Germany

Monday

Alex Massie

Cheer up! The Greek crisis shows you were right all along

I don’t know whether the joy on the right was worse than the preening on the left last night but as the result of the Greek referendum swept across social media I found myself thinking that any result so cheerfully welcomed by Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Sinn Fein can’t be thought altogether cheerful. Of course you needn’t judge a cause by its followers but when a cause is followed and endorsed by such a collection of rogues, crooks and cranks it’s wise to begin to wonder about it. All this glee seemed especially shabby since, really, it didn’t really seem to be about Greece at all.

Sunday

James Forsyth

German rhetoric suggests that they are preparing to try and kick Greece out of the Euro

Greece has voted No, and resoundingly so. But the reaction from Berlin tonight does not suggest that Germany is prepared to have any further negotiations with the Syriza government. The vice chancellor, and head of the SPD, Sigmar Gabriel has declared that “With the rejection of the eurozone’s rules of the game, which has been expressed in this majority ‘no’ vote, negotiations on further multibillion euro programs are scarcely conceivable.” Given that the SDP is more doveish than the CDU and the CSU on the Greek question, this sounds like Germany has given up on trying to strike a deal and now wants Greece to leave the Euro. Indeed, one

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Why is the FT ordering Greece to do what Germany wants?

‘The Greek people,’ the Financial Times leading article said on Monday, ‘would be well advised to listen closely to the words of Ms Merkel. The plebiscite will be a vote for the euro or the drachma, no less.’ It is interesting how menacing powerful ‘moderate’ institutions can become when popular feeling challenges them. In the eurozone theology to which the FT subscribes, its statement above cannot be true. It is not possible (see last week’s Notes) for a member state to leave the euro, any more than it is for Wales to renounce sterling. Eurozone membership, once achieved, is a condition of EU membership. So the Greeks cannot vote to

Tuesday

Emma Hartley

We haven’t had a pan-European war for 70 years. Why is that?

The EU referendum makes me suspect that the grownups don’t know what they’re doing. I can see how we got to this point but it seems absurd that something so fundamental should be up – not just  for debate but possibly even – for reversal. It is doubly absurd because David Cameron has said that he will be campaigning – as you would expect of a conservative – for the status quo. So why are you doing this? I mouth at the television, wishing heartily that he would fight his internal party battles on his own time. Bewilderment is, it seems to me, one of the main forces behind this referendum. Some

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Angela Merkel’s burden, Ukip’s American flirtation and Gove’s grammar rules

This podcast is sponsored by Berry Bros, The Spectator’s house red. Germany has just as much to worry about from a Grexit as Greece. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, economist Fredrik Erixon and James Forsyth discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on the challenges Angela Merkel faces to keep her beloved European project on the road. It also presents an opportunity for David Cameron to get a better deal for Britain during his renegotiations — can he make the most of the present situation? Freddy Gray and Owen Bennett, author of Following Farage, also discuss Ukip’s flirtation with the American right and the impact it had on the party’s election performance. What role did Farage’s ex-senior adviser Raheem Kassam

Christopher Caldwell

If Merkel shrugs…

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/angelamerkel-sburden/media.mp3″ title=”Fredrik Erixon and James Forsyth discuss the challenges facing Angela Merkel” startat=36] Listen [/audioplayer]German chancellor Angela Merkel may still be the most formidable politician in Europe, but this week she lost a bit of her reputation as the scourge of Mediterranean debtor nations. Greece’s firebrand leftist premier, Alexis Tsipras, actually gets on well with Merkel, however much his countrymen enjoy burning her in effigy and adorning her portraits with Hitler moustaches. In a recent profile of their relationship in Der Spiegel, Tsipras gushed, ‘She has this East German way of telling you honestly and straightforwardly what she thinks.’ His top adviser Nikos Pappas also admires Merkel, calling her

Wednesday

Fredrik Erixon

Greece’s service economy is no match for Germany’s mercantile one

It sounds a bit odd these days but economics was actually invented by the Greeks. Back then, in ancient Greece, the ethos of economics was to keep the house in order and generally manage finances in a way that would make Wolfgang Schäuble blush with embarrassment for extravagant habits. Now economics is about to get a new meaning for Greeks. Perhaps not a science, but Greekonomics is now the art of killing an economy softly. The Greek tragedy is not that it teeters on the brink of default. Greece is going to get its deal – and its euro membership will live to die another day. The deal that is

Tuesday

David Patrikarakos

The one thing that might ensure a Greek deal: fear

On a narrow, sloping street in downtown Athens sits a graffiti-strewn wall that has captured the spirit of a nation. Amidst the spray-painted slogans and flaking posters, a black-and-white stencilled image of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras looks down benignly (beneath a perfectly-observed monobrow) at passers-by. His arms outstretched, dressed in flowing robes and with a halo circling his head, he is Christ come to redeem Greece. Such is the bitter humour that now pervades the country’s capital city as the prospect of financial implosion nears. Tsipras came to power promising to get rid of austerity and take the fight to Greece’s European partners. Reality, alas, proved less accommodating. The

Sunday

James Forsyth

Greece may soon face a humanitarian crisis of its own

Normally, the phrase ‘continent in crisis’ is hyperbole. But it seems appropriate today as we contemplate the situation Europe, and more specifically the EU, finds itself in. In the next few days, Greece could default, triggering its exit from the single currency and financial disruption across the Eurozone. Meanwhile, Rome is on the verge of unilaterally issuing Mediterranean migrants travel documents enabling them to travel anywhere in the Schengen area because—as Nicholas Farrell reports in the magazine this week—Italy simply cannot cope with many more arrivals. Those involved in the British government’s preparations for a Greek exit put the chances of it at 50:50. If Greece did leave, which would

Thursday

Guy Dammann

Country house opera

I stole a blanket last night. Rather a nice one, in fact. I feel bad about it, of course, but guilt is less inconvenient than pneumonia; and after trying to blow-dry my waterlogged dinner jacket with the winds howling through Garsington Opera’s ‘airy’ pavilion, it seemed like pneumonia or the blanket were the options. Forgive the melodramatic, self-justificatory tone. That, too, has its roots in the evening’s diversions, which included a performance of Intermezzo, Richard Strauss’s melodramatic and self-justificatory autobiographical account of a marital misunderstanding. It’s an odd piece, lovely in some ways, trite and misogynistic in others. Some decades ago, after a May Day ball in Oxford, I learned

Monday

Steerpike

David Starkey defends his comments comparing the SNP to the Nazis

Over the weekend, David Starkey caused outrage in Scotland when he compared the SNP to the Nazis. While the SNP MP Kirsten Oswald was quick to dismiss Starkey as a ‘serial utterer of bile and bilge’, others called for an apology from the historian. So, how did Starkey feel this morning having had time to reflect on his comments? Turns out, he didn’t feel all that different. Answering a question on Sky News about whether he regretted his comments, Starkey said he did not, explaining that he stood by what he had said: Starkey said the SNP were a ‘virulently nationalist party’ and blamed political correctness for the backlash: ‘It’s time we call things

Thursday

John Osullivan

Cameron’s friend in Brussels

The Spanish, in their local elections, just elected a bunch of radicals who oppose the austerity needed to keep Spain in the euro. Poland on Monday elected a Eurosceptic challenger from the conservative Law and Justice party. And leaks from the Euro-summit suggested that David Cameron will respond to this rare combination of crisis and opportunity by demanding… well, not much in the way of reforms and concessions. Admittedly these leaks may be feints to mislead all sides about London’s negotiating strategy. It’s early days. Nor is Poland yet a reliable ally for Britain in such negotiations: its government will be divided between a Eurosceptic president and a pro-Brussels administration

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s EU charm offensive must seem genuine

There is so little detail on David Cameron’s talks with Jean-Claude Juncker that it is almost outweighed by the briefing on what the pair ate while at Chequers (a spring salad, followed by pork belly and vegetables and a dessert of lime bavarois). What we were told was that ‘Mr Juncker reiterated that he wanted to find a fair deal for the UK and would seek to help’ and that ‘they talked through the issue at some length in the spirit of finding solutions to these problems. They agreed that more discussion would be needed, including with other leaders, on the best way forward’. Cameron intends to speak to all

Thursday

Norman Lebrecht

Two batons better

The morning after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra failed to elect a music director, I took a call from Bild-Zeitung, Berlin’s most popular tabloid, seeking analysis. Later, they asked me to write a full-page op-ed. Now shut your eyes a moment and try to imagine any circumstance in which the Sun would ever shine an inch of space on an orchestral conductor — unless, of course, he or she was snapped pants down by paparazzi in an M4 layby. Nothing will ever convince British tabloids to overcome their class-based scorn for art and, while we may think of German media as less counter-elitist, Bild readers consume no more Beethoven per head

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Germans propose linking the British renegotiation to Eurozone reform

Wolfgang Schäuble’s decision to link the British renegotiation to changes to the governance of the Eurozone is highly significant. In an interview the German Finance Minister told the Wall Street Journal that he has discussed George Osborne ‘coming to Berlin so that we can think together about how we can combine the British position with the urgent need for a strengthened governance of the eurozone’. Schäuble went on to say that ‘the structure of this currency union will stay fragile as long as its governance isn’t substantially reinforced. Maybe there is a chance to combine both goals’. Schäuble’s comments are the most encouragement that the government has had on the

Thursday

Robert Philpot

Children of Gomorrah

In the early hours of 25 July 1943, nearly 800 RAF Halifaxes and Lancasters launched a 50-minute bombing raid on the Third Reich’s second largest city, Hamburg. The pilots used the neo-Gothic spire of St Nikolai’s church in the city’s historic heart as a landmark and killed 1,500 people. Three nights later, just after midnight, the bombers returned. What was to follow was immeasurably worse. The RAF’s target was the city’s overcrowded working-class districts, Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfelde, to which many of those who had lost their homes in the previous bombardment had fled. Unusually warm weather and heavy loads of incendiaries combined to create a hurricane-like firestorm. In the

Nigel Jones

The devil’s devoted disciple

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie. Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children, in the Berlin bunker, the ‘little doctor’ is still a byword for the black arts of political spin and politicians regularly accuse each other of telling fibs ‘worthy of Goebbels’. The Nazi specialist Peter Longerich, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers a compelling chronicle not because he writes with sparkle —

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 April 2015

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Is this the greatest sculpted version of the Easter story? It’s certainly the strangest

In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve a giant marble David, a very different sculptor named Tilman Riemenschneider agreed to make an altarpiece in the small German town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Since then, things have not changed much in Rothenburg. Though battered during the war, it has been restored to postcard perfection (or rather turned into a perfect place for tourists to take selfies of themselves against a Disneyesque medieval background). And the Altar of the Holy Blood is still there, in the place for which it was made, at the west end of the

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Here’s what a real reform of business rates would look like

Of all the measures talked up ahead of the Budget, the reannouncement of a ‘radical’ review of the business rates was the least concrete in content but the most important in potential impact on the domestic economy, and especially on business investment. This column has banged on for years about the iniquity of a system that imposes the highest local taxes on businesses of any EU country, based on pre-crash rental assessments and bearing no relation to the value of diminishing local authority services. It’s a system that, on top of other economic woes, has brought devastation to town centres — and gets away with all this because it has