Not for the first time, Americans appear to be slightly confused about events in France. The mass demonstrations that began as a protest against President Emmanuel Macron’s “climate-change” taxes gave comfort to conservatives here, and not without reason. The new levies on gasoline and diesel…
Christoph Irmscher reviews a new translation of Uwe Johnson’s massive, masterly year-in-the-life novel, ‘Anniversaries.’
“I wasn’t born chancellor,” said German leader Angela Merkel in an ad for her 2009 reelection campaign. She repeated the phrase in late October at a press conference to announce her coming resignation as chairman of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Recent state elections have…
Germany cannot decide whether migrants or xenophobes are a bigger threat.
Christoph Irmscher reviews Benjamin Balint’s book on the international legal battle over the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.
Two things can be bad at the same time.
Christopher Caldwell on the euro and the damage it wrought.
Plus, Philip Van Cleave's suspect defense.
To judge from Western newspapers, the elections on June 24 in Turkey brought a crisis for democracy. The “crisis” is that Turks will continue to be governed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the perennially popular Islamist former mayor of Istanbul, for whom they voted overwhelmingly, and not by Muharrem…
Jews worry too much. That seems to be the point of a recent article in the otherwise sensible Economist. Sure, two German rappers won that country’s highest music award by bragging their torsos are “better defined than an Auschwitz inmate’s” and vowing to “make another Holocaust.” But, says the…
Noir series now on Netflix vividly captures the contradictions and dynamism of the Weimar era.
The key to reading history of Nazi Germany, a wise professor once explained to me, is to attempt to understand the logic and mentality of those who embraced the Nazi movement without ever losing sight of what an ultimately absurd and fundamentally evil project theirs was. This is the approach…
President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on the European Union, in what would be an economic counter-strike to Europe’s expected response to impending steel tariffs.
The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski was born in the ancient capital of Lvov, but cherishes no early memories of the city. Lvov was occupied by the Germans at the time of the poet’s birth. After the Red Army occupied the city at the end of World War II, Zagajewski’s family was forcibly repatriated—or…
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
When the nationalistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept into the national legislature with 13 percent of the vote in the fall, the American op-ed industry boomed but Germans mostly took it in stride. The country has had populist parties since World War II, even extremist ones. They have…
It was a busy news week.
They have come to Bonn, Germany, some 25,000 diplomats, scientists, and lobbyists from some 200 nations to put flesh on the bare bones of the climate agreement signed two years ago. That’s when members of the congregation, gathered in Paris, pledged to limit further global warming to 2 degrees…
I recently saw a sportswriter on social media paying tribute to a deceased editor he’d had the pleasure of working with. “The best editors are a psychologist, a friend, an idea person, a life vest,” he wrote. “Every story written is a trust fall into an editor’s arms.” I don’t doubt this sentiment…
On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Berlin
Berlin
Angela Merkel and the alliance of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with the Bavarian social conservatives of the Christian Social Union (CSU) won Sunday's German federal elections, granting Merkel her fourth consecutive term as chancellor. But that is not the real news out of the…
Readers will recall that just before memories of the Confederacy became an existential threat to national unity, Americans were worried about another—and surely more plausible—menace to the United States. In early August, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator who has been successfully testing…
I spent a dreary half-week in Helsinki a few years ago. It was mid-March. Short days, empty streets, damp snow blowing off the harbor. The Finns I met said: “Come back in July. There’s nothing like a Scandinavian summer.”
Chinese president Xi Jinping is headed to the G20 meeting in Hamburg later this week planning to paint the town—no, not red—but green. Using President Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate deal as an excuse, Xi will present himself as the new savior of the environment. As he…
Just when it looked as if the professionals in the Trump administration had taken over administration of trade policy, leaving the president to handle the rhetoric, someone in the Trump camp recalled that some 70 years ago—in 1947—23 nations signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),…
Weeks after Germany’s Cabinet announced a plan to fine social media companies over their users “hate speech” and amid efforts to push similar restrictions across the European Union, authorities are cracking down on individuals whom they have deemed to have crossed a line. The New York Times…
In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.
In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.
Not since 2011, when Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi was captured on a wiretap disparaging the size of her backside, has Angela Merkel suffered so grievously from the boorishness of allies. Donald Trump, on his first diplomatic visit to Europe, strong-armed the prime minister of Montenegro. He…
Long ago, or at least it seems, before "covfefe" and the Kathy Griffin fiasco, Donald Trump decided it wise to use social media to escalate a spat with Germany.
President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday morning to amplify comments he made during the European leg of his overseas trip. He controversially, and indelicately, invoked one of his key issues — trade policies that put America first, or fail to — in a meeting of E.U. leaders last Thursday, during…
The UK's Telegraph newspaper published an interesting report last week, the upshot of which was that Germans laugh very little. One in three Germans laughs fewer than five times a day. "When they do allow themselves a chuckle," writes the Telegraph, "it's more likely than not to be at the expense…
On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the incident Monday at a Berlin Christmas market that left 12 people dead and dozens more injured is a "terrorist attack." Here's the New York Times with more:
The last German offensive of World War II began at 5:30 a.m. on December 16, 1944. The rank-and-file German soldier thought he was giving Paris back to the Führer for a "Christmas present." The more experienced Wehrmacht commanders knew that, even should they reach the Meuse or—more…
History matters, except to politicians.
The historian Jeffrey Herf's profound new book shows that German-animated left-wing terrorism targeting Israel was not a tactic but rather part of a long-war strategy to destroy the Jewish state. Academic study and journalism on the now-defunct East German Communist state and radical West German…
Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country's consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of…
"Excessive" is the word that Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch president of the Eurozone countries, used for the Obama Justice Department's decision in mid-September to seek mammoth fines from Deutsche Bank. The German bank's various mortgage-underwriting violations were committed in the days before…
Germany is blowing up again over migration. The Saxon town of Bautzen has, like dozens of similar places across Germany, a barracks for some of the million or two Middle Eastern migrants who have been streaming across the Mediterranean for the past year-and-a-half. People in Bautzen aren't used to…
The BBC reports:
A surprising German poll showed Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) tied for second place with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) just before this weekend's regional elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The incumbent Social Democrats are at 28 percent, the CDU and the…
How on earth does Angela Merkel think she is going to get re-elected?
Poland's government has passed a law, upheld by its constitutional court, "that significantly limits the rights of people whose property in Warsaw was seized during or after World War II, and their descendants, to apply for restitution," according to the New York Times. The law sets up hurdles…
The Iran government tried to obtain nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons technology from German companies, according to a new report from the Jerusalem Post. Here's Benjamin Weinthal, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, reporting from Berlin for the Post:
A state museum in Munich returned Nazi-looted paintings to Nazi officials rather than the rightful owners after World War II, according to charges from a British NGO. Researchers with the Commission for Looted Art in Europe found that after the war, the Bavarian State Painting Collections sold art…
Not many people had heard of Frauke Petry, a pretty and very sassy 40-year-old chemist, until she started talking about how a country without borders is not a country at all and railing against the political establishment. It is natural for Americans to think of Petry as a kind of German version of…
"Suddenly there was a hand on my bottom . . ." was the rather atypical headline that ran in Germany's ordinarily conservative daily newspaper Die Welt on January 4. It described a riot-like series of sexual assaults and robberies carried out on New Year's Eve in the center of Cologne on the…
On the death of the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt last week, The Scrapbook has two observations.
Give a man a reputation as an early riser, as the old saw goes, and he can sleep until noon everyday. The same phenomenon evidently applies to bad reputations as well. Brand Donald Trump a bigot, and suddenly every policy he endorses, no matter how innocuous or mainstream, becomes repugnant.
Until mid-September, the half-million migrants who had been marching northwards into central Europe seemed like the Old World equivalent of Hurricane Sandy survivors. Families uprooted by the war in Syria were seeking safety, according to this view of things. It was sad to see little girls sleeping…
Moody’s must have it in for France. Sure, its economy is moribund. Sure, its trade unions are among the most intransigent in the world. But surely the socialist government deserves some credit for one of the most significant reforms in 200 years.
Have you ever had two dinners in one night? I did, more than 20 years ago, in Budapest. My buddy Todd and I had gone backpacking through Europe, hitting 11 cities in 30 days. As students, we were careful not to overspend, staying at pensions and hostels and crashing at my former host family’s house…
Secretary of State John Kerry defended the Obama administration's decision to take the Iran deal to the United Nations before the U.S. Congress votes on it. Kerry made the remarks in an interview this morning on ABC News:
Two big deals were signed this week, with one thing in common – can-kicking. The Eurozone countries, more precisely Germany, kicked the Greek debt can down the road for three years by lending the already over-indebted country another €86bn. And the P5+1, the permanent members of the UN Security…
France needs Greece more than Greece needs France. So long as the Greeks grab the headlines with their defense of their unreformed economy, no one seems to notice that France is in violation of EU rules on the size of the allowed deficit, has such sustained high-level unemployment that its young…
April turns out to be “Remember-a-Nazi Month.” A 93-year-old Auschwitz guard, a former member of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS unit, is on trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. He says he “morally” shares the guilt for taking cash and belongings from the prisoners as they entered the camp, but…
The German chancellor bestrides Europe like a colossus. She sets economic policy for the 18-nation eurozone. She says “If the euro goes, Europe goes”, by which she means that the currency’s value favors German exports to her eurozone partners, and makes it more difficult for them to sell their…
In Athens in mid-January, two weeks before the election that would make 40-year-old engineer Alexis Tsipras Greece’s new prime minister, a bunch of cleaning ladies explained to me why they planned to vote for his party, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza, for its Greek acronym). We met where…
According to this Reuters headline, Germany is getting its game face on
German chancellor Angela Merkel has cautioned that the adventurism of Russian president Vladimir Putin would not remain limited to Ukraine, or even to other countries bordering on Russia. Since Russia seized Crimea in February-March 2014, Putin’s provocative campaign has included imposition of…
Berlin
For over a year, Germans have expressed mounting outrage at revelations of American espionage in their country. The opportunity to shake one’s head and wag one’s finger, especially at uncouth Americans, is one that many Germans enjoy, and Washington’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s…
Condemnation of Israel for its conduct of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza continues unabated. The chief accusation, heard time and again, is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have either been cavalier about civilian casualties or are intentionally inflicting them. Israel and its defenders, for…
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the foreign and domestic surveillance practices of the National Security Agency have inspired a great deal of anger around the world, but nowhere has the fury been stronger than in Germany. “Goodbye, Friends!” read the front page of Die Zeit last November, when it…
In a little noticed interview President Obama did with German media last weekend, he defended his positioning on the NSA by saying, "I am one figure, one man in this broader process."
The death of Manfred Rommel last week, at 84, ended a life that might be taken as a metaphor for contemporary Germany.
Berlin
There is something futile about breakfast meetings. Breakfast ought to be where you dissipate the irrationality of dream-life and find your way back to a clear view of the things you care about in the waking world. Alcoholic memoirs are full of where-the-hell-am-I stories, some funny (“I seem to…
Frankfurt "For the first time in this election I'm feeling nervous," one FDP member just confessed. And he should be. ZDF's final poll (Politbarometer) was released, and the race could not be tighter. At the moment, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is holding steady at 40 percent. Its…
Frankfurt
Wiesbaden, Germany
Berlin
Last week, the New York Times ran a piece on the dire demographic problems facing Germany. The short version: Germans aren’t having enough kids, and as a result the economy is in trouble and there are all sorts of logistical problems—vacant buildings that need to be razed; houses that will never be…
President Obama told a German audience today that the U.S. lags behind other countries because Americans don't speak enough foreign languages. It’s not the first time he’s expressed the sentiment: back in 2008, Obama said, “It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English,…
At an event in Germany, President Obama said American youth lag behind their European counterparts because they are not taught "a second and third language." Via the pool report:
In Germany, President Barack Obama expressed gratitude on behalf of the American people "for some very important German immigrants, Anheuser-Busch."
Today, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, President Obama paid appropriate tribute to the brave East Germans who rebelled 60 years ago against Communist dictatorship:
President Barack Obama, speaking today in Berlin, cited German philosopher Immanuel Kant:
The White House pool report reveals that only 6,000 will be in attendance for Obama's Berlin speech today:
Friday evening, the State Department released a joint statement from the June 10-11 "U.S.-Germany Cyber Bilateral Meeting." The meeting was held in Washington.
Since the Shermans of General Patton's Third Army crossed the Rhine on March 22, 1945, there have been American tanks in Germany. No more, as John Vandiver of Stars and Stripes reports.
Bjorn Lomborg claimed on John Stossel's television show last night that money isn't being spent well to combat "global warming":
The little island of Cyprus is not behaving as other European countries desire and this, according to Bloomberg, is irritating German Chancellor Angela Merkel who “told a closed-door meeting of legislators in Berlin today that she’s annoyed the Cypriot government hasn’t been in touch with the…
In Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Vice President Joe Biden sounded relieved. "It’s a delight to be back in Germany," he said. "I -- the President, since I’m the Vice President, sends me mostly to Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a pleasure to be back in Germany. And it’s a pleasure to see…
The Third Reich hovers over German history.
Germany appeared over the past several months to have finally fallen in line behind European Union efforts to stiffen economic sanctions against Iran. But in late October a group of German parliamentarians dealt a blow to the campaign to isolate Iran’s rulers. Bundestag Members Bijan Djir-Sarai of…
September 12 was a momentous day for Europe. It saw three separate events that in a powerful way may come to remake the European Union. First, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that the nation’s parliament can ratify a new, permanent rescue fund for the eurozone, called the European Stability…
On August 24, 2012, the German daily Tagesspiegel reported a dismaying decision by the German Academic Exchange Service, or Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). The agency decided in favor of continued cooperation between the University of Potsdam’s Institute for Religious Studies (IRS)…
A German court has ruled that male circumcision is a crime. "Who cuts boys for religious reasons is liable to prosecution for assault," a report in the German-language Financial Times Deutschland reads, via Google translate. "Neither the parents nor the right to freedom of religion guaranteed in…
Today's the twenty-five year anniversary of Ronald Reagan's powerful Brandenburg Gate address in Berlin, Germany. Watch here:
Debtors of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your IOUs!
America is the best house in a run-down neighborhood: The famous BRICs are crumbling.
Berlin
Arid Uka, the 22-year-old Kosovo native who shot and killed two American airmen at the Frankfurt airport in March of last year, was sentenced to life in prison by a German court on Friday. Despite the terminology, however, a “life” sentence in Germany does not in fact mean life, and Uka could be…
Last week Germany reclaimed its status as the leading power in Europe. In the two years since it became apparent that Greece was, essentially, bankrupt, there have been dozens of emergency meetings of the countries that use the common European currency, the euro. Most of the euro-using states…
Jonathan Steinberg presents the fabled German chancellor as both an egomaniacal hypochondriac and a political-military genius: “He is the statesman who unified Germany in three wars . . . a hypochondriac with the constitution of an ox, a brutal tyrant who could easily shed tears, a convert to an…
Berlin
"It seems . . . that we are in fact dealing with a new form of right-wing extremist terrorism,” German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich announced last month, following the revelation that a trio of neo-Nazis from Jena had been responsible for the murder of nine “foreigners” in Germany, as…
Berlin
Washington Post: No health care rationing here. Move along.
We are all Europeans now. Doubt that—and just try to get news about the American economy on the financial news networks on any morning. No luck. Lots of talk about German chancellor Angela Merkel’s balancing act—trying to keep from being turfed out of office, while still sending Germans’…
Arid Uka, 21, a German-Albanian Muslim who killed two U.S. servicemen and wounded two more at Frankfurt Airport on March 2 of this year, will go on trial in a German court beginning August 31, on two counts of murder and three of attempted murder. The dead Americans were Senior Airman Nicholas J.…
With the debt ceiling debate behind us, now might be a good time to get back to the biggest problem currently facing the world economy: the eurozone. While the European debt crisis may have slipped off Americans' radar screens in the past weeks, its significance has not diminished.
In Western Europe, Fukushima’s power reactor disaster has produced a loud round of anti-nuclear power reactions. Germany says it will phase out atomic power by 2022, and the Swiss insist they will shutter their reactor fleet by 2034. Earlier this month, the Italian public rebuked Prime Minister…
Berlin—On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New York brought charges against Arid Uka, a radical Islamist who killed two U.S. servicemen and wounded two more in Germany’s Frankfurt International Airport in March.
The issue of nuclear power will be front and center when German chancellor Angela Merkel visits Washington this week. Consider the front-page story in the May 31 Washington Post: “Germany to shut down nuclear plants by 2022: Decision in aftermath of crisis in Japan is a turnaround for Merkel.” The…
Berlin—Since President Obama ordered the special forces strike that killed mass murderer Osama Bin Laden earlier this month, the German government has grown increasingly reluctant to help Washington find terrorists who are fighting U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Berlin—Many European reactions to the recent murders by radical Islamists of pro- Palestinian Israeli filmmaker Juliano Mer-Khamis and Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni replicate the typical recurrence of the same: Shift the blame to Israel in an a priori fashion without delving into existing…
Berlin
Benjamin Weinthal reports for the Jerusalem Post:
Berlin
Arif Uka is a 21-year-old German-Albanian Muslim whose family came from the ethnically divided region of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo. He is being held by German police after the shooting deaths Wednesday of two U.S. Air Force members, and injury to two more—one seriously—in a group headed for…
Speaking to more than 10,000 supporters in Duesseldorf on Sunday night, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once again the source of some controversy across Germany when he called on his “compatriots” – many of whom hold German passports and were born there – to strongly resist…
U.S. frustration with German chancellor Angela Merkel and her foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, seems to have reached a breaking point this week. Germany’s recalcitrant position about shutting down Iran’s main financial conduit in Europe – the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank (EIH) –…
The below photo appears on the first page of yesterday’s edition of the German daily Die Welt:
“We can only find the ways to communism if we get started and try them out, whether in the opposition or in the government,” Gesine Lötzsch, co-president of the German Left Party, declared earlier this week.
Germany’s journalists, human rights activists, and taxpayers are paying a painful price for its country’s woefully flawed “critical dialogue” policy with the Iranian regime.
Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation is the principal fundraiser for WikiLeaks and indeed, on its own account, WikiLeaks’s de facto financial manager. In “Tax Deductible WikiLeaks,” I noted that donations to WikiLeaks via the foundation are even tax deductible for German contributors. This is because…
Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote,…
The German equivalent of Charles W. Freeman Jr. has surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin. His name is Christoph Heusgen and he is a senior adviser on the Mideast to German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Berlin
Last month, the joint “Media Academy” of Germany’s two public television networks, ARD and ZDF, hosted a three-day seminar in Wiesbaden on the topic of “Islam in the Media and in Society.” As reported in Germany’s Islamische Zeitung, or “Islamic Newspaper,” the final day of the seminar featured…
It’s been awhile since a German chancellor’s pronouncement caused a global reaction. But Angela Merkel’s remarks—to a conference of the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union in Potsdam—that multiculturalism hasn’t worked in Germany, and that the attempt to build a multicultural society and…
In the annals of mind-bendingly obfuscatory teaser lines, the following from the New York Times surely must be given pride of place: “Germany may have secured one of the new nonpermanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, but with the rise of China, Europe’s influence is waning.” The teaser leads…
Berlin
Berlin
Berlin
Other than among associates of Feisal Abdul Rauf, one could well believe that 9/11 “trutherism” is largely a thing of the past. The main target of the “9/11 truth movement” was always, after all, the supposedly nefarious cabal otherwise known as the Bush administration. With the end of President…
Berlin
Late last month, EU Home Affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced the resumption of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), under which American counterterror investigators have consulted and analyzed selected data on international bank transactions originating in Europe. (Note that…
Berlin
Another interview and another controversy for Thilo Sarrazin, the embattled board member of the German Bundesbank. Last autumn, Sarrazin found himself embroiled in controversy and accused of racism following the publication of a wide-ranging interview in which he questioned the capacity for…
Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, offered the following justification for not traveling with his gay partner to Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries: "We want to encourage the idea of tolerance around the world but we don't want to achieve the opposite either by acting imprudently."
On Monday, German authorities announced that they closed down the Taiba mosque in Hamburg. The mosque achieved infamy as home to several of the 9/11 plotters under its previous name -- Al Quds.