Can't Feel My Face, Angela, to which Baudrillard ...

© Robin Blair - Simulacra and Simulation

And I know she'll be the death of me, 

at least we'll both be numb

And she'll always get the best of me, 

the worst is yet to come

... adds a figurative  where  the  object  and  substance  have  disappeared. But let's first delve into the recent past.

Oh what a difference some months make. Four months ago a cocky Greece was successfully viciously assaulted, raped in broad daylight and thrown bleeding into the gutter. The German press applauding, just like they applauded 82 years ago. The European Reich Germany had made its point. You go against our policy of austerity, we crush you, we shut down your banks. The German public just loved it as could be seen in the Sportpalast du jour, the comments section of newspapers. The shakti had spoken. On to business as usual in the country of the Fachkräfte.

Wait a minute, what's that? Strange looking people came trickling in. Then more. Germans learned about some Greek islands perilously close to that disdained country Turkey. What started as a mild wave quickly turned into a stampede. A stampede one would have associated with Bharata 70 years ago. Midnight's Children. Yet this was Europe. "United in diversity".

As that former country became the playground of a benevolent Macedonian woman plying her self-serving trade in Kolkata, the country of refugees' choice in Europe granted itself the luxury of a woman, likewise from the east, whose hallmark was indecisiveness and much admired by her subjects therefore. Confronted with hundreds of thousands, scaremongerers even managed to come up with ever higher numbers every third day, of refugees on her queendoms' soil she followed the playbook of the Mother of Kolkata. Come ye all, my brothers and sisters, 'I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love'. Translated into German: 'Wir schaffen das'.

However, badly miscalculating the generosity of her subjects - a generosity that had already been stretched to its utmost limits with Greece - she was made to learn a widespread displeasure with her handling and admonished for her nebulous grasp of reality. 

Hesitatingly, a trait most becoming to a woman, she made the initiative to a raunchy love affair with a Frenchman of short stature, quickly passed some new immigration laws out of that boudoir when time would allow and topped that off, to the consternation of that short Frenchman one might add, with a Walk to Canossa Turkey for a prostration in front of the local emir, finally culminating in the decision to fast-track deport superfluous human imports on, oh those Germans, military transport planes.

It is here then that an eminent monsieur from France, a country Germany was hitherto at odds with, can shed a wise light on the ineptitude, subsequent chasse patate and other follies of this clumsy and so revered Führer of Teutonia:

When  the  real  is  no  longer  what  it  used  to  be,  nostalgia  assumes its  full  meaning.  There  is  a  proliferation  of  myths  of  origin  and  signs of  reality;  of  second-hand  truth,  objectivity  and  authenticity.  There is  an  escalation  of  the  true,  of  the  lived  experience;  a  resurrection of  the  figurative  where  the  object  and  substance  have  disappeared. And  there  is  a  panic-stricken  production  of  the  real  and  the  referential, above  and  parallel  to  the  panic  of  material  production.  This  is  how simulation  appears  in  the  phase  that  concerns  us:  a  strategy  of  the real,  neo-real  and  hyperreal,  whose  universal  double  is  a  strategy  of deterrence.

(Baudrillard - Simulations and Simulacra)