Zounds! When you finally get a bunch of people willing to stick their heads above the political parapet, why do people become so intent on shooting them down?

Anti-Euro-Partei: Alternative für Deutschland gerät in Turbulenzen http://t.co/ANI6ig97Dd

April 23, 2013 3:09 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

For there’s a new political party in Germany, as of a week ago last Sunday, the Alternative for Germany. Here’s a taste of their homepage, so you can see what they’re about:

Chose the Alternative!
Enough with this Euro!
The Federal Republic of Germany is stuck in the most difficult crisis in its history. The introduction of the Euro has proved itself to be a fatal mistake, that threatens the prosperity of us all.
The old parties are all crusty and worn-out. They persistently refuse to recognize and correct their mistakes.
Therefore we have founded the ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY!

Whether you welcome this development I suppose depends on what you think of the euro. At least it testifies to the openness of the German political scene, that a new party can be founded so easily. There are drawbacks to that as well, though, as any political scientist could tell you. Anyway, any party has to receive at least 5% of the vote in any German parliamentary election – state or federal – to get its members into that parliament. Lately it had seemed that the only new political parties being formed were from the Nazi fringe. (more…)

Even for people coming from neighboring countries, moving to Germany involves making some cultural adjustments, and one of the main ones involves name-titles: Germans love them! They include them in their passports, for example; they even include them in raised-letters on their credit cards. Put another way: if your German counterpart has earned one (e.g. Prof., Dr.) you better be darned sure that you use it when addressing that person orally or in writing (until you get close enough to address him/her with “Du,” if ever) – and in writing, for the case of the particularly active academic, you are expected to keep track of them all (e.g. “Dear Herr Prof. Dr. Dr. Schmidt!”).

However, there are inklings that things might be about to change:

EXKLUSIV: „Dr.“ nicht mehr im Pass: Grüne starten Angriff auf Deutschlands Elite http://t.co/w8lctH7wI1

March 4, 2013 6:31 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@handelsblatt

Handelsblatt Online

What this is about is that Germany’s Green Party has submitted to the Bundestag a proposed law that would would ban the “Dr.” title from official documents such as the passport and ID card.

Why this now? Well, the “Dr.” title has lost a bit of its luster in Germany lately due to a widely-publicized string of plagiarism scandals. First there was Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a politician of Angela Merkel’s coalition partner, the CSU, and at one time German Economics Minister (2009) and then Defense Minister (2009-2011). But then someone discovered that he had committed widespread plagiarism in writing his doctoral thesis, and soon he was out of government.

(Hey, this guy’s full name is Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg – the “zu” alone tells you he comes from a noble family. So why did he feel he needed to insist upon adding to all that with a “Dr.” in the first place?!)

That was swiftly followed by more cases of plagiarism in high places. These involved two MEPs from Germany’s Free Democratic (FDP) Party, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis (yes, of Greek descent) and Esther Silvana Koch-Mehrin. Both had their doctorates withdrawn; both, however, remain MEPs. When the same plague arrived last year at the doorstep of no less than the Federal Education Minister(!), Annette Schavan, she did – eventually – resign her position.

You could say, then, that “Dr.” is not really all that it used to be, even in Germany. Thus the Green Party initiative, but the article goes on to point out that no less an Establishment figure than current Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble suggested the same thing back in 2007, to no success.

Solar power: Sorry, but the US is not tops here, for one thing Congress is still mired in recriminations about the loan guarantees that went to the bankrupt Solyndra. As for the Chinese, they have made rather more progress, to the point of allegedly “dumping” polysilicon solar panels on the US market.

But it’s the Germans who are really into solar. They claim to be the world’s biggest solar market at present. And they have just scored a major coup, as we hear from Die Welt:

Erneuerbare Energien: Saudi-Arabien unterstützt Umsetzung von Desertec http://t.co/93C3FnEs

February 20, 2013 3:52 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

Yes, there’s still a heck of a lot of oil in Saudi Arabia, but there is also quite a lot of sun constantly beating down on its desert sands. And the Saudi authorities are sensible enough to want to do something to exploit that. Well, that’s understating things somewhat: they want to invest $109 billion through 2032, so that by that time they want to be generating 25 gigawatts of power from solar-thermal plants, and a further 16 gigawatts from photovoltaics.

It’s a German “civil society initiative” called the Desertec Foundation (site in English) that is about to sign an agreement with the Saudi governement to be in on the ground floor of this effort, by establishing a Saudi company to be called “Desertec Power” whose mandate will be “above all planning, execution, local value-added [Wertschöpfung] and running the installations,” but also the “closely related themes of education, training and employment.”

Apparently Desertec Power will rely mainly on so-called Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology, which is not photovoltaic but rather uses parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays in salt-water tanks and thereby store the energy, so that it’s available even when the sun goes down – and also can contribute in some way to providing desalinated water, another thing the Saudis prize highly.

You can click through to peruse the photo at the top of the article if you need some idea of what CSP arrays look like. (It’s a picture of them in Spain; they’re not yet in Saudi Arabia, the contract hasn’t even been formally signed!) Here in this post I’ll give you instead the grip-&-grin photo of the two principals in this deal. And just as with a Saudi official you can expect a name along the lines of Ahmed al-Malik (whom we see to the right, in Arab garb), with Germans I’m afraid you sometimes run the risk of silly-sounding names: that’s Dr. Thiemo Gropp to the left. And Thiemo has got the desert-dollars.

You have heard of the MOOC, right? That stands for “Massive Open On-line Course,” truly the great Internet innovation of 2012. No less than on-line guru Clay Shirky has suggested that MOOCs – offered through sites such as Coursera, edX, Udacity and others, and surely more on the way – threaten to be to universities what Napster was to music.

For now, though, they simply offer fantastic (and free) on-line higher education opportunities (but beware, the required time commitment is usually considerable). Whether YOU are aware of these or not, rest assured that the Germans now are as well, after an article provocatively entitled Harvard For All appeared first in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and then, more significantly, on the website of Germany’s leading intellectual weekly, Die Zeit. The lede:

Study for free with the country’s most famous professors: The on-line courses of the US’ elite universities makes that possible. Only who will finance this hoard?

Well, financing for now is somebody else’s problem. This should really set off the landslide (GE: Erdrutsch) of German students into these MOOCs, for their capabilities in English are often excellent. I know that Coursera courses (of which I have taken/am taking a few) routinely attract students in the tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, but I bet this article alone will be responsible for at least a couple thousand more on an ongoing basis. Then again, these MOOCs are explicitly built to scale, so that should not cause any new problems in particular – the course’s discussion forum might just be a bit more crowded with student comment and response.

Also, there have already been some MOOC efforts in Germany. This article mentions an on-line IT course now being taught for the second time by an Institute at the University of Potsdam (seems to be in German) – but also (nota bene!) the course in English on “Ideal City [sic] of the 21st Century” given by the Leuphana Digital School of the Universität Lüneberg – free, of course, unless you want a paper certificate sent to you at the end – that will begin registration in a few days on January 9. Note that taking this course will involve being assigned to a workgroup of about seven fellow-students from all over the world within which you will be expected to collaborate to complete group assignments; if those turn out to be evaluated as the best, so that your team comes in as #1 in the course, you’ll win an expenses-paid trip to Berlin to meet your fellow group members in the flesh!

Finally, Iversity is a Berlin-based start-up (subsidized by German government funding, yet its site and most of its courses are in English) making a beginning in this MOOC space while also branching out to research groups and conferences.

Here, let me ask you this (answers and/or commentary as usual welcome at the €S e-mail address): Does Turkey currently face a military threat across the Syrian border? At least through the air?

Those are the important questions now before the German parliament, or Bundestag:

Luftabwehr für Türkei: Patriots-Debatte zwischen Skepsis und Fremdscham http://t.co/RSZflivE

November 19, 2012 5:09 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@BMOnline

Berliner Morgenpost

Or rather: they are supposed to be before the Bundestag, as we learn in the Berliner Morgenpost article. Rather incredibly, though, it actually seems that the German government was ready to deploy Patriot anti-aircraft missile units to Turkey just on its own authority.

But Homey don’t play that, as opposition politicians are now reminding the German public. Indeed, as a spokesman for the opposition Socialist Party (SPD), Rainer Arnold, maintained in a separate newspaper interview, the German “Supreme Court” (Bundesverfassungsgericht) has made it clear in its decisions that such a deployment outside the country must be approved by the Bundestag.

If you ask Arnold’s boss, the SPD’s faction-leader in the Bundestag, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, it’s not clear-cut that Turkey lies under any threat. And his Green Party counterpart, Jürgen Trittin, will be glad to tell you – you don’t need to ask – that in fact a UN mandate (presumably from the Security Council) is also necessary for such a deployment. (That’s his own opinion, though, not that of the Bundesverfassungsgericht.)

On the other hand, the article also says that Turkey had asked for – or was very close to asking for – NATO assistance of that kind, so that this can easily be viewed as a case of providing solidarity to another NATO ally. That’s certainly the line that the governing coalition has taken up; some leading spokespersons profess to be ashamed that there is even any doubt that Germany is willing to come help.

Then again – is there really a threat? German deployments outside Germany for decades (after the mega-deployment known as WWII) never happened at all, but in any event are very sensitive matters domestically – and the latest one that is just winding down, to Afghanistan, did little to inspire confidence. Anyway, the nature of the Turkish situation is not decided in Berlin, yet, and so neither is the whole issue of Patriot deployment.

If you examine the phenomenon closely, there’s a curious aspect to the current European economic crisis, whose most outstanding (but not sole) manifestation is the sovereign debt crisis. I mean looking beyond the threat to the common European currency, to where you see a marked imbalance in economic fortunes. Things are bad – very bad – in Spain, especially in Greece, but in Southern Europe (and Ireland) in general, but then things are rather good in Germany and its own ring of associated economies, the Dutch and the Austrian, but also the Polish (and Slovak) and to a lesser degree the Czech.

Why is that? Hermann Simon is a German, and also Chairman of the Board at the consulting firm Simon Kucher & Partners, and he put forth his ideas in a substantial article that appeared in Germany’s newspaper-of-record, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a few weeks ago. Actually, his piece is but an hors-d’oeuvre to the ideas he sets out in his new book – in German only.

The one-phrase summary for Germany’s success – and that book’s title – is “Hidden Champions.” Germany is overwhelming dependent, not on its domestic demand, but on its exports. The business establishment there is very good at that game. But it’s not large firms which are responsible – Simon mentions that even France has more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than Germany – but rather the smaller firms (famously known as the Mittelstand) that do killer export business even though most people have never heard of them – the Hidden Champions. Of the 2,734 names on the list Simon compiles of them, fully 1,307 are German (and many of the rest are Austrian or Swiss).

How do they do it? Simon conveniently (unluckily?) lists thirteen reasons: (more…)

Free movement of goods; free movement of ideas; free movement of money; free movement of people: these all used to be points of pride for the European Union, milestone-accomplishments as it succeeded in bridging national differences to create unprecedented levels of cooperation between European states. And along with that, unprecedented levels of trust; all of those freedoms required each participant state to have confidence that the others would not let them down and cause them to regret such openness.

Now “freedom of movement” once again seems to be under peril, as can be seen in today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung exclusive article Berlin and Paris want to bring back border controls. This is all about the EU’s Schengen Agreement, begun in 1985 and expanded since then to include most, if not all, member-states in a regime where travellers are not checked at “internal” EU borders between member-states but, on the other hand, “external” borders between member-states and non-member-states are policed ever more carefully, since someone getting past those then has free access to other states party to the Agreement.

Or at least those external borders are supposed to be carefully policed. In reality, doubts have arisen as to whether this really is the case, particularly when it comes to asylum-seekers making their way from North Africa across the Mediterranean, usually to Italy. When the pressure got turned up last year due to the Libyan civil war and many thousands more attempted this boat trip than usual, French confidence that the Italians were performing their proper border-control duties disappeared, to the point that border controls were reimposed for a few days on those countries’ “internal” common EU border – in violation of the Schengen agreement, of course. Denmark last year also chose unilaterally to reimpose controls on its border with Germany for a while. (more…)

In case you didn’t notice, Germany lost its President a month ago. Don’t worry, it was no great tragedy. After initial resistance – including trying to intimidate the editor-in-chief of Germany’s most-sold newspaper into withholding a particularly damning news-article – Christian Wulff finally decided he needed to resign after embarrassing revelations finally emerged concerning a loan for a house he had received in the past, and denied receiving, from a prominent businessman. So not tragic – just sleazy, certainly in light of the standards the Germans usually like to uphold post-1945, and thus also rather embarrassing. It’s little wonder your local German ambassador/Goethe Institute/German expat down the street was less than keen to draw this news to your attention.

Naturally, now they need to pick another one, and in Germany that is done indirectly, by a one-time body (the Bundesversammlung) composed of all the members of the lower house of parliament (the Bundestag) plus an equal number of state delegates, totalling 1,244 people in all. But Chancellor Angela Merkel moved fast to gain approval from almost all the main parties for Wulff’s main opponent the last time, Joachim Gauck, to become the new president. So he’s a shoo-in for that, although the German Left Party (Die Linke) has obstinately put forward its own candidate anyway, Beate Klarsfeld.

And with all that, Germany finds itself thrust backward into the 20th century, in the opinion of Stern writer Lutz Kinkel:

Gauck und Klarsfeld: Willkommen im 20. Jahrhundert!: Die Wahl des Bundespräsidenten setzt uns in eine… http://t.co/330BzfeP

March 17, 2012 8:35 am via stern.deReplyRetweetFavorite

@sternde

stern.de

Look at the candidates, Kinkel says. Joachim Gauck, a Lutheran pastor, gained fame as a dissident in the former Communist East Germany. When the Wall fell, he was appointed as the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi archives, or at least what was left after the Stasi had done their best to destroy them as the DDR fell. In Germany his last name has even been elevated to the status of “KIeenex” or “Hoover”: to “Gauck” someone is to go see whether he/she might have a file kept on them by the Stasi, and if so, what it says.

Then there is Beate Klarsfeld. A journalist, she has spent most of her adult life (along with her husband) hunting down ex-Nazis, such as Klaus Barbie, Maurice Papon, and others. At times her anti-Nazis efforts have perhaps gone too far – if you define “too far” as being sent to jail – including her most (in)famous incident in 1969 when she slapped the current West German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, because of his history of working for/in the Nazi Party during the Second World War (and, again, that was not the only time she has been jailed).

Look at them! Both are admirable, driven people – but what “made” them was fighting the old wars of the 20th century, the struggle against the Nazis, the struggle against Communist dictatorship! Haven’t we finally moved on from that, Kinkel asks? On the other hand, did not Christian Wulff seem just perfect for this new era? Big business; bribery; bling-bling; Bundespräsident – surely that’s what we’re all about following the financial crash/scandals of the last few years. After all, a President must reflect his people – just take a look across the Rhine to France!

Even if Kinkel’s analysis is borne out, at least Germany is not being propelled too far back into the twentieth century. A little of that may do no harm; a lot, not so much, historically speaking.

The beginning of the year coming up, 2012, offers a rather bittersweet anniversary. Do you remember? It was from midnight on 1 January 2002, literally as fireworks still lit up urban skies, that euro banknotes first issued from ATM machines inside the 12 original Eurozone members, and that banks and merchants first returned eurocoins in change, all of those with a national emblem reflecting where they had been minted on one side.

No prize for guessing why any commemoration of this 10-year milestone is lacking so far in the press – everywhere I look, really. For 2012 promises to be a difficult year for European national finances, and therefore for the euro; to many, an exit from the Eurozone of one or several states is likely, and from that possibly even the common currency’s “collapse” (although I think that, no matter what, there will be a rump core of states – Germany, Netherlands, Finland, etc. – still using it for quite a while).

But enough of this depressing talk! We have all read and heard quite enough of it, at least before the onset of the holiday season (when the bureaucrats and bank officials in charge left their desks for a while).* Let’s rather follow the Luxembourg lead and consider the euro from a different perspective:

http://t.co/eNBpc2Z7 Dix ans de l’euro Pas vraiment de mixité dans les porte-monnaie http://t.co/b3mtHfyx

December 27, 2011 12:40 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@luxembourg_news

news luxembourg

That perspective is “integration,” always a hot European topic: to what degree are the various European peoples mixing with each other and getting along while they do so? Except that here, in this essential piece from the French-language Luxembourg paper L’essentiel (no byline), the subject is rather the degree to which all the various eurocoins are mixing with each other in people’s pockets. The lede:

Ten years after the arrival of the euro, the coins which sport a national symbol on one face are not yet totally mixed in European wallets.

(more…)

Let’s now get away from Dominique Strauss-Kahn – hopefully for quite a while! – and turn our attention to serious matters, like, say, saving the euro. One big roadblock to doing that is the increasing refusal by the electorates of solid, solvent, predominantly Northern European EU member-states to pledge more money to bail out Greece. “Why should we do that,” Germans ask for example, “when those lazy Greeks all get to retire at age 55?”

Now Patrick Saint-Paul of the French newspaper Le Figaro, possibly acting out of some sense of Mediterranean solidarity, offers a riposte that the Greeks can use: Germans go to sleep on the job! Or at least they soon might do so: the article discusses a recent proposal by a high official of the DGB (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, one of the country’s biggest unions) that all German workers should have the right to a “siesta” on the job, i.e. a period in the early afternoon to just go take a nap.

Of course, the suggestion is being offered not as a concession to labor but rather as a clever way to enable them to be even more productive. “A siesta reduces the risk of heart-attack and allows one to resume work full of energy,” states Annelie Buntenbach of the DGB’s governing board. Then there’s this from the inevitable expert-professor, this time one specializing in “psychological biology”: “A rest at noon permits one to make up for a period of weak productivity and occurs just at the point where chances of an accident are at their highest.”

Anyway, Saint-Paul goes on to mention that, although everyone thinks Germans work harder than Greeks, that isn’t necessarily true: OECD statistics purport to show that the former work only 1,390 hours per year and the latter 2,119. But that might just be a difference without any true distinction.

So let me ask, dear reader: What’s your highest level of education attained? What sort of dwelling do you live in? What’s your yearly income?

Most likely you’re not going to answer, and I understand that. (But for those of you with a burning desire to share, there’s always our Facebook fanpage for commentary and discussion – stick that info right on our wall!) With all respect, I’m not even really interested. But many of those among you who are German citizens will soon have to answer such questions in the upcoming Volkszählung or census.

That’s the taz’s Rolf Lautenschläger who rings the bell loudly to remind his fellow citizens of their upcoming data-provision duties in his editorial We are glassy.

But check out his first sentence (it’s also in the tweet): “There’s a census – and no one is interested.” What – Germans are refusing to obey and fill in the forms? That’s rather hard to believe, especially when you consider that this is the first census in the Federal Republic since 1987, meaning among other things that the whole added territory and inhabitants of the former East Germany have still not yet been properly tabulated! (What’s more, not everyone has to participate in this year’s census, unlike e.g. American practice – it’s property-owners and residents of community-owned property only.)

In fact, there were apparently protests and non-cooperation even against that 1987 census, according to Lautenschläger, but that’s reasonable if you stop a bit and think about it. It’s that infamous bit of German history, of say about 70 years ago – not to mention a feature of everyday East German life called the Stasi – that can understandably raise people’s hackles about the government getting its Leviathan hands on too much private information.

In a way, the reluctance people are already showing to cooperate with this 2011 census is related to that. You may wonder, Lautenschläger writes, why anyone can have objections considering how keen people are to neglect their privacy on such Internet mainstays as Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk. (That notion is the inspiration for his piece’s title: “We are glassy,” i.e. it’s easy to see through us to find out what you want.)

But the point is really the opposite. Leave Facebook, etc. to the side – there, we take on voluntarily the privacy risks that we want and that we (think that) we understand. On the other hand, Sony recently perpetrated only the latest in a series of catastrophic breaches of what were supposed to be secured personal data, and there have been some similar home-grown German catastrophes as well (e.g. with Lidl, a supermarket chain, and Deutsche Bahn, where management misused personal data in its fight with unions). Apparently then, Germans-in-the-know are hardly ready to put their confidence in their government’s data-protection abilities. What’s more, they’re likely correct in their suspicions – the former East Germany be damned (and uncounted)!

UPDATE: And you thought I was just being cynical! Check this, again from Die Tageszeitung although not from our friend Herr Lautenschläger:

Translated: “The State emphasizes that Census 2011 data is optimally protected. [However] on-line the first security-holes have appeared,” as freelance (white-hat) experts have gotten to work putting the data defenses to the test. A fake census input-form has even popped up, to which phishing victims can be unknowingly diverted, featuring extra questions not in the original re: sexual preferences! #censusfail, one would have to remark; try again, try better.

Yes, as if you don’t have enough to worry about these days . . . but the decision-process is now starting to get in gear for who will get to host the 2018 Winter Olympics! We’re reminded of this by Evi Simeoni with her article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, brought out on the occasion of the recent deadline for submission of official “bid-books” from candidate cities to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Understandably, Ms. Simeoni is particularly interested in Munich’s bid for the honor, which was delivered to Lausanne in person (because that’s simply what you do) earlier this week along with the documents of competitors Annecy (France) and Pyeongchang (South Korea). What follows from this point is inspections by the IOC’s Evaluation Committee to each site (to happen 1-3 March for the Bavarians), followed by formal presentations at the Lausanne headquarters on 18-19 May and the announcement of the decision at an IOC meeting in Durban, South Africa, on 6 July. (more…)

I recently covered here the Deutsche Bundesbahn’s troubles this year with operating their trains satisfactorily in extreme-ish weather, both hot and cold. But – How could I forget? – there has always been a bigger problem with the German trains, one that shows its ugly face year-round: they’re damned expensive! Now, anyone familiar at all with transportation and/or public-sector economics will have already known about this, whether s/he has ever travelled on the Bundesbahn or not, for this is an affliction shared by most public monopoly transportation systems requiring substantial prior capital investment (therefore also e.g. for city public transport systems): since it’s generally messy and often even politically unpopular to play the Grinch and show any resistance to escalating wage-demands from unions representing the labor required to keep these systems running, the costs and therefore ticket-prices inevitably rise higher than the rate of inflation. For myself, then, as much as I otherwise like the German trains, I tend to only travel on them as a result of some special offer and/or early booking which offers considerable savings. (more…)

What is to become of General Motors’ European subsidiary? The European auto-market is overcrowded with suppliers, that’s clear; Opel needs a guarantee of money, from someone, in order to stay on its feet financially and be able to compete. Yet the source from which the company thought it could gain the guarantee it needed – the German government – has been growing cool to the idea in light of the many new demands on its money from elsewhere (e.g. Greece). Long-time readers will know that I’ve been covering Opel’s recent travails more-or-less consistently; you can update yourself on the situation from my last blogpost on the subject here.

But now firm decisions are finally being made in this matter by the German authorities – or at least are seeming to be made. For those interested, and with the required German language skills, the ongoing saga can even be followed fairly closely on the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed. I know: it’s that sort of thing that you are glad to leave for me to do instead, and I’m pleased to oblige. (One caveat: @Deutschland_ only follows material from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.) But for now, let’s go “over the jump” to this blogpost’s full article, since a couple of tweets from that @Deutschland_ feed need to make an appearance. (more…)

The word came in earlier this morning on the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed that I follow for EuroSavant purposes (it’s only in German):

The tweet refers to an interesting article in Der Spiegel, Economic crisis accelerates dying-out of hospitals, and normally is something I would gladly re-tweet.* But then I realized that, when it comes to news about any European country’s health system, I owe my readers a bit more than that in view of the couple of posts I wrote on that subject in the recent past, especially one on the same German system that astute readers will have perceived as particularly heavy in its irony. (more…)

One key factor affecting the entire ongoing Eurocrisis was known to cognoscenti as “NRW” – short for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German state whose local elections on May 9 did much to influence both the nature and timing of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s response to the grave threat to the euro and even the EU arising from the Greek financial problems. That is well and good, but those same NRW elections at the same time had another rather different significance for a separate voting bloc, one not necessarily so interested in the mere potential for collapse of the common European currency. These citizens are overwhelmingly young and male; they usually converse in Java and C++ as easily as in their native German; and they vote for the German Pirate Party, whose disappointing results in that same ballot saw its share of the overall vote drop to 1.5% from the full 2% share it had enjoyed during last Fall’s nationwide election.

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results. (more…)

Writing in the Walloon (i.e. Belgian-French) business newspaper L’Écho, in a piece somewhat sarcastically entitled The euro, our Savior, Marc Lambrechts makes a brief macroeconomic survey of the current European scene and comes up with a couple paradoxes. It looks like everybody is feeling better now about the business conditions, as surveys carried out within the Eurozone among both businessmen and consumers show. But this might be nothing more than spring-fever; Lambrechts prepares us for the shock that first-quarter 2010 economic reports are going to bring, showing a marked slowing-down then (e.g. German GDP drop of 0.4%) caused mainly by the severe winter weather and the sharp drop in auto-sales from the expiry of all those national “cash-for-clunkers” purchase-subsidy schemes.

Surely recovery will come about eventually, although with regard to Europe generally economists at the OECD are not optimistic about that happening until the second half of this year. One way for Germany to expedite that for itself, though (since the Germans earn so much from exports), is to get the euro to fall in value against the other major world-currencies – a process to which nothing has contributed more lately than the continuing confusion in the financial markets over Greece’s fiscal problems, which German obstinacy and tight-fistedness at the EU level has only prolonged. “A curious paradox,” Lambrechts calls this.

UPDATE: Strangely, the performance-vs.-confidence balance seems to be reversed in the US, as per this article from the New York Times.

Back to Health Care Reform. I know: the battle’s over, the President is now out doing his victory-lap, and even some Republicans think that, now that it passed, it’s here to stay.

But remember, this is above all a weblog with a European bent, so – if it makes you feel better – I can let you know (from an article in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel) that a certain turbulence is also currently afflicting that model of social(ist) health care provision, the German Krankenkassen. Those are the non-profit, government-supervised insurance companies that cover the vast majority of Germany’s population and are restricted to basing their premiums solely on the insured’s income. (You’re required to have medical insurance coverage there, of course, with very few exceptions, although if you prefer you can buy it from purely-private, for-profit insurers instead.) As the article reports, the public Krankenkassen are now experiencing extraordinary customer-turnover, often in the hundreds-of-thousands. Why? Because the government authorized them in February to charge those they insure up to €8 (= $10.85) more per month in order to shore up their balance-sheets, and some of them took advantage of that.

That’s right: eight euros per month more! Apparently that’s a deal-breaker for many Germans, who in remarkable numbers have proceeded to resign from the Krankenkassen which implemented the measure (known as the Zusatzbeitrag, or “supplementary contribution”) to go join those which did not. It didn’t help that someone made an elementary mistake about how to implement it, in that they made any interested Krankenkasse have to bill customers directly for the extra amount, rather than just letting it be charged as medical insurance premiums normally are as a wage-deduction collected by employers.

Just a word here, then, to let all interested know that it is not always sweetness & light over where citizens need not worry about medical coverage. (Not that there’s any indication that the firms losing customers are in any danger of going bust – like I say, they are state-supported.)

The tales of mistreated youth at these institutions are continuing to multiply. There was sexual abuse coming from those who were supposed to care for them, to be sure. But far more pervasive was the intimidating atmosphere, often accompanied by violence: heads shoved down toilets; beatings; even confinement for extended periods in cells, like common criminals.

I’m not making any of this up, as I will shortly document, at least for those of you who read German. Yet long-time readers of this weblog – Hi Mom! – will remember my fondness for the “false lead,” where impressions about what a given blogpost is about gained from its opening lines turn out to be wildly off-the-mark. Surely I am describing here the Roman Catholic institutions, run by paedophile priests, whose reputations are now being blackened by accusations leveled against their administrators by former inhabitants? Actually, no; taking as my cue a new article by Alan Posener in Die Welt (Brutal daily life in DDR youth institutions), I am referring to the establishments for problem youths set up and run by the former Communist East Germany. (more…)

Ever hear of the B-61? Sounds like a US warplane, and that’s close but not quite right. Or maybe you’re not interested at all in the B-61, whatever it is – but, to modify the quote attributed to Leon Trotsky, the B-61 could well be very interested in you, at least in the event of nuclear war. For the B-61 is actually the leading thermonuclear bomb in the American arsenal, first designed back in 1963 at the height of the Cold War. And a there was a recent article in Der Spiegel (US Ministry wants to modernize old atomic weapons) about the drive that is now underway on the part of the US Department of Energy (which formally controls all American atomic weapons) and the Department of Defense to spend quite a lot of money to modernize the many B-61s still in stockpile.

Aside from being refreshingly arcane – anybody see any sort of coverage of this at all in the American press? I thought not – how is any of this important? In a couple of ways, actually. First there’s our old friend German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who explicitly campaigned during the last German nationwide election to have the Americans withdraw all of their nuclear warheads from Germany. It’s even a separate policy-point in the coalition agreement that undergirds the current CDU/CSU/FDP federal government in power in Berlin.

Obviously, though, if the Americans are seriously contemplating going forward with B-61 modernization, including for the many such warheads stored in Germany (the exact number is surely classified), then the German Foreign Minister can yell and demand all he wants, but it will remain painfully apparent that he has no say in the matter. Hey, they’re just devices sitting on German soil, each capable of annihilating a major city – but it’s highly unlikely that even Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel herself has any say, either, due to the web of defense agreements governing NATO military installations and US-German relations dating from back when Central Europe was a much more dangerous place.

It’s all something rather alarming to be made aware of, especially if you’re a German citizen, but this still is plainly the main message of this article’s author, Otfried Nassauer, even as he goes on in his article to describe – in what sometimes reads like rather unseemly detail – exactly what the proposed B-61 modernization plans entail. Right now there are five B-61 models, and that’s too unwieldy; those five are to be transformed into just two, namely Model 11 (which already exists and is said to be an atomic “bunker-buster” for tactical use) and Model 12 (brand-new, a multi-use model to take up the roles now covered by all the other models which are to be phased out). Further, in a yet more- explicit sign of the clear intention to keep these weapons in Europe for a long time to come, another aspect of the modernization will involve making sure these bombs are modified so that they can be delivered by the next generation of NATO tactical aircraft, such as the Joint Strike Fighter.

There’s yet another point Nassauer intends to make as well, however. Didn’t President Obama, in his speech to the adoring crowd last April in Prague’s Hradčanské náměstí (Castle Square), speak of his ambition to abolish nuclear weapons entirely? What ever happened to that notion? It’s true that Obama gets the last word in this modernization decision, which he will present in the “Nuclear Posture Review” that his administration is due to deliver to Congress shortly. But – surprise! – no sort of radical move to put aside the proposed modernization entirely is expected. There is too much money at stake, i.e. too many vested interests pushing for it both in DOE and DOD. Indeed, the main point of contention currently is whether the envisioned modernization will end up paving the way for the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons or instead just serve as a substitute for that.

But as for the Germans? Forget ‘em.

Here’s another obscure blast from the past – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better-known by its initials (in French) CERN. Do you happen to remember the brief stir of publicity from around two years ago when that institution’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was finally built and could start smashing sub-atomic particles into each other along a 27 kilometer-circumference magnetic track? That fleeting bit of excitement (among those who cared, at least) quickly evaporated when the huge thing didn’t work quite right when they first flipped the proverbial switch, and so had to be repaired.

Don’t worry, though, because the scientists finally got the LHC to function properly late last year. Or rather, if you do need something to worry about, consider the possibility out of theoretical physics that has been looming ever since the LHC finally started operations, and which was also certainly known about before the gigantic thing was even built. When it smashes these sub-atomic particles into each other, you see, one by-product is black holes – small black holes, to be sure, but there has always been some possibility of one or more of them getting bigger and basically swallowing up the whole Earth. (more…)

On the old media/new media front, a couple of German on-line sources give us an update on how the landscape is evolving over there.

First there is a brief piece in Der Spiegel about the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or FAZ. The FAZ’s fortunes are worth tracking because, like the New York Times in the US, it is really Germany’s own “newspaper of record.” (You can even call it the Teutonic “Grey Lady” as well if you like, since it still publishes no illustrations of any kind on its front page, but always has instead two commentary articles over on the right side, with their headlines in the old Gothic script.) Of course, as with the Times it’s also true for the FAZ that it is currently suffering heavily from declining subscriptions and declining advertising revenues, to the point that it expects to suffer a financial loss this calendar-year “in the area of the high single-millions [of euros]” – the precise number will of course depend upon how things turn out over the holiday period rounding out the year. Still – and here’s a contrast with the Times – management has ruled out any lay-offs. Of course, they’ve also had a hiring-freeze in place for a year, and the “no lay-offs” stance is also dependent upon an anticipated upturn in the paper’s fortunes sometime in the second half of next year, so that it will be able to actually turn a profit through 2010. So maybe the difference here with American employment practice is not the German’s being more “compassionate” in holding on to employees, but merely being more deluded about the future. (more…)

Word is from over there on the West side of the pond we call the Atlantic Ocean that your Great Recession is coming to an end, to the point that the Federal Reserve is starting to move “back toward normal policy.” Well, it seems the same is true for Europe’s largest economy, Germany, as we learn today in the Frankfurter Rundschau: new data out from the Statistical Office there show that there was growth of 0.3% in the second quarter, even though 35 analysts surveyed by Reuters had earlier collectively counted on further GDP-shrinkage by about minus 0.3%.

In fact, that Office reports that there were signs that growth actually re-commenced already in this year’s first quarter, although the cumulative total for 2009 does stand now at minus 3.5% (and is still expected by the government and some leading economic institutes to come out at minus 6% for the year). Even better is the year-on-year comparison with 2008′s second quarter, which itself was minus 7.1%. (I’m assuming all these growth/shrinkage percentage figures are normalized to an annual basis.) Increased private and governmental consumption, as well as construction, get the main credit for the upturn – plus the singular fact that German imports have lately contracted even more than their exports, thus sharpening further the world-beating performance of that champion German export-surplus machine.

Still, you don’t have to be too much of a skeptic to ask “So what? What does this new, surprising, but small growth number really mean?” So the (uncredited) FR reporter turned to a handfull of economic analysts from leading banks and think-tanks to get their opinions. Analysts from Commerzbank and Unicredit (an international bank, Italian in origin) are very optimistic, stating for example that “The recession is over, and has reached its end earlier than everyone thought. . . . According to our calculations we will see a V-shaped recovery in the second half of this year.” Call me congenitally gloomy, but I find the remark from Jens-Oliver Niklasch, of the Landesbank Baden-Württemburg, to be rather more enlightening:

The question is, how enduring [this "end-of-recession"] is. Many problems we have not solved, the banking sector just like before is especially reliant upon the State’s debt-shield. As long as it is not clear that the banks’ capital base is robust, we cannot assume that the Crisis is past. Japan is a cautionary example here.

As we’ve mentioned before in this space, but in other contexts, there is a German general election due on Sunday, 27 September. To mention yet another context: that happens to be the middle-Sunday of the two weeks of Oktoberfest, so perhaps we can expect reduced electoral turnout among Munich polling-places and/or increased incidents of voting-while-drunk.

Berlin, on the other hand, is already having to deal with a new (yet also very, very old) method of trying to provoke a cleft within the body politic, as you can see from the above illustration, and as Die Tageszeitung columnist Ines Kappert – that’s a woman’s name – complains about in a brief essay entitled Aha, Titten (which I won’t translate for you from the German; I think you can get the sense on your own). Vera Lengsfeld is the lady with the green necklace, which stands in stark contrast to her more-natural adornments, on the right side of this electoral poster from Germany’s CDU, or Christlich Demokratische Union, also the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is the similarly-adorned lady to the left. Lengsfeld posed explicitly for this poster, while Merkel’s picture comes from her appearance last year at the ceremony for the inauguration of the new Oslo (NO) opera house, where her choice of apparel excited considerable comment in the German media. (more…)

Die Zeit today brings doleful news: Germany has a relapse! What the unnamed journalist (no by-line) is referring to here specifically is what he calls the “Maastricht Criteria,” according to which EU member-states are supposed to keep their government budget deficits to 3% of GDP or less. (That’s OK as a name, but it would be more accurate to call this requirement part of the Stability and Growth Pact that was agreed to as a pre-condition for the establishment of the euro.) Sure enough, the European Commission now calculates (in a report released today) that the German debt this year will amount to a full 3.9% of GDP – and next year even 5.9%! And all this, the Die Zeit article notes, just two years after Germany had managed to get itself out of the Commission’s bad graces (actually, out of a full-scale official EU “penalty process”) for violating this rule!

Well, to offer a quick bit of economic analysis: No sh–, Sherlock! (more…)

I hate to be a “downer” here at EuroSavant, but nonetheless feel an obligation (as explained below) to bring up recent alarming pronouncements about Germany’s immediate future made by a prominent economics professor there, Dr. Max Otte (full last name: “Otte van Ullstein”) of the University of Worms. The main coverage I found in Die Welt (Crash-guru demands vacation-ban for Germans, no by-line), although that article references and orients itself around a brief interview Prof. Otte recently gave to Berliner Kurier (The crash-professor prophesies: the crisis will hit us this hard), a Berlin-based tabloid. (more…)

Need a little bit of good recession-related news? Maybe even something with “rejoice” in the title? We get that from the mainstream Czech daily Lidové noviny, reporting on recent Škoda auto sales: Germans fall in love with the Fabia, Škoda rejoices. Yes, Škoda’s Fabia (pictured here) was the second-most-sold automobile in the German market in February, 2009, behind only that perennial favorite the VW Golf. At 9,190 units sold, Fabia sales were triple what they had been only the previous month, while sales of the Octavia also improved enough to push that sister Škoda model (more of a luxury auto, I believe) to 19th place on the auto-sales hit-parade of what is of course a very competitive German market. One important result of all of this is that Škoda has cancelled the plans it had to go to a four-day work-week until the end of June; the five-day work-week (meaning five-day pay for personnel) will stay. (more…)

I almost missed it, but here is the article I had been waiting for about the big question now confronting the German government. With Opel allegedly only having about a month’s worth of cash left – should it stay or should it go? We have recently touched upon this affair here, although that previous treatment was shaped around the emergence of an Opel fan club whose members certainly see both a notable past as well as a promising future as perfectly good reasons for the German State to intervene to help see the car company through.

Wolfgang Münchau, of both the Financial Times and Financial Times Deutschland, although evidently German himself, clearly does not class himself among that group of Opel fans. His commentary piece is cheerily entitled Have a good trip into bankruptcy!, and he begins it with the generic tale of what has happened to him at many a rent-a-car stand in Germany: sorry, the friendly lady behind the counter informs him, but we’re all out of our VW, Mercedes, and BMW models for you to choose from, how about that Opel there in the corner? Münchau says that, at such times, he is always sorely tempted to simply rent a bicycle instead.

OK, so it’s evident from the start that Opel can expect no favors from this particular FT/FTD columnist. Unfortunately, the analysis that ensues about why the German government should just stay hands-off and let the firm go meet its demise is precise and mostly incontrovertible. Opel does not embody any sort of key technology that would need to be preserved by keeping the firm alive. (Actually, although Münchau does not bring it up, even if Opel did possess some snazzy proprietal technology, it would inevitably be owned by the parent company, GM. More on this below.) And its closing would not overwhelmingly hit any particular region or industrial sector, he writes. (I have my doubts about the former; Rüsselsheim, a German city in Hesse near Frankfurt and the Rhein and Main rivers where the main Opel factory-complex is housed, would become quite a forlorn place if Opel were to shut its doors.) (more…)

Here’s another entry in the series we seem to have fallen into lately of “Countries Tooting Their Own Horns.” We already have learned, from the Danish, that the Danish economy can be a “supermodel” for the rest of the world, and (from the Belgians) that Belgium is the most-globalized country. Now, as a current article in Die Welt puts it, Germany is the most-beloved state in the world!

Ah yes, we know – those cuddly Germans! But wait: looking beyond the headline, what this is really all about is a worldwide poll, undertaken yearly for the BBC World Service by the firm GlobeScan, asking respondents to react to a list of fifteen prominent countries by stating whether, in each case, they feel that country has a positive or a negative influence on world affairs. This year, for the first time, Germany was tops, with 61% positive and only 15% negative. Canada was second (57/14), the UK was third (58/19).

(OK, the UK was third even with a slightly-higher positive rating than Canada; obviously GlobeScan uses some ranking formula that combines the two inputs. The good thing about this poll is that the sample was a rather-large 13,575 people, from among 21 countries. The bad thing is that I can’t find any mention of it on the BBC World Service website or any affiliated BBC webpages.)

And the losers? In tenth place was China, at 39/40 – yes, despite those marvelous Summer Olympics. In eleventh place came the USA, with 43% evaluating its influence on world affairs as negative (40% positive). Keep in mind that this poll was conducted after Barack Obama was elected president last November 4 – but at least that negative rating for the Americans is down from the 48% that it was in last year’s poll. Then Russia at twelfth place (30/42). Israel is at fourteenth place (21/51), but at least the Jewish state beats out Pakistan (17/53).

Here’s a solution for dealing with hard times, from Germany’s Die Zeit: Game of chance: Rush on Lotto-shops – 25 million euros has its attractions. The lede:

The prospect of winning the Lotto-jackpot of 25 million euros has led to a rush on the sales-points in many places in Germany. Lotto-players file through the tobacco-shops and Lotto-shops one-per-second.

The report comes from on-the-scene in Stuttgart, mainly because the last big German Lotto winner – picked up a €4 million prize last 20 December – came from there. To win that €25 million you have to get the seven numbers picked exactly right; if no one does that in four further drawings, then it will be split among all those who pick at least six numbers correctly for the next drawing.

The article also passes along comment from Klaus Sattler, press-spokesman of the Deutscher Lottoblock that runs these lotteries: “It’s a misconception that people in hard times turn increasingly to games of chance.”