This is an outsider’s blog. No inside-track stuff here. I have been living in Germany as a correspondent and columnist for 15 years and the place is still a mystery. All those hidden rituals and anxieties. Strangest of all: the curiosity of Germans about the views of foreigners, their genuine interest in the judgement of [...]
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 6 Kommentare »
For three years in the 18th century England fought Spain. Spanish coast guards had sliced off the ear of a sea captain. It was put into a jar and held up in the British parliament; that was the start of what became known as the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”.
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It is that time of year again. Giggling Japanese girls in Starbucks. Buffoonish British teenagers on the top floor of the M 19 cheering each time the bus brushes against branches. A couple of Italian women with jangling gold bracelets, so charmingly tactile and leaning in so closely to show me their map, that I check later to see if my wallet has been lifted. Yes, the tourists are back again (and my wallet was not stolen; shame on me for even being suspicious), descending on the city like a migrating flock of snow-geese.
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 1 Kommentar »
It is a big anniversary year for Germany. Sixty years since the Berlin airlift and the signing of the constitution, the Grundgesetz. And of course 20 years since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism and the reunification of the country. So Germany should be celebrating a party all year long, right? Wrong. The country is agonising, yet again, over how it should show its joy. Dare I say: Typisch Deutsch?
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Adnan in the Schlüterstraße is famous for its lamb chops (17 euros) and its truffled pasta so it was a bit of a surprise that Gregor Gysi did not turn up at the party for journalist Jan Fleischauer. Perhaps it was to do with the title of his new book, “Unter Linken – Von einem, der aus Versehen konservativ wurde”. Or perhaps he simply wasn’t very hungry. Still the place was full of conservatives – Matthias Döpfner, Minister zu Guttenberg, Wolfgang Bosbach, my God, a whole cruise ship full of Missfelders and Röttgens and Barings – in celebratory mood as if they had just won an election and were dancing on the graves of the Left. And you see their point. For some mysterious reason the Left across Europe (except in tiny Iceland) is in retreat. We have the biggest crisis of capitalism in human memory and what is the hard left doing? Hiding under the bedcovers.
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 0 Kommentare »
Slowly but surely a queue is forming to take over my job in Berlin. “London has become a nest of snakes,” a younger colleague told me, “why don’t you get out of Germany and make some space for us?” This was actually said in a light-hearted way but it expressed a sense of frustration being heard everywhere now that the recession is taking hold. Many older workers realise that their pension funds are not as big as they thought; indeed not big enough to live. So the people known in the US as the Baby-Boomers, and here as the 1968ers, are fighting to hold on to their jobs. “Who says 55 is old? It’s the new 40!” If I had ten euros for every time I heard that slow-witted pseudo-wisdom I would be a rich man by now. Anyway what seems to be happening in the Anglo-Saxon world – and therefore sooner or later in Germany – is that office politics is getting nasty. The oldies are not making way for the young and the result is pent up frustration.
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 0 Kommentare »
The most painful things about recessions, for those of us who still have jobs, are the forced choices.
What do you hang on to, what do you discard? It is as if your life has become a giant house clear-out. Newspaper subscriptions? Out.Listening to the radio in the bath? In. Weekday “business lunch” with SPD guru? Out. Pudding bretzel at the baker in the morning? In. Cinema? Out. DVDs? In. Steak?Out. Mincemeat? In.
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 0 Kommentare »
Have you noticed how old people have been replacing car showrooms on the Ku’damm ? Instead of the traditional practice of hiding the aged away in leafy suburban residences–on the spurious grounds that they need to suck in the forest-ozone and hear the twittering of birds–they are living out in the open, sandwiched between Kaisers and Tschibo. Their new homes are given supposedly glamorous but actually tactless names like Diana( did she not die in a car crash?) or, worse, Phoenix( named after the rock star who died of a drug overdose?), anything really apart from Senioren-Residenz which has a slight aura of decay, of the twilight zone.
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 1 Kommentar »
The editor-in-chief, with that Caligula-like sense of whimsy special to his job, decided it would be amusing to send Boyes on a survival course. Perhaps he had the idea in the bath while playing with his plastic ducks. Or perhaps he was simply sitting around the sunday lunch table in Hampstead with a few fashionable friends. You can imagine the conversation:
Kategorie: Typisch deutsch | 0 Kommentare »
Once upon a time there was a girl who could only convince the world that she was a princess after she lay for a night on 20 mattresses and could not get a wink of sleep. The reason: a pea at the bottom of the pile that had somehow dug into her skin. She was hyper-sensitive and therefore noble.
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