This month’s European crisis has without a doubt been the waves of refugees trekking their way from Turkey, through Greece and then northwesterly up the Balkans, whose eventual desired destination has generally been Germany. Germany itself has changed before our very eyes: first taken aback by developments, then taking a welcoming attitude, but now dialing that greeting back somewhat, with border controls and other restrictions, as the full reality hits of what that welcoming attitude has wrought.

Here are a couple of “under-the-radar” articles from the German press on how that country has been trying to deal with circumstances. First: gut gedacht, schlecht gemacht (“good intentions, terrible execution”).

The goal was a noble one, if perhaps also serving as good PR for reBuy.de, a German site that functions as an on-line marketplace for used goods of all types. But what better company to launch an effort to solicit and coordinate used clothing donations for the refugees, right? So it made an arrangement with the German Red Cross; donors could send in their used clothing for free, using labels provided by reBuy.de, via the Hermes package-deliver service.

There was a major misunderstanding, however. For the German Red Cross, this was supposed to be a local action confined to its Berlin Wedding/Prenzlauer Berg affiliate. But reBuy.de understood it to be nationwide – and improperly used the nationwide German Red Cross logo on its website announcing the action. The result was the rest of the German Red Cross’ branches throughout the length and breadth of Germany being inundated with clothes they never expected, before the whole national organization abruptly withdrew from the effort. reBuy.de employees all over Germany gamely tried to push on anyway, accepting, sorting and distributing the clothing themselves, but things soon broke down entirely, with many recriminations.

Then there is this other interesting development in Berlin.

Even beyond clothing, a major concern for the German authorities in dealing with all the refugees has been finding them sufficient acceptable shelter, particularly in view of the oncoming colder weather. Already Berlin officials have taken some decisive measures to achieve this. Last month they pressed into action an old town hall, that of the city quarter Wilmersdorf (capacity: 500), for housing refugees, and the Berliner Morgenpost piece also reports they recently confiscated a former bank in the same area for the same use.

But now those authorities are ready to take things up another notch. Specifically, another Berlin quarter, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (known for decades for its many immigrants and left-wing politics) now wants to make use of the many apartments standing empty within its boundaries. These are generally higher-quality residences, and the reason they are not being actively used is either because they are being withheld by their owners for speculation or because they function as second homes for well-off people who usually live elsewhere. They are estimated to number up to 5,000.

It does look like those apartments are going to be pressed into service. Will it be confiscation, or some sort of money paid to the owners as compensation? Likely the former. Here we encounter the age-old conflict between private property on the one hand and taking care of people’s urgent needs, in an emergency situation, on the other hand. Those owning those apartments really should not be surprised; the squatting movement has been particularly active in Berlin and Hamburg for decades, way before any refugee crisis.

The German government has lately been on a charm offensive towards the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, is today finishing a visit to Berlin which, as is pointed out in this piece in Die Welt by reporters Robin Alexander and Daniel-Dylan Böhmer, marks no less than the fourth time Chancellor Merkel has met with high-level Chinese officials this year.

“Merkel, China’s Minister-President and the Supermarket”: the notable bit of this get-together thrown out for appreciation by the public is the joint visit to a local Berlin supermarket made by Chancellor Merkel and her guest Li just yesterday (Friday) afternoon. You can see a photo of both of them at the check-out at the head of the article: Li is pointing at Merkel’s hand as she gathers her purchases there, having paid cash. (Good move: paying with any sort of card would naturally leave readers wondering who it is who provides the stock of money standing behind it.) At first glance, the absence of any sort of Secret Service-like figures is notable, although they must be those suited gentlemen – without sunglasses or earpieces – with their backs to the camera just behind the cigarette rack. And where is Li’s interpreter? I don’t think he is very fluent in English, let alone German.

All in all, a jolly, down-home moment. Meanwhile, you can be sure that other members of the visiting Chinese delegation were hard at work with their German counterparts in near-by government buildings, working out what are said to be no less than forty business/economic agreements that are the true purpose of this summit, including contracts worth billions of euros. What is more, it is sure to be full cabinet members that fill out much of the rest of that Chinese delegation: Merkel has taken a liking to staging cabinet-meets-cabinet get-togethers with neighboring countries (indeed, I recall one such with the Dutch cabinet earlier this year – not in Berlin, but over in northwestern Germany, close to the Dutch border) and clearly decided on the same format for meeting the Asian economic superpower.

Er . . . Human Rights?

That’s fine, but with China you get more baggage into the bargain – particularly now that Hong Kong demonstrators are still flooding the streets there demanding a democracy worthy of the name. Of course, Germany does have a robust free press, so that Premier Li at some point found himself  directly confronted by the question why citizens in Hong Kong should not be able to truly pick their own political representatives. As reported here, he looked impatiently at his watch as the query was translated for him, only to reply that that was a matter of “internal Chinese politics” only.

There was another question in that same vein, about local employees at the Chinese bureau of the renowned German newspaper Die Zeit who were recently arrested. This one Li ignored entirely. Merkel herself had called these Die Zeit incidents “news that really makes you think” (durchaus bedenkliche Nachricht) on an earlier occasion; it’s not clear from the article whether this interrogation of Premier Li happened in her presence. Alexander & Böhmer’s piece does point out that, at the joint news conference, the German authorities resisted Chinese pressure to disallow any questions, such as those above, which might be too awkward for the honored guest to handle. Other countries that top Chinese officials visit, it is said here, often cannot bring themselves to do so.

In the end, German President Joachim Gauck – famous for his past as a prominent East German dissident – was brought in to play “bad cop” to Merkel’s “good cop” and reproach Li for China’s human rights record at a one-on-one meeting. At least that session was scheduled at the very beginning of the two-day conference, and it did last about an hour. But economic times are hard in Europe, including – for an unwelcome change – in Germany; the worry has to arise that German interest in doing business with China will soon trump any influence that country could wield on the human rights situation there, if it has not done so already.

I think we can safely predict that 2014 will not see any fifth meeting between Chancellor Merkel and high Chinese officials, though. For this  year marks 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the self-liberation of most of Eastern Europe from decades of Communist dictatorship. Meeting the Chinese against that backdrop would just be too awkward, no matter what new profits any such meeting could promise. Better to get the year’s remaining Chinese business done, cabinet-to-cabinet, by early October.

The editors of Le Monde seem to have received advanced word on the content of President Obama’s big speech in Berlin later today. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

“Obama will propose a reduction of the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.” Good news, right?

Well yes – but that’s really not the subject his audience is going to be interested in! You just might have heard of recent revelations of programs with names like “Prism” which involved massive spying by US authorities on the telephone and electronic communications of, basically, everyone, certainly including German citizens. As NYT columnist Roger Cohen quite clearly pointed out on Monday (“Obama’s German Storm”), due to their past the Germans are particularly sensitive about such abuses. They will certainly want to hear what Obama is going to do about this, and likely not about the latest warhead-number that will result if the President can get his way with whatever measure he wants to propose.

I know that preparation for such major speeches requires long lead-times, but nonetheless if his big Brandenburg Gate speech this evening does turn out to deal solely with nuclear armament matters, it will be the sorriest attempt at mass attention-diversion we will have seen for a long, long time. And you can bet it will not work on the Germans. I hope to be able to offer some after-the-fact coverage from the German press along those lines in this forum.

But so OK: Nukes

Still, for the sake of exercise let us take these reports at their word and consider the issue of nuclear arms reductions. The Le Monde article specifically declares that Obama’s proposal will include US “tactical” nuclear weapons still stored in Europe, where many are wondering why – given the current geopolitical situation there – they were not removed a long time ago. (more…)

You would think such a question would be particularly easy for the Germans. They should even be the world’s experts in this sort of thing.

SED-Regime: Warum wir die Symbole der DDR verbieten sollten http://t.co/riAVcFhIGv

May 24, 2013 3:10 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

What do you do with the legacy of a monstrous political regime? Particularly when you represent the successor regime, which in reaction rather understandably becomes hesitant to tell people what to think? Inevitably, there are going to be some partisan holdovers, even some misguided fans from new generations that never had to live with it. (See Russia: Papa Stalin.)

Do you refrain from banning the former dictatorial party and its symbols, confident that the voting public at large will have too much sense to ever let it get close to power again? That has been the Czech Republic’s approach to its Communist Party, which after the Velvet Revolution was allowed to survive and simply renamed (rebranded?) itself the Communist Party of the Czech Lands and Moravia (KSČM – that link is to their English page). This decision has not quite redounded in an unfortunate way on the Czech political scene – by which I mean, the Communists have never been back in government – but occasionally they have come close, even though all major political parties claim that they will never work with them. (I actually treated this question of the KSČM on this site back in 2003, in a somewhat over-long post.)

Or do you say “Yes, we believe in free speech, but sometime there have to be exceptions and this is one of them”? In particular, this is what Germany – or the Germanies, both of them – did with the Nazi Party once they were allowed to regain some measure of sovereignty after World War II: no swastikas allowed, no Mein Kampf, no organization calling itself National Socialist, all under threat of real legal sanction.

Now the question has arisen with respect to the DDR, that is, the Communist and Soviet-dominated “German Democratic Republic” that was the ruling regime of East Germany from 1949 until almost a year after the Wall fell – until Reunification on 3 October, 1990. That’s what this tweet, and the Die Welt article it links to, by Richard Herzinger, is about, namely a growing consensus (at least among Germany’s ruling coalition parties, the CDU/CSU and FDP) to try to get a law passed that would similarly forbid the display of DDR symbols. (more…)

“All Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, All The Time”? You could be forgiven for thinking so. Or consider the alternate, “natural progression” perspective: what first was but a tweet engendered a post amplifying that tweet – and now just one more to show how crazy things have become.

We need to remember that, in the first place, this is all about the Germans (!) really messing up a major engineering project, one that directly involves their capital. Is that “man-bites-dog” or what? I can’t believe that this has not attracted more attention from the press outside Germany! It’s not like you can keep the lid on news like this in today’s day & age. This could well turn out to be a highly instructive test-case on how to ensure the rest of the world is content to remain ignorant when you have news that you would just as soon not spread – if only I could distill the key lessons.

But that’s not what this post is about. Some extra crazy has popped up, in none other than the German newspaper of record, the FAZ. There author and journalist Ralph Bollmann urges the Berlin authorities to Lass es bleiben – Let it be! He ain’t exactly trying to channel the Beatles; he is actually urging the abandonment of that Berlin-Brandenburg airport project, which was supposed to have opened to the public about a month from now!

Why on earth? He actually lists ten arguments; let me just mention the highlights:

• Better to just stop this unending nightmare: Schrecken ohne Ende. A number of factors have convinced Bollmann that just starting to use the new airport will soon bring one new problem after another – for instance, it will have too little capacity from the very get-go, yet will be almost impossible to enlarge further.
  
• Tegel is better: That’s Berlin’s Tegel airport, of course, on the west side of town, famously built in a hurry (90 days for the first runway) during the Berlin Blockade to expand vital airport capacity. Even more interesting – I had not picked up this fact – is that Tegel was supposed to be closed at around the same time the new BER opened! (Obviously, those plans have been put on hold.) Right now Tegel is merely Berlin’s main airport, and the fourth-biggest in Germany! I think Bollmann zeroes in on why Tegel must die with his sentence “Back then [the early 1970s, when Tegel was upgraded to what it is today] architects didn’t build a shopping mall, just an airport.”
  
• Riding by train is more comfortable: Amen to that. Too much time lost travelling to, getting “screened” at, etc. the airport.
  
• Only poor people fly to Berlin: Incoming passangers to Berlin have doubled in ten years, Bollmann writes – but are these new visitors the kind Berliners really want to see? “Exiles from Schwabia, party-goers from all of Europe, recently unemployed Spaniards.”
  
• Templehof deserves another chance: This is rather surprising to read. The old Templehof airport is famous from the Airlift, but it sits right in the middle of the city, among dense urban areas. What’s more, there was a referendum a few years ago about shutting it down – and it passed! So that decision has already been made.
  
• Put Nature back: Apparently the route south from the Berlin city center that the new airport now blocks was a favorite for heading out to commune with nature on weekends and holidays. So demolish the airport!

So there you are: quite the mix of the reasonable (first three) and the insane (last three). Still, maybe he has a point: it would have been better just to expand Tegel, as well as to further encourage train over air transportation.

And just who is this Ralph Bollmann, anyway? Turns out he’s a fairly prominent journalist and commentator, with a side-line in writing history books about the Roman Empire. So he’s familiar with grandiose projects, and he’s familiar with the imperial hubris often associated with them.

Yesterday I reported on the @EuroSavant Twitter-feed about the rather unfortunate-sounding instance of Berlin’s new airport (BER: Berlin Brandenburg Airport) not opening in time for the summer tourist season:

BM Misses peak season! Outrage in #Germany as opening new #Berlin airport delayed beyond planndd 3JUN date into autumn http://t.co/zbKidRg7

May 8, 2012 2:05 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@EuroSavant

EuroSavant

Apparently that was not even the half of it, as we learn today from one of the German capital city’s leading newspapers, Der Tagesspiegel:

Der Willy-Brandt-Flughafen ist ein politischer Bruchpilot: http://t.co/sZdqXtNP

May 9, 2012 12:09 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@tagesspiegel_de

Tagesspiegel.de

Bruchpilot: Peter Tiede proclaims BER to be a “political crash pilot.” And Peter Tiede is no mere Tagesspiegel journalist, but rather editor-in-chief of the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, another Berlin-area paper.

I’m not really aware of that aviation term (“crash pilot”?), but clearly it’s not meant to be good, as we see in the piece’s first paragraph after the lead:

An airport arises in the wrong place under scandalous conditions. There is too little planning, too little building, and it is not ready. And the routes by which airplanes come and go no one wants to make known beforehand . . . How all that was sold, who in the airport company’s management made which errors, who misled the Public – that’s something the airport company, its Board and owners, the states of Brandenburg and Berlin, and even the federal government will have have to clarify.

Or else an investigative commitee – at some point.

So somebody certainly believes that the authorities in charge messed this airport up, and bad. But Germans? And at their very own capital city? These are not the Germans we all know (and love)! Even worse, if this lament does happen to be anywhere close to true, is that the airport is supposed to be named after everyone’s favorite Cold Warrior, Willy Brandt.

It does look bad, though. Among other things, Tiede claims that an additional runway (the airport’s third) is just a question of time, and short time at that: it’s going to be needed within at least two years, if BER is to serve any serious use. And yes, they have now called off the airport’s scheduled opening ceremony for 3 June, but nobody really knows when it actually will be able to open.

The article to which the Tagesspiegel tweet links is basically Peter Tiede’s polemic about how disastrously everything has gone wrong, and his platform for calling for political consequences to ensue for those he holds most responsible, namely Brandenburg Minister-President Matthias Platzeck and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit. An earlier, much longer Tagesspiegel article (Errors in the system: The BER problem is back), to which Tiede provides a link at the beginning of his piece, provides more of the actual details.

Oh, is he controversial! He likes to sleep with three females at a time, all of them clad in fur. (And this after a notorious separation from what was supposed to be his exclusive mate.) He’s been the subject not only of lawsuits but also full photo-spreads in Vanity Fair (by Annie Liebovitz, no less) and parody on the Colbert Report. Meanwhile, both his obsessive need to ingest things that are not good for him and to always be the center of attention have made most observers very concerned about his welfare.

And rightly so, for now he is dead, and way too young . . . what’s that? No, I was never talking about Charlie Sheen, this is about the celebrity that was Knut the Polar Bear, whose adventures at the Berlin Zoo this weblog has occasionally covered over the years. Maybe to make myself clear I should have brought up Knut’s being featured on his own postage-stamp, or even the public calls in the past for his castration, but frankly, all of that and more seems well within the capability of the out-of-control 2 1/2 Men once-and-future star.

No, this is about Knut, and I guess I can take a sort of bittersweet pride in having realized, from the very beginning of my coverage, that “it is perhaps the life of a child movie star that provides an even more-exact template to what has been happening with Knut.” You’ll surely know by now that last Saturday, as he was lounging on an island in his Berlin Zoo enclosure (which he shared with the aforementioned three female polar bears – who somehow seemed to want little to do with him) the lumbering grayish bear suddenly stood up, spun around a couple of times, fell into the water and was gone. Well, at least you probably heard that he died; those additional details I got from having the fortune to hear an interview on the BBC World Service with the Berlin Zoo Bear Dept. Head Heiner Klös. The interviewer put Klös on the spot (as BBC interviewers are increasingly wont to do with their subjects in recent years), accusing him of feeding Knut too many of the infamous croissants he was mad about. Yes, OK, there were croissants, Klös stammered in his reply, but mostly the keepers made sure he received the sort of wholesome meat-and-vegetables diet a still-growing young polar bear requires.

Anyway, while Knut was never in what you could call polar bear athletic shape, it’s unlikely it was anything in his diet that caused his death at age 4 – untimely, as polar bears in captivity are routinely known to live forty years or more. Just what it was remains something of a mystery; it was not a tumor, for example, as Christina Hucklenbroich of the FAZ let us know in an article of yesterday, although it did seem to involve some disease in his brain. Nothing in the environment provided to him at the Berlin Zoo was at fault, either – despite calls from no less than the Financial Times Deutschland for polar-bear enclosures across Europe to be subject to “stress tests.” (For real – although I suspect the piece is written tongue-in-cheek.) Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of in-breeding – Knut’s mother was a full-blooded wild polar bear out of Canada, Zoo Director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz assured the assembled press hordes.

Of course, it was that very same mother-bear who started Knut off on his celebrity adventure in the first place by rejecting him and thus making it necessary that he be raised in a rather more public fashion by the zookeepers. And although that life is now at an end, the legend (and, possibly, the need for further coverage here – whatever the traffic will bear, you might say) will surely live on. They want to raise a statue to him; his fur is already in the hands of expert taxidermists at a museum; and, inevitably, you know there is going to be a movie. For – relative to his species, at least – Knut lived fast and he died young: may I suggest “Polar Without A Cause”?

Going to Berlin in the next month or so? Looking for a unique tourist experience? Here’s one that comes not out of some guidebook, but rather from no less than Die Zeit: the lobby-tour, a tour of the German capital from a lobbyist’s point-of-view.

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out. (more…)

Mark Espiner is a writer for the Guardian as well as a playwrite/director. He has had a new gig since last autumn, though, writing for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Obviously, comparison between the two great European capitals which that new position causes him to move between (by which I mean Berlin and London, where the Guardian is headquartered) is what his columns are expected to be about and, as a writer on the dramatic arts, it’s only natural that he has devoted most of his attention to cultural issues.

But not exclusively so. One difference between the two cities that leaps out him he describes in his latest piece, The eyes lying in ambush of the CCTV. He remembers back to his first visit to Berlin, a little over a year ago: what accounted for that strange feeling of freedom, of exaltation even, that he felt then while walking through the streets of the city center? Well, you already know the answer from his piece’s title. It was actually the absence of something that inspired such enthusiasm, the absence there of the closed-circuit TV cameras that, as he puts it, “bristle on every corner” in London.

To be sure, Espiner had previously rather perversely made use of his special journalist’s access to aggravate this hang-up of his: he managed to visit a monitoring center in London (a “dingy room, deep below the streets”), where he witnessed officials there using the cameras to zoom in – to a “scary” level of detail – on anyone who seemed “suspicious,” or else interesting to take a close look at for any other reason. Therefore, although coming back to Berlin he does observe a few more Video Überwachung signs than he noticed before, the apparent forebearance on the part of the Berlin authorities to spy on their own citizens is still quite refreshing.

The reason for all that is not hard to grasp: after all, as he does point out, some of those Berlin city authorities not so long ago lived under a Stasi regime, which itself followed a Nazi regime. Still, Espiner warns against any complacency – not necessarily in the face of officialdom suddenly changing its mind and deciding to bring in the cameras, but rather in the form of new private shopping centers and “gated communities” being built, which inevitably bring with them an associated bunch of such cameras, to provide “protection” and “security.”

Anyway, it turns out that you can check out his argument for yourself, as Der Tagesspiegel has taken to posting parallel versions of his columns in English. (No doubt the original English that Espiner wrote them in, of course; this one is called CCTV: Invasion of privacy.) I reveal that to you as a public service, even as it is an unwelcome development since you’ll no longer need the assistance of your neighborhood EuroSavant to read these particular columns from Der Tagesspiegel.

UPDATE: Please also be sure to see this: Spy Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer, from a renowned security expert, and including up-to-the-minute insights on the topic from the recent very professional assassination of that Hamas official in Dubai.

Could this be the opening sparks of a new incarnation of German militarism? The local newspaper Der Tagesspiegel has the report: Kreuzberg vs. Neukölln – with snowballs. Yesterday, in the newest variation on the flash mob phenomenon, 200 to 300 people showed up at 2:00 PM in Berlin’s Görlitzer Park, summoned by the Internet, to fight. To fight for fun, that is, taking advantage of the many inches of snow available everywhere.

It was a contest between residents of those two Berlin neighborhoods, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, waged across the ditch in the park’s middle (with combat photographers in attendance, of course; the on-line article has an amusing YouTube video.) In the end Kreuzberg was declared the winner, controversially, but most by that time were too tired to care and settled down instead to drinking Glühwein (wine mixed with spices, a Christmas drink) and letting a DJ entertain them.

Been to Berlin recently? Noticed how everything seems to flow particularly smoothly when you navigate the subway system (the U-bahn) there? But that’s just because it’s Germany, right? I mean, seemingly in exchange for exhibiting certain, shall we say, strict and humorless character-traits, and sustaining themselves on Sauerkraut and other tasteless food (at least according to popular imagination outside of the country), Germans can at least be sure that their trains run on time.

Actually, not really. I don’t mean that the subway-trains don’t run on time in Berlin, it’s quite likely that they do. Rather, it seems that they have recently addressed the entire issue of U-bahn efficiency – especially the problem of minimizing transfer times between one line and another – with a bit of higher mathematics, as Holger Dambeck recounts for us in Der Spiegel (Waiting faster).

Consider: you pull into a transfer-station in your one subway train and cast an anxious eye across the platform to where you rather hope the other subway-line to which you want to transfer has a train already waiting there for you. Of course, it’s rare that you’re so lucky; usually you’ll need to get out and wait for some period of time before that follow-on train ever arrives. And sometimes – oh, the frustration! – you do see the train there across the platform as your first train pulls into the station, yet the other train-driver can’t even wait a minute and instead pulls out of the station just as you are arriving! (more…)

Coming up on 9 November of this year is a significant anniversary, namely 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Coupled with that will be all sorts of related 20-year commemorations: of the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, the fall of Ceausescu in Romania, etc., but also the end of West Berlin as a very unique enclosed outpost of the West in the middle of Communist-controlled territory. Writing in Die Zeit, Wolfgang Büscher wonders whether it wasn’t all just some bizarre dream:

Was there really a West Berlin – this walled-in, haunted city? Sunk into the past twenty years ago, she is to us today as distant and fantastic as the Moon.

Nice, but Büscher’s aim is ultimately not to wax lyrical about his forgotten West Berlin, as we can see from his piece’s simple title: “City of Spies.” Or, if you prefer, Operationsgebiet (“operations area”), West Berlin’s designation in the files of the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, the infamous East German secret police.

For it turns out that the Operationsgebiet was a veritable playground for the Stasi during the entire period back when there existed ideologically-hostile West and East Berlins. This shouldn’t be so surprising, though, if you think about it. One the one hand, West Berlin was a completely-enclosed area right at hand, in fact right next to what became the East German capital. And on the other, the Stasi was known to be very good at its job. Anyone who knows anything about what the DDR (“German Democratic Republic”) used to be like knows about the 100,000 or so inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (“unofficial co-workers,” or IM) the Stasi managed to plant among the East German population – basically police-spies tasked with reporting on anyone who expressed dissent, seemed planning to flee the country, and the like. This could be your child’s teacher or your neighbor (in fact, it probably was one of your neighbors) – it could even be your husband or wife. (more…)

It’s all a bit bizarre: Here at EuroSavant we consider the Economist’s on-site blog Certain Ideas of Europe to be something of a watered-down competitor, in that its (anonymous) writers evidently command a few European languages themselves and take advantage of that often to remark upon noteworthy articles in the European press (really only the French and the German). Yet in its own day-after Obama-Berlin coverage, what else does Certain Ideas of Europe choose to highlight out of reaction to Obama’s Berlin speech from the German Fourth Estate than a breathless piece from the Bild Zeitung (Britons: think The Sun; Americans: maybe The New York Post but – as we’ll see – with a bit greater tolerance for female nudity.) The blog entry is entitled Obama and the ‘BILD girl’. Wow – 27-year-old Bild reporter Judith Bonesky (stifle the puns!) finds herself together in the gym of the Ritz Carlton hotel with HIM! Oh, he’s much taller than she had expected! They exchange some “How are you?”s! Then he goes and starts hefting some impressively-big weights, in such a manly fashion, without breaking a sweat! Naturally, when it’s time for him to go (he’s got a speech to deliver), she grabs her chance for a smugshot with the candidate. (more…)

. . . and the weather is certainly continues to cooperate for the Democratic presidential candidate’s much-anticipated speech this evening at 19.00 at the Siegessäule, which after all will be an open-air affair. The website of the regional state media company, Rundfunk Berlin und Brandenburg expects only a chance of clouds and no chance of rain. Temperatures during the day in Berlin will peak at 27º C (= 81º F – getting a little high for Northern European standards, believe or not), but will of course cool down to more-comfortable territory by the evening. Perfect!

You can certainly expect a broad run-down of tomorrow’s reactions in the German press (and, possibly, elsewhere in Europe) to the Senator’s speech and the event in general on this site from tomorrow – so stay tuned!

Some EuroSavant entries virtually write themselves. What’s the hottest thing going on now on the American scene – or, put another way, where can you find all of America’s top TV anchor-persons?

Super Star!

Traveling with Obama, of course! And while the itinerary to the first part of his overseas trip – to the Middle East and South Asia – is somewhat unclear, deliberately for security reasons, we can be more sure about where he is going to be in Europe during the second half, and when. Everyone knows already that the high point – the only public address he is scheduled to give – will occur in Berlin next Thursday evening, 24 July. There’s already been somewhat of a controversy over where he is to be allowed to give that speech. That has now been resolved, but let’s take a look at what further details are available from local Berlin sources. (more…)

One thing you can say about Czech president Václav Klaus, he’s never loath to let people know his opinions. Perhaps that’s good for a head-of-state, you might say – we don’t want any slippery focus-group-pandering politician in that top office, even if it’s mostly ceremonial! – but there’s a better case to be made that, in fact, it’s not so good. Consider this: heads-of-state generally carry the title “president,” but only in that major subset of the world’s countries which call themselves (in one form or the other) “republics,” having at some point in their histories discarded the king/queen/prince/duke representative of the hereditary, unelected system of rule that emerged in most places out of the mists of history. But a lot of other countries have still kept their king/queen/prince/duke around; so they’re not republics, although by now the sovereign generally has only a fraction of the political power he/she once wielded. (more…)

Everyone knows you can find anything on eBay. Heck, for the right auction-winning price you can pick up Britney Spear’s used chewing-gum. And remember back when that guy tried to use this forum to auction off his kidney for transplant?

Presumably the functioning of eBay Deutschland is a bit more decorous (but maybe I simply don’t want to initiate some Google searches to try to find out). Still, there’s one thing that eBay Deutschland doesn’t offer (nor, as far as I now, the original American variety), and that is jobs. Paid work happens to be what a lot of Germans are looking for these days. That very real fact, and the possible connection to an eBay-like facility to address the problem, are what went through the head of German medical doctor and entrepreneur Alexander Stillfeldt about nine months ago. The result was JobBerlin.com, precisely an on-line forum for seeking and winning all kinds of work, for now just in the Berlin/Brandenburg area of Germany. So reports Nikolaus Doll today in the “Economy” section of the Berliner Morgenpost (He Who Demands the Least, Wins). (more…)

Time to go back to the €S bread-and-butter: the media survey. Of the recent spate of bombings in Istanbul, perhaps? Much too serious (e.g. Turkey’s September 11 – from the NRC Handelsblad); maybe later.

Instead, now that popstar Michael Jackson has run afoul of California’s “Three-Tykes-You’re-Out” law (not my line, alas; it’s Jay’s), it should be interesting to see what the press has to say about that in one country where his fans are probably even thicker-on-the-ground than they are in the US, namely Germany. There is indeed plenty of coverage to choose from the German mainstream (on-line) press; we’re not going to be able to get to it all.

But wait: One of the many articles is from the Süddeutsche Zeitung describing the American media as “Obsessed” with Michael Jackson. (more…)

In its continual quest for innovation, today EuroSavant reverses the matrix, so to speak. (No, not “Matrix” – there will be no more discussion here of that pseudo-philosophical, black-leather-and-Ray-bans film series). Usually I take a topic and go see what newspapers in a given national press have to say about it. Granted, occasionally it’s just “newspaper.” Today, though, I present you reporting from today’s Volkskrant on a couple of topics – a smoker’s responsibility, a singing trash can – mainly because, as far as I can tell, that paper is alone in staying on top of these vital issues.

To start with: Did you know that, when someone who has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for most of his life dies prematurely from cancer, that is basically his own damn fault? You can read all about it in Gauloises Home-Free from Lung Cancer. (more…)

Today’s topic for a press review is of course the summit held yesterday in Berlin between the leaders of the EU’s “Big Three” – Germany’s Schröder, France’s Chirac, and Britain’s Blair. The subject on the table (but, as it turned out, not the only subject) was Iraq – where to go with regard to that country’s rebuilding process, what posture to take going into the crucial meetings around the opening of the UN General Assembly to occur this following week, and how to respond generally to the Americans’ patent need for a bit of assistance there.

You remember from our past discussion, here, that two of those three (Schröder and Chirac) already met last week, also in Berlin. Now, that occasion was supposedly not for the express purpose of meeting one-on-one per se, but rather to mark the first-ever joint session of the combined German and French cabinets in the German capital. That event had been planned in advance, but nonetheless it gave the two heads-of-cabinet a convenient opportunity to confer in advance of their meeting yesterday with Tony Blair, and confer they did.

What’s going on when there’s to be a three-way meeting, but two of the three have their own little meeting ahead of time? In such a case the suspicion has to arise that the thing has really metamorphosed into, in effect, a two-way meeting, between the already-met (in a posture of solidarity forged during their previous get-together) and the third, late arrival. And don’t forget yet another meeting still, that huge meeting later this week at the UN General Assembly, which will be attended by most of the involved heads of state, and which will be marked by meetings between Chirac and Schröder on the one hand and President Bush on the other – separate meetings with each. This three-way meeting in Berlin looks an awful lot like a training-session for those all-the-marbles meetings in New York. A by-now-common preparatory technique among politicians preparing for a big debate is to find a preliminary sparring partner who can best imitate the opponent that politician will face when he is later debating for real – could Tony Blair have unwittingly been fooled into assuming this role for Messrs. Schröder and Chirac, ahead of their one-on-one conversations with George W. Bush in New York?

Among the many English-language dispatches covering the summit, the Washington Post’s report ends by recounting the “embarrassing question” the three leaders encountered at their joint news conference: Was Blair seen by the other two as simply “Bush’s envoy to the talks.” Oh no, no, they hastened to answer – Chirac even magnanimously said “I want to pay tribute to the vivid imagination of the last journalist,” i.e. the poser of the question. The other common elements you’ll be able to read about in most all the coverage were that all three agreed that the UN must be given a “key role” in Iraq, but disagreed on how long it should take to do that, Chirac demanding that this take place “within a few months”; and they all at least agreed that “we all want to see a stable Iraq,” in Blair’s words. Nothing very radical there.

But the English-language press – usually – is not EuroSavant’s happy hunting-ground, nor are the common elements that everybody is reporting the usual grist for its mill. Let’s take a look at reporting and commentary from the host nation – Germany – to see what wrinkles and unique aspects of the summit are presented there. (more…)

Perhaps a solution to the Italo-German tiff that has been the subject of recent €S entries was there all along, in Bundeskanzler Schröder’s very backyard – if he could have only thought of it in time. But it’s too late now: the Love Parade, that yearly festival in honor of techno-music and “Love” generally held in Berlin’s Tiergarten kicked off on schedule yesterday despite past threats to its very existence from the Berlin municipal authorities. An emergency (federal German) government allocation for flying Italian opinion-leaders up to the German capital to take part might have worked wonders for relations between the two countries. As the on-line photographs accompanying German press coverage make clear, instead of “blonde beasts” they would have encountered quite a few “blonde beauties,” ready to party (or, indeed, even “blond breasts”), with no other thought than to “invade” their own city park, and to a techno beat. (more…)

Going through the Dutch press today, I ran across an article that sheds further light on the workers’ revolt in the DDR (East Germany) in June, 1953 – in the daily Trouw, formerly a religiously-affiliated journal, now simply a respected, mainstream Dutch newspaper. It is entitled Duitsland/De revolutie waarover niemand sprak – “Germany/The Revolution that No One Talked About.” (more…)

Enough – enough already! – of the Czech Republic and its EU accession referendum. They voted “Yes” – “massively,” some would say, at 77,33% – so congratulations to them. Now it’s time to move on, beyond the Czech future to . . . the German past because, after all, it’s the 17th of June. (more…)

It comes perhaps a bit too late – a reminder to the German public of Germany’s past great-power involvement in the Persian Gulf region would have been useful in the diplomatic wrangles preceding the War in Iraq – but the Süddeutsche Zeitung recently had a entertaining article about project for the Berlin-to-Basra “Baghdad Railway” (in German only). I guess they had to be true to the anniversary aspect: it was one hundred years ago, on 13 April 1903, that the Bagdadeisenbahngesellschaft (i.e. the business company set up to build it) was established at a lavish ceremony in Constantinople attended by Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was more than just a planned railway; even unbuilt, it carried tons of geopolitical implications for relations between Germany on the one hand and Russia and Great Britain, in particular, on the other. Then World War I intervened, and it never was finished.