Philipp Höhn

On Monday I will have arrived in Umeå three weeks ago. This sounds like a long time considering that courses have already started and I left my familiar surroundings for the (yet) longest time of my life. But in this case these 21 days seem like nothing to me. Here in Umeå time seems to fly by as you enjoy your life and do your daily studying. Well, I might think differently about that after the first exams in four weeks but for now, this statement is certainly true. I’m having a great time although I’m still working on an assignment from back home. I’m working assiduously and still have lots of time to enjoy Sweden’s great nature, watch football matches in sport bars, do sports, meet people and just enjoy my life.

Part of enjoying my life was today’s day off which I spent playing the new FIFA 10 demo and watching the German Bundesliga. What a useless, wasted and yet great day . After a few hours of studying I decided to use this day for nothing but sitting around and doing some nerdy stuff. I started with estimated 20 matches of FIFA 10 demo. I think I’m falling in love with this game. I then browsed tech-related forums and listened to loud music. I only left my room for some food (picture 1) and a short walk to the local supermarket. Today’s highlight was definitely the Bundesliga match between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich which ended in a glorious 5:1 victory for my favourite team. Just yesterday I had discovered that eurosport.se offers an hd livestream of every Bundesliga match for a monthly fee of 5€. I decided to give it a try and signed up for one month. After this first day with two live matches, a one hour summary of Wolfsburg vs. Leverkusen (picture 2) and several five minute summaries of the other matches I’m pretty sure I will continue paying Eurosport this small sum that I would otherwise easily spend for two cokes in a local sport bar for just one match. After the last interviews and news I switched to virtual football again and beat Barca 3:1. That was a nice ending of the day! Tomorrow I will be meeting some international students for fika and watching the Formula 1 race in Monza with them. In the evening there will be another football match. Only this time, it will take me a little more to score than pushing a button on the controller as I will be playing with some students on the university’s football field.

Tags: Umeå

It’s already been five days that I left beloved Marburg for my journey to Sweden. While I still don’t realize that I am going to stay 2000 kilometres from my home city for the next ten months, I am already getting quite used to my surroundings. But let me tell you step by step about those first days.

On Monday the 24th I went to Frankfurt airport for a flight to Umeå via Stockholm. After two hours the plane landed in Stockholm and I tried to get the connecting flight to Umeå. Unfortunately that didn’t work out very well and I missed the plane. Being a little shocked at that moment this wasn’t really a major problem as I was handed out a new ticket for the next flight just two hours later without further costs. In these two hours I met three Germans who had also missed their flight. Together we took the next plane to Umeå and arrived in our rooms in Ålidhem at about eight pm. I used the rest of the day to get to know the other people on my corridor as well as to talk to a friend from back home via Skype.

Tuesday morning started with a 20 minute walk towards the university in hope of actually finding the campus. While the road took me through a forest and past something that looked like a factory I arrived at the Universum Building 30 minutes early. Inside this modern looking building I found the “Aula Nordica” where the orientation week was supposed to take place. It’s a huge auditorium that would be perfect for presenting a theatre performance: There’s a big stage, different light settings, lots of curtains, remarkable acoustics and a nice atmosphere. Talking to some people already sitting there the Aula Nordica filled with international students. In the next two hours we were introduced to the University, the city of Umeå, some major facts about life in Sweden and upcoming events of the orientation week. Later that day most of the international students met in the city centre at the “Rådhustorget” (the town hall square) for a beer/water/wodka or in my case, a cold Coca Cola

The second day at Umeå University started just like the first one did except that I found the buildings I was looking for immediately and even five minutes earlier. We were introduced to the University Library, heard even more interesting stories about “Sweden and the Swedes” and were presented Umeå’s sport centre IKSU, Europe’s largest sport centre. In the evening we met at Mariehemsängarna (big meadows near the University) to play some Swedish games. Divided into several groups we played “Kubb” and “Brännboll“. Already knowing Kubb I decided to try Brännboll. It was actually great fun until rain set in. Somehow we decided to keep on playing and had even more fun sliding from base to base. As the rain grew stronger and stronger we were all soaking wet and finally decided to head home. About 40 minutes later I arrived in my room in Ålidhem and enjoyed a nice warm shower.

Thursday started surprisingly healthy but a little tired as I was (and am) still waiting for the post to bring my pillow and blanket. At the Universum Building we were introduced to the Swedish system of study, the municipality of Umeå and the student unions. At two pm we started a campus race. In groups of eight to twelve people we walked around the campus looking for small boxes containing hints that could lead us the next boxes. Although we haven’t been able to find every ten boxes we had a great time and got to know each other a little better. Besides that we actually got to know the campus which was probably the main goal of this “friendly competition”, as the organisers called it.

Today we were offered some further insights to society and life in Sweden as well as a very interesting and entertaining presentation of the Sámi. Later on we went on a bus tour around Umeå and enjoyed our first fika. After a guided walk tour in the city centre we finally met for a welcome reception at Rex. I put pictures of this day in the gallery. If you’re interested in seeing them please contact me as the gallery is password protected.

Looking back to those first five days I am really enjoying Umeå so far. Except the excitement of living in a country you don’t know and enjoying a week like you’re on holiday there are some things I am really starting to like about this place. For example, everyone involved in the organisation of the orientation course is obviously doing a great job as they are trying to get us new students socialised as soon and as good as possible. Even the housing is great. Something special that’s come to my attention is the university’s staff apparently caring for questions of equality in an extend that can hardly be compared to German standards. There seem to be a lot more people in this university that have actually heard of and thought about questions of gender, class and race than there appear to be in German universities. Having in mind that I only got to know a few Swedes, it does already seem that the Swedish society is a lot more open-minded and influenced by the thought of equality and justice than others, including my home country’s, seem to be. It will be quite interesting to see how this point of view might be confirmed, changed or argued. I’m looking forward to this. I am also very happy about meeting all those different people from all around the world. I am not sure about the countries but I have at least seen and talked to one person from every continent. It’s great to get the opportunity of talking to all those people with different social backgrounds and different cultures. There’s so much you don’t know about other countries and cultures that you can find out by just talking to people.

After my first week in Umeå I am quite happy to be here. I will let you know about my first courses and trips as soon as I find the time to do so. There will also be some pictures of Ålidhem and the room I’m living in.

Tags: Umeå

In the last semester in Germany I spent a lot of time reading, thinking, discussing and writing about a topic that has not been very popular in Germany in the recent decades. Together with a group of two fellow students I occupied with the act of desertion as well as its consequences in Nazi Germany. Although we haven’t been able to find out much that hasn’t been written about earlier, we recognized that desertion in NS Germany and specifically what people have been thinking about it in the later years needs to be heard of and talked about.

Over many decades former judges of the Wehrmacht who managed to get into positions of high respect in the Federal Republic of Germany spread the word of an independent and mostly guiltless military judiciary. While profiting from this widely spread and actually wrong picture of the Wehrmacht some of those judges apparently didn’t care for the victims of the NS judicial branch who have been convicted until the year 2002 when the German Bundestag suspended the verdicts. In our study we analysed how deserts have been discussed in public, in the political institutions and in the scientific community after the Second World War in Germany. For those of you who are interested in finding out more about this outrage upon justice I am offering our study as a pdf file (Beware: It’s German). You can download it and give it away. You are though not allowed to change anything about the text, the layout or the file itself. If you wish to link to the study, please do not link directly to the pdf file but to this blog post.

There is also a travelling exhibition about desertion in NS Germany that we three have been visiting in Dortmund. From the 25th of October this exhibition called “Was damals Recht war…” will be available in Marburg. You can also find information about the exhibition itself as well as a time table on their website.

Tags: desertion

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that philipp-hoehn.de is back. I haven’t been posting to the weblog for nearly two years because… well, let’s just say I didn’t have neither the time nor the motivation. But this is going to change. At least for the next ten months I will be using this page to blog about my time in Sweden. But first things first. Let me just tell you in a few words what changes I’ve been doing to the site in the last two years and what I plan to use it for in the upcoming days and weeks.

In May 2008 I migrated this website from evanzo to ispOne. The decision was easy as ispOne offers a lot more service while being nearly have as expensive as evanzo. At evanzo I had the usual webspace supporting php, one mysql database, one ftp account and an annoying administration interface. At ispOne I’m having my own vserver offering me the flexibility of changing whatever I want and using it just the way I want. As I’ve only had about four hours of downtime in more than one year I’m really enjoying the reliability. I’m pretty happy with the speed too as it’s running two websites, my very own mail server with postfix, dovecot, greylisting and squirrelmail, a picture gallery, a file server for my personal use, an ftp server and some minor apps within perfect speed. If anyone is thinking about moving to a vhost provider feel free to write me a mail and I’ll be glad to help you out. Otherwise, if you’ve made different experience with either evanzo or ispOne feel free to express yourself in the comments.

After the big migration in May I applied a major upgrade of wordpress some weeks later. I was looking forward to this upgrade as it offered a whole bunch of new features and security fixes. Enjoying the new features I did a minor mistake that consequently crashed my whole wordpress database. Somehow it wasn’t even possible to recover the old site and redo the upgrade. So I had to reinstall wordpress and enter every single text including every single comment (i. e. every author name, every date and every text). As you might guess this left me a little upset For some weeks I didn’t even visit my own website. Fortunately that’s over!

Beside these changes at philipp-hoehn.de there where quite some interesting things happening in my life. When writing my last post to the blog I just moved to Marburg and started studying Political Science. After two years I’ve – fortunately – grown accustomed to studying and living on my own. In fact, I’ve found some nice new hobbies, met various great people, made new friends and gained interest in some new fields. I’m probably going to write about some of these things in the future. But that might depend on whether I’m having enough time and whether I’m in the right mood. So don’t expect too much.

One major theme of the upcoming posts is going to be my trip to Sweden. Since Monday the 24th of August (yeah, it’s only been two days!) I use to live in Umeå, Sweden. I’m here as an Erasmus exchange student and I will be staying for ten months. Read more about this in the upcoming posts or just contact me (see the about page for contact information, use the contact form or just leave a comment).

At last, there is one more thing regarding philipp-hoehn.de: There will be some small changes in the next days and weeks. The banner is going to be replaced by a set of pictures I’ve been taking. Most sections have been or will be redesigned. And, as you might have guessed, there will be new content I’m looking forward to posting on my blog again and I hope the number of people visiting the site and commenting the blog will rise back up to where it once was.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: philipp-hoehn.de, Umeå