Germany

Friday

Zak Asgard

Cigarettes and currywurst in Big Berlin

I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says,

Thursday

Elisabeth Dampier

Never date a German man

Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution. Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Why France hates Macron

One of the pleasures of spending the summer in France is that I can turn aside from our national problems and concentrate on those of our neighbour. They are similar but gratifyingly worse. You have to know someone quite well before they will open up about their own politics to a semi-outsider. I used to feel the same way when our own politics were chaotic in the aftermath of the EU referendum and French friends would approach me with that characteristic note of smug condescension to ask what on earth was going on. Emmanuel Macron is the ablest President of France since Charles de Gaulle. Yet he is hated across

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

Clerical skulduggery on the far borders of 1830s Germany

Königsberg is no more. Now known as Kaliningrad, it forms part of a small Russian exclave surrounded by Lithuania and Poland. It is probably here that the third world war will start. Before it was bombed flat and ethnically cleansed, the historic Baltic city formed one of the main centres of the German province of Prussia. Old Königsberg was a port and a -meatballs-and-potatoes kind of place, but also one of the battlefields of the Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born, lived and died there. One of the questions he struggled with was how to reconcile the claims of human reason with the need for faith in the divine.

Thursday

William Moore

Border lands, 200 years of British railways & who are the GOATs?

38 min listen

First: how Merkel killed the European dream ‘Ten years ago,’ Lisa Haseldine says, ‘Angela Merkel told the German press what she was going to do about the swell of Syrian refugees heading to Europe’: ‘Wir schaffen das’ – we can handle it. With these words, ‘she ushered in a new era of uncontrolled mass migration’. ‘In retrospect,’ explains one senior British diplomat, ‘it was pretty much the most disastrous government policy of this century anywhere in Europe.’ The surge of immigrants helped swing Brexit, ‘emboldened’ people-traffickers and ‘destabilised politics’ across Europe. Ten years on, a third of the EU’s member states within the Schengen area have now imposed border controls.

Thursday

Salley Vickers

There was no escaping the Nazis – even in sleep

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, who as a Jewish journalist and a communist had been barred from publishing, found her sleep wracked by nightmares that unmistakably reenacted the terrors of the Nazi regime. Deprived of her regular employment, her own dream experiences prompted the subversive if dangerous idea of recording the dreams of her fellow citizens. ‘I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had, as it were, dictated,’ she wrote. Citing a dictum of a Nazi official that in Hitler’s Germany no one has a private life except while asleep, the material she collected demonstrated how dreams ‘as minutely as a seismograph’

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

How governments gaslight

The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping up my entertainment end of things, I’ve forwarded the pictures to multiple correspondents myself. See, news stories have been accumulating – and many similar stories doubtless remain unreported – about Muslim immigrants harassing and sexually assaulting native Germans trying to cool off. In response, some helpful bureaucrat has generated a series of images whose crudely drawn cartoon format makes light of the problem while wilfully, defiantly misrepresenting it. Below ‘Schubsen ist nicht lustig!’ (‘Shoving is not funny!’), a white boy and vaguely brownish boy push a terrified black girl towards

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine

Can freedom of movement survive Europe’s migrant crisis?

Freedom of movement in the EU received another nail in its coffin yesterday after Poland became the latest European country to introduce checks along its shared borders with fellow member states. As of next Monday, Warsaw will start enforcing border controls at crossings shared with Germany and Lithuania.  The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that he felt compelled to introduce border checks in particular to ‘reduce the uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border to a minimum’. The source of Tusk’s angst is the tougher border regime introduced by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz less than two months ago. Under the new measures, German border guards have been

Thursday

Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army

Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing

Thursday

The Spectator

What was the first cyber attack?

19th-century cyber crime M &S and the Co-op have suffered cyber attacks. Cyber crime didn’t quite begin with the internet. The first record of an attack on a communications network was in the city of Tours in 1834, where the Blanc brothers traded government bonds in Bordeaux and bribed the operator of the country’s telegraph system. He placed extra characters in the telegraphs before they were sent on to Bordeaux, providing secret messages that could be read by the Blancs watching the receiving station in Bordeaux. Unlike the M&S and Co-op attacks, however, the ‘hack’ went unnoticed for two years.  All change Friedrich Merz should become only the 11th Chancellor

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Texas is the perfect holiday destination

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

Orphans of war: Once the Deed is Done, by Rachel Seiffert, reviewed

In Rachel Seiffert’s searingly beautiful fifth novel, the author returns to Germany, 1945 – ground she previously explored in The Dark Room, her Man Booker-shortlisted debut. Once the Deed is Done opens with a boy, Benno, looking out of his window at night, having been woken by sirens from the munition works. Elsewhere in the town, Hanne and Gustav discover a runaway woman and young child sheltering in their shed. In the morning, the woman has fled, leaving just ‘the winter child’. Hanne decides to care for her, in secret, ‘because she was a child – just a child – left behind in this cold time… What else could she

Sunday

Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes

Can German cars survive Donald Trump?

In 2003, Donald Trump took delivery of a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a $450,000 German supercar that blended precision engineering with Formula 1 bravado. Photographed grinning over its bodywork in Manhattan, he looked every bit the unabashed playboy flaunting a new toy. Two decades on, he’s threatening to hammer the very firm that built it – and Germany’s car industry as a whole – with a 25 per cent tariff on European auto imports. Germany’s post-Cold War boom was built on a single assumption: that ever-deeper globalisation was here to stay. As we explore in our book Broken Republik and its German sibling Totally Kaputt?, the country’s carmakers made an all-in

Thursday

Douglas Murray

What Europe gets wrong about the far right

The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them to explain in a brief email what they did last week. The exercise is intended to take no more than five minutes but has already lead to howls from many employees. How could anyone expect them to perform such a task? How can one explain the intricacies of supporting transgender opera among the Inuit in such short order? Happily, the new editor is not putting those of us on The Spectator’s payroll through any similar exercise. Nevertheless, something in the global vibe-shift perhaps impels me to mention a little of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Foreign aid cut, Pope in hospital and King pulls a pint

Home Before flying to Washington, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We have to be ready to play our role if a force is required in Ukraine once a peace agreement is reached.’ He told the Commons that Britain would raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2027, funded by cutting development aid from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of GDP. The government surplus for January, when much tax comes in, was £15.4 billion, the highest ever, but far below the £20.5 billion predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Average household energy bills will rise from April by £111 to £1,849 a

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The brilliant uselessness of art

Wonderfully useless Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February). A few minutes from our offices, there are several vast buildings, all lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer, whose sole purpose is to allow hordes of strangers to stare at rectangular sheets of fabric on which are daubed various colours and shapes – most of which quite wastefully replicate things that we can already see with our own eyes in the real world. Across the river, many millions more are spent on small armies of people coming together to bang, scrape and blow bits of wood, metal and brass for hours

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

How far-right might Germany go?

In the Thuringian city of Weimar, opposite the theatre where the National Assembly hashed out Germany’s constitution in 1918, stands the museum of the history of the Weimar Republic. ‘A spectre is rising in Europe – the spectre of populism,’ a plaque reads. ‘Forces long thought overcome seem to be returning to threaten the basis of democracy. The Weimar Republic and its neighbours knew the phenomenon only too well.’ It’s a warning that will be weighing on the mind of Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the man who will probably become Germany’s next chancellor. The federal election this Sunday is the culmination

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The real value of independent schools

Strength of service Sir: Matthew Lynn and Steven Bailey (Letters, 1 February) are quite wrong to deplore the decline of Britain as a manufacturing nation. Manufacturing – especially of the heavy sort – is best suited to a country with plenty of space, little regulation, cheap energy and cheap non-unionised labour. That was once the case for Britain but it is no longer; nor is it so for the majority of European countries. Germany epitomises the folly of mindlessly adhering to manufacturing, as is well explained in Wolfgang Munchau’s excellent book Kaput. Britain, on the other hand, has successfully diversified into services and is now the world’s second-largest exporter of

Monday

James Jeffrey

Who really lost when the Berlin Wall fell?

The fall of the Berlin Wall was meant to have been the crowning moment for the West, and for the principles of empowering liberation and freedom. Obviously so – I used to think. Now I’m more along the lines of, well, yes and no. The fall also seems in some ways to divide the former good times from the current bad times, both for Germany and for the rest of us. Such thoughts came to mind after I headed to Berlin to witness the New Year’s Eve fireworks display, during which the city is turned into the most attractive war zone you’ll encounter. I stayed with my brother, a creative

Thursday

Michael Gove

Labour’s Irish insurgent, Germany’s ‘firewall’ falls & finding joy in obituaries

48 min listen

As a man with the instincts of an insurgent, Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, has found Labour’s first six months in office a frustrating time, writes The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove. ‘Many of his insights – those that made Labour electable – appeared to have been overlooked by the very ministers he propelled into power.’ McSweeney is trying to wrench the government away from complacent incumbency: there is a new emphasis on growth, a tougher line on borders, an impatience with establishment excuses for inertia. Will McSweeney win his battle? And what does this mean for figures in Starmer’s government, like Richard Hermer and Ed Miliband? Michael joined the