“Giving your kids fucked-up names is a vulgar display of power.” – Christy Leonardo

Although Germany may not have had a colony to speak of, what with having to negotiate over their lands back home while the great scramble for Africa was going on … settle back children, and let me twiddle my fiddle a little … Hair? Oh, I don’t like hair! Put it away … No, no, there was never a fully-functional German empire. But the Germanic influence on the world has yielded the effects of an empire, and in a grandiloquent old-European way, the Germans can boast of fathering influences on the modern world – Bach invented music, Goethe invented Romantic, and therefore modern, literature, Lang and Murnau invented cinema. We need not continue listing.

But even in their names, the Germans’ influence is evident. England was named after the ancient Germanic tribe the Angles, there are parts of Australia named after parts of Germany, and little old Togo, we mustn’t forget little Togo: A kingdom all German. And then there’s the German pirates. No-one thinks about the German pirates. They bred too, and in those far off days of white spaces on maps, and ships sailing across the living ocean, what was Germany then? Read of these lives, my children, and re-consider your place in the world, and the tribe from which you stem.