Germany

Wednesday

Philip Sime

Forget the ‘Norway model’. Germany suggests UK could get ‘special’ EU status

Britain’s decision to leave the EU sent shockwaves crashing throughout the continent. As Europe struggled to interpret the outcome of the referendum, we heard calls for Brussels to drive a hard bargain with the UK in order to contain the ‘Brexit contagion’. The European Council President Donald Tusk’s warning that the UK must not be allowed to ‘profit’ from leaving the bloc summed up this mood. But now, it seems, our neighbours in Europe are coming to terms with Brexit. And with it, the desire to punish the UK appears to be dampening. Michael Roth, Germany’s European Affairs minister, has this week suggested that a ‘special status’ could be achieved

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Germany turns against EU-Turkey deal

Is the tide in Germany turning against Turkey? It certainly seems to be. A poll today shows a majority of Germans favour ending the refugee deal agreed between the EU and Turkey back in March. The agreement has helped stem the flow of migrants flooding into Europe, making a repeat of the 1.1m people who arrived in Germany last year unlikely. But the deal came at a price: Turkey won a renewal of aid, the prospect of visa free travel for its people across Europe and the biggest prize of all – ‘re-energized’ EU membership talks. Yet for all the bluster talked about the EU deal, it seems that many Germans are

Thursday

Michael Henderson

Munich notebook

It has been a strange week in Munich; a week of deceptively cool mornings, afternoons hot enough to fry eggs and thunderstorms at twilight that have turned streets into streams. A week of reflection, too, capped last Sunday by a service of remembrance in the cathedral, attended by Chancellor Merkel, to honour the nine young lives taken in the shooting at the shopping centre which sent a tremor through Freistaat Bayern, and through the nation. One more tremor. It has been the summer of terror in Bavaria. Würzburg, Ansbach, Munich. But the Münchners have taken it well, in as much as one ever takes these things well. Along Maximilianstrasse, where

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 July 2016

Home The collapse of BHS after Sir Philip Green had extracted large sums and left the business on ‘life support’, with a £571 million pension deficit, was ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism,’ said a report by the Business and the Work and Pensions select committees of the House of Commons. The British economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the quarter ending in June. A man was shot dead at a commercial pool party in Headley, Surrey, organised by Summerlyn Farquharson, known as the Female Boss Krissy, and the Jamaican reggae artist Jason White, known as Braintear Spookie. HMS Ambush, a Royal Navy Astute-class nuclear-powered submarine, was in a ‘glancing collision’ with

Monday

Douglas Murray

Terror is the new normal for Germany and France

Update: This piece was written yesterday and so is already out of date. This morning two armed men entered a church near Rouen during Mass.  They took the priest, two nuns and a number of congregants hostage. It appears that they slit the priest’s throat before themselves being killed by French security forces.  Nobody can think of any possible motive, though people claiming that attacking Christians at prayer is not a traditional Islamist practice have clearly not paid attention to Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt or any number of other countries around the world. Well this is all going very well isn’t it?  I refer of course to the totally unforeseeable, impossible to predict wave

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Germany comes under attack again

For the third time in a week, Germany has come under attack. On this occasion, a Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up outside a festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. Twelve people were injured in the incident last night but thankfully no one else was killed. It’s still too early to tell what the motive for the attack was but one thing does seem clear: nerves in Germany are fraying. Sadly, the latest incident was carried out by a man who was given shelter by a country which took in 1.1million asylum seekers last year. The man responsible for the attack had recently been told his claim for asylum had been

Thursday

Philip Sime

Theresa May’s first day and Boris at the Foreign Office: How the foreign press reacted

A new British Prime Minister is always big news on the continent and around the world. This time around, with Mrs May tasked with redefining Britain’s relationship with the EU, the foreign press has taken a special interest in recent events in Downing Street. One of the big stories aside from Britain’s new Prime Minister taking up her role is Theresa May’s decision to make Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary. Here’s how the press around the world reacted to the news: France: With France bracing itself for a protracted period of arduous negotiations with the UK, Britain’s new Prime Minister is big news across the Channel. Le Figaro goes as far

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The cultural hodgepodge that is Europe

If Geert Hofstede’s name is familiar to you, it might be from pop-science articles explaining a spate of Korean airliner crashes in the 1990s. A widely held theory placed some of the blame on the hierarchical nature of Korean culture; this made the junior pilot reluctant to mention any mistakes made by his superior. If he noticed the captain heading for a hillside, he might summon up the courage to mutter, ‘Perhaps, honoured sir, you might like to pay particular attention to the interesting terrain.’ This contrasts with low ‘power distance’ cultures: New Zealand, say, or Ireland. On Aer Lingus, a stewardess could jab the pilot in the ribs and

Monday

Steerpike

Angela Merkel and David Cameron fail to work out who’s in the driving seat

At times in David Cameron’s EU renegotiations, it’s seemed as though the Prime Minister struggled to be in the driver’s seat. Now evidence has come to light that confirms Cameron’s power struggle with one of Europe’s main leaders. Speaking at the Hay Festival, Neil MacGregor — the former director of the British Museum — let slip the difficulties he encountered when Angela Merkel and Cameron arranged a visit to see an exhibition he on German history from the past 600 years. Of all the objects in the exhibition, MacGregor thought the VW Beetle would make a great prop for a photo opp for the two leaders. Alas, it wasn’t to

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Happy ending

‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era was 1960s Germany; in that context, Baselitz feels he was subversively respectable. ‘For example, I never took any drugs. I have been a very faithful husband, I just wanted to hold on to my wife, I wasn’t interested in straying. I never went on any political demonstrations.’ His major offence, however, was not what he didn’t do but what he actually did: paint figurative pictures. Eventually, fashions reversed, and this perverse behaviour made Baselitz a celebrated figure in the world of art. At 78, he remains vigorously productive. We were

Friday

Alexandra Coghlan

Hit-and-miss Handel at the Göttingen Festival

Ask anyone to name the greatest classical composers and certain names are bound to come up – Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, Bach. But ask them which composer’s music they’d most like to live with for a week, exclusively, and answers will change. Greatness is one thing, but a great festival composer is quite another – someone whose works have not only sufficient quality and variety to stimulate, but also a certain comfort, a clubbable ease about them. Handel is one such, a composer whose music has spawned festivals from London to Halle, Dublin to Tokyo. It’s only appropriate, given the composer’s long association with England, that two of these festivals –

Friday

James Bartholomew

The Spanish argument for abolishing government

On 26 October last year, the Spanish government shut up shop in preparation for a general election. This duly took place in December but then a strange thing happened: after all the build-up, the arguments, the posters and the television coverage, the result was… nothing. The various parties were so balanced, so mutually distrustful and ill-assorted that no government could be formed. Since last October, therefore, there has been no government in Spain. One can imagine that the average political correspondent would think this a terrible problem, maybe even a crisis. The Financial Times has referred to Spain ‘enduring’ months of ‘political uncertainty’. This is assumed to be a matter

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Filming the Final Solution

In July 1986, nine months before he died, I met the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi at his home in Turin. He was in shirtsleeves for the interview and the concentration camp tattoo 174517 was visible on his left forearm. (‘A typical German talent for classification,’ he tartly observed.) If This is a Man, Levi’s chronicle of survival, offers a warning to those who deliver facile judgments of condemnation: only those who have survived the Nazi camps have the right to forgive or condemn. Attempts to recreate the Final Solution on screen were mostly a ‘macabre indecency’, said Levi. The 1978 Hollywood television soap opera Holocaust, starring Meryl

James Bartholomew

Who needs governments?

On 26 October last year, the Spanish government shut up shop in preparation for a general election. This duly took place in December but then a strange thing happened: after all the build-up, the arguments, the posters and the television coverage, the result was… nothing. The various parties were so balanced, so mutually distrustful and ill-assorted that no government could be formed. Since last October, therefore, there has been no government in Spain. One can imagine that the average political correspondent would think this a terrible problem, maybe even a crisis. The Financial Times has referred to Spain ‘enduring’ months of ‘political uncertainty’. This is assumed to be a matter

Monday

Anne Jolis

Obama warns of countries who ‘use trade as a weapon’. Like USA over Brexit?

President Obama has taken his European tour to Germany, where he touted the ‘indisputable’ benefits of an EU-US free-trade pact. Speaking at the Hannover Messe Trade Fair, Obama noted the importance of an agreement as a bulwark against the likes of Russia ‘at this time of uncertainty, including here in Europe, when others would use trade and energy as a weapon.’ Trade as a weapon? You don’t say. Obama’s remarks in Germany came shortly after his visit to Britain, where he bludgeoned Brexit campaigners with the implied threat that Britain would ‘go to the back of the queue’ for a US trade pact if it left the EU. Obama followed that press

Thursday

Douglas Murray

A poem for Erdogan

At the end of last month, a German comedian appeared on German television and read a poem mocking Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. Jan Böhmermann’s satire was directed, among other things, at the laws President Erdogan has been using to lock up his critics. Turkey — which David Cameron is still fighting to bring into the EU — now has some of the world’s most repressive speech laws. Numerous journalists have been arrested for ‘insulting’ President Erdogan and he has even been known to ban Twitter in the country when corruption allegations against him and his family have surfaced online. Yet until Mr Böhmermann came on the scene, one might

Monday

Douglas Murray

Introducing ‘The President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition’

Nobody should be surprised that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has instituted effective blasphemy laws to defend himself from criticism in Turkey.  But many of us had assumed that these lèse-majesté laws would not yet be put in place inside Europe.  At least not until David Cameron succeeds in his long-held ambition to bring Turkey fully into the EU. Yet here we are.  Erdogan’s rule now already extends to Europe. At the end of last month, during a late-night comedy programme, a young German comedian called Jan Böhmermann included a poem that was rude about Erdogan.  Incidentally the point of Mr Böhmermann’s skit was to highlight the obscenity of Turkey already trying to

Thursday

Nigel Farndale

Just join Germany

An argument you sometimes hear from those sitting on the Brence (the Brexit fence) is that it’s a pity the EU couldn’t have stayed the same as it was when we first joined it in 1973. Back then, say the Brence-sitters, it was a trading bloc with only nine members, which made sense. Greece wasn’t a member, nor were Spain and Portugal, never mind Lithuania, Latvia and all those other countries ending in vowels. But if we could go back to that better arrangement — play fantasy politics, as it were — would we, with hindsight, want it to include France and Italy, two of the original nine? Their economies

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 March 2016

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept talking of the ‘next generation’. He outlined cuts of £3.5 billion in public spending by 2020, to be ‘on course’ to balance the books. Personal allowances edged up for lower taxpayers, with the higher-rate threshold rising to £45,000. A ‘lifetime Isa’ for under-40s would be introduced. Corporation tax would go down to 17 per cent by 2020. Small-business rate relief was raised: a ‘hairdresser in Leeds’ would pay none. Fuel, beer, cider and whisky duty would be frozen. To turn all state schools into academies (removing local authorities from education), he earmarked £1.5 billion. He gave the go-ahead

Tuesday

Ed West

Is more multiculturalism really the cure for the EU’s problems?

Germany is on its feet again; the country’s answer to Ukip, Alternative Für Deutschland, made huge gains at the polls, winning a presence in three state assemblies. The shadow of Auschwitz looms over all European politics on the subject of immigration and race, but obviously more so in Germany, and many people are worried. Their growth in popularity may have something to do with the chancellor’s decision to invite one million and counting people from the wider Middle East, in an gesture historians will probably see as the grandest act of folly of early 21st century history. Some people are worried that, along with FN, Ukip and Trump, AfD are