for his next film, also produced by Bruckheimer, was already around $ 75 million. And less modest, the budgets for Bay's career should be little more.
This second film "The Rock - The Rock of Decision" is about the frustrated US General Hummel (Ed Harris), who is trying to extort from the government millions of compensation money for the families of deceased Marines with a threatened poison gas attack on San Francisco. An FBI chemical weapons expert (Nicolas Cage) and a former escape king (Sean Connery) are being sent to infiltrate the prison island of Alcatraz, occupied by Hummel and his men. A material that is not extraordinary original for Hollywood - but the special thing about the film history was that in retrospect ...

5th step: grapes of death

... should become the model for a political scandal - and at the same time the reason for its flight. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States, Britain, and the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" headed for war against Iraq. This led to dislocations in the UN, whose charter prohibits a war of aggression by its member states. In support of the absolute necessity of this war, the United States and the United Kingdom proposed alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and threatened attacks. One referred to an allegedly well-informed Iraqi secret contact from the highest ranks of Saddam Hussein's regime. He provided accurate accounts of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, especially chemical warfare agents.
An MI6 officer had been baffled at a detail of the descriptions of Iraqi poison gas tanks: they were, he was quoted in 2016, the British "Observer", "remarkably similar to those of the fictitious chemical weapons in the film 'The Rock'". According to the Iraqi secret informant, Saddam Hussein had the warfare agents stored in transparent glass tubes. Although these fragile containers might have looked incredibly dangerous when filming The Rock with green colored liquid, in reality, for obvious reasons, no one would think of storing poison gas in fragile, grape-shaped glass jars.
In spite of such objections, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw commissioned in 2002 to amend existing reports on the military threat posed by Iraq, claiming that the country was at war with the highest degree of threat. And so the "Coalition of the Willing" succeeded in bending the facts and invoking a source obviously inspired by Michael Bay's film, the ...

6th step: blood and oil

... to declare a war of war declared as a preventive war. On March 20, 2003, US and UK forces began bombing Baghdad. They had been able to enforce the operation, de facto an invasion of a country rich in oil resources and an important geostrategic location, before the United Nations thanks to its special status as a veto power. The war, which lasted only from March to May 2003, led to the collapse of the state order, which in 2014 should make possible the emergence of the terrorist organization "Islamic State".
Only years after the beginning of the war did committees of inquiry reveal in detail how flawed the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had been. It turned out that the then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had even expressly instructed his staff to prepare reports on the threat to Iraq of Iraq in order to give the impression of an "extraordinary threat" from the country.
The illegal Iraq war had devastating consequences: estimates speak of 650,000 to 1.2 million dead Iraqi civilians as a result of the war. In the Baghdad Abu Ghraib prison, CIA workers tortured and humiliated their prisoners. The US-based blacksmiths service in Iraq apparently directed arbitrary civilians and organized regular hijacking of Iraqis. Such human rights violations and "collateral damage" have provoked opposition to the Iraq war in many countries. So too ...

7th step: freedom struggle

...in France. The country faced the Iraq war at an early stage in the United Nations Council and instead of fighting, called for the continuation of inspections to check for weapons of mass destruction. The United States split into war opponents on the one hand, and the US-loyal "coalition of the willing" on the other.
Proud Americans were appalled by France's opposition to the attack on Iraq. And that led to pretty bizarre culinary turmoil - about fries. Statistically, every American consumes an average of around 14 kilograms of fries a year, known as the "French Fries" there. Although they were supposedly invented not in France but in Belgium. About one third of the annual US potato harvest is processed into ready-made frozen chips. In hardly any other country do the golden-yellow potato stalks enjoy comparable popularity. More precisely: pleased. Until the beginning of the Iraq war.
"French frieze" threatened to get stuck in the throat of US war advocates with patriotism. And so Republican Representatives Walter B. Jones and Bob Ney, who revolted about the so-called Allied France, seized the initiative and saved nationalism from overly pacifist fast food: they renamed the "French Fries" - in "Freedom Fries " Initially, the new fries nomenclature was only implemented in three US Congress canteens, but soon more restaurants joined the idea nationwide. It was not until 2006 that the language revision was officially abolished - when Bob Ney was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 30 months imprisonment.

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Danny Kringiel
How Hitler invented the skateboard: in seven steps through world history

Publishing company:

KiWi Paperback

Pages:

320

Price:

EUR 11,00

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