The Future of Europe + Culture in Weimar

by Tim and Karolina

In our group (group 3) we dealt with the topics “civil society” and “elections”. It consisted of six members: one boy and one girl from Germany, France and Poland. Because of that we decided to speak English most of the time with each other which worked quite well.

The first day we gathered ideas about what “civil society” means. In the following working sessions we focused on inventing a small questionnaire and on Monday we did a survey in Weimar. Most of the people were really kind and told us about what they think of the European Union. Then we discussed the results of our survey.

Yesterday we had a “Zukunftswerkstatt”  (“future workshop”). We did this in the thematic groups in which we had also prepared our theses and questions for the meeting with the politicians and European experts.  The workshop consisted of various parts: At the beginning we collected things we dislike about the EU. And we found quite a lot:  money that is wasted, the European Parliament sometimes being in Brussels and sometimes in Strasbourg (which costs taxpayer’s money), important national politicians like Silvio Berlusconi (Italy) who seem not to be taking the EU seriously (as he chose politically inexperienced models to be a candidate for his party in the coming European elections) and many more.

Afterwards we did the total opposite. Instead of writing things we dislike we invented utopian visions that we would like to become true in Europe. And the best thing about this was that they did not have to be realistic! Because of that we came up with many ideas. Some of the best (or rather the somehow a little bit realistic) ones were:

• The European Parliament will be in a train. It will drive the representatives through Europe and everyone can enter it
• A new vegetable is found: this vegetable can only be grown in Europe and it is so wonderful that all people want to eat it. Because of that the European farmers can grow this vegetable and won’t need any more subventions
• A new European flag: It shows 27 “Blümchen” (flowers), so one for every member state. This would also mean that Europe desires peace. Another idea was a flag that shows the national flags of the member states

Having done this the groups started presenting the ideas. But our group couldn’t do that because a lot of us also had tickets for the theatre and we did not want to be late. The theatre was really impressive. The actors were very convincing and a lot of applause followed at the end of the play.

Today, after the discussion with the politicians and representatives of the civil society in the Weimar city hall (in which we unfortunately could not ask all our questions because there wasn’t enough time), Matthieu did our presentation as well: Everyone seemed to like our ideas of vegetable and the train!

~ von feuselino am 07/06/2009.