Blog - Typisch deutsch

Kollwitz-/ Ecke Sredzkistraße. You can eat Spanish, Italian, Kartoffelsuppe; from around the corner, defying physics, comes the smell of waffles. So, although it is far too early and far too late to eat you sit down and wait for food. There is nothing to read apart from a menu with spelling mistakes – but there, through the window, you see the Bücherwald. Three man-sized trees with holes cut into them, and books filling the holes. Transparent covers shielding the discreet shelves from the weather. Now, the choice of books may not exactly be to my taste: “Kaufmännische Buchhaltung”, “So schnell geht’s mit Mikrowelle!” , “Biologie und Ideologie”. Konsalik, Gorbachev . But there’s Strube’s “Wagnis und Furcht des Nicolaus Copernicus” , and it’s free, so my lunch hour is saved (gerettet). The idea was admirable: the trees come from the Grunewald because a bright forester wanted to bring the wood into the city; the shelves were devised by female carpenters interested in creative design; the books stir curiosity in kids and adults. As my Grunewald neighbour and cultural Unruhestifter, Konrad Kutt puts it, the trees are a perfect example of sustainability (Nachhaltigkeit) in the city – trees, paper, books, all intelligently recycled; a respect for nature and for reading. Konrad and others want these book exchange centres (you put one in, you take one out) spread across Berlin , the search is on for good design and, of course, sponsors. Someone perhaps in the tradition of old Hans Wall who understood that capitalism and philanthropy belong together. Or simply some bankers who realize that their image will remain terrible as long as they put nothing into the community.

Now I should say that I don’t believe in saving the world, I’m not even sure we should be saving the whales. I start from the principle that you should save your children, yourself, your friends, your pub and your Kiez, more or less in that order. But the book project and its sense of invisible community is close to my heart. Books, it seems to me, have to be liberated, allowed to live their own separate lives. The other day I bumped into a book in the Ku’damm Oxfam shop that I had first given away a year ago, a duplicate copy of Christoph Amend’s elegant book of interviews with wise Germans. It was sold by Oxfam. And then what? Read, given to a neighbour? It looks as if it has been backpacking across Europe and then came back home to wash its laundry. I bought it back.

Naturally, at Oxfam and other charity shops, you feel virtuous because you are certain that passing on and buying books will help save a life in Somalia or at least buy half a donkey in Dafur. The book exchange – it is called book-crossing and has its own website – is something else: an attempt to create a community around a book. At its most basic, you leave a book on the S-Bahn or on the windowsill of a café and wait for someone to pick it up, read it and pass it on in turn. There is something 1968ish about this –Rainer Langhans, Fritz Teufel and the APO-nauts, albeit without the harem – but don’t let that put you off. It is one of many possible intelligent responses to our times. Arte today(saturday 6 Feb), for example, is profiling the work of the designer Judith Milberg who turns discarded microwaves into dog kennels (try not to put the dog into an active microwave), old Wischmoppe into lamp shades.

Book-crossing has a pleasantly childish element about it – in the summer people leave books in a box under a tree in Grünau, not far from the Regattenstraße – but it is also protected by the sophistication of the web. You can register each found book, give it a number – just as a migratory bird is given a microchip – and an identity. Other readers can report its progress across the world. In Germany there are over half a million books already registered in this way, each with its own page, a kind of Facebook for books. There is a magic in this. I like it.

Last time I had a book published in Germany I sent my Praktikantin into the U-Bahn with a copy and instructed her to laugh out loud every three minutes. Ideally I should have engaged a whole gang of Praktikantinnen, like Fagin’s thieving urchins in Oliver Twist, to laugh their way around Berlin ’s transport system. That would have helped sales. I’m finishing another book, a love letter to the Mark Brandenburg, and this time I am going to cut out the laugh-marketing. I’ m just going to place 100 copies in different corners of the city, give them bookcrossing numbers, and see how far they travel. Good luck to them all.

Roger Boyes latest book, Ossi Forever, ein Roman aus der brandenburgischen Provinz, will appear with Ullstein in June.

Wherever you go in Washington there are statues of politicians. At one end of the Mall a giant Abraham Lincoln gazes at George Washington down the other end, Jefferson and F. D. Roosevelt hang around too. Very few young Germans know how Ludwig Erhard looked; every American schoolkid though can describe Jefferson .

Would it not be good if Berlin lost its fear of presenting its leaders in concrete, in bronze and in wood? Is it not embarrassing that the best that can be done for Konrad Adenauer is the briskly walking bronze figure, hat in hand, in Charlottenburg. What a place to put a Catholic – an LSD sex shop and a gay gym behind him, the Erdbeermund sex shop to his right and to his left a sushi bar where I once got food poisoning. (Schreckgespenst der Zukunft, said Stanislaw Lec, “Denkmäler die reden”.) As for Willy Brandt he has been reduced to the dimensions of a gnome and hidden in the SPD headquarters, a place where sane men no longer go. Bismarck is also incognito, in Grunewald. A teenage acquaintance who lives nearby calls it the “dog statue” because his Reichshund seems to be given equal prominence with the founder of a unified German state. Sure Bismarck was a war leader; but so was Abe Lincoln. As for the modern Einheitskanzler, the best that can be done for him is a bust in a shopping mall. You can argue that living people should not be honoured with statues, but where is the sense in that? That’s just voodoo logic. Helmut kohl’s role in history is already pretty clear, why wait for another 20 years?

The fact is Germany needs political models more than ever, before the profession falls completely into disrepute. The new government has been in power less than 100 days and already one coalition partner is being dragged through the mud in the trial of Karl-Heinz Scheiber and the other is being characterized as the political filiale of the gastronomic trade. Little wonder that politicians are less popular than dentists; less respected than window cleaners. The old political masters live on in the popular culture of other countries; just not in Germany . The French say they’re flying to Charles de Gaulle, the Americans to JFK , to Dulles. Passengers to Munich never say they’re landing in Franz Josef Strauss. Now Willy Brandt’s name will be attached to Berlin ’s new airport but I can’t imagine anyone calling it anything but Schönefeld.

The German failure to mythologize the political process, to seek out heroes, is of course (of course) a Hitler thing. But it also reflects the post-war cult of anti-heroic leadership which has been brought to such a numbingly boring apotheosis by the Valiumpolitik Angela Merkel. Typically, she was absent on holiday at the beginning of the election campaign and has been remarkably absent ever since. Not because she is lazy, or because she is a brilliant behind-the–scenes strategist but because she has calculated that the new government, nominally under her captainship, benefits more from her absence than her presence.

Angela Merkel is master of what sociologists call situational leadership; she waits for events and tribal disputes to accumulate. Then she intervenes to set priorities. She does this effectively, but in so doing loses time for the new government at a moment when it should be accelerating. When she is not leading in this way, she is on automatic pilot. Not so much leadership as follower-ship. More precisely, she carefully observes any threat to German national interests and then acts to protect them. It is leadership-on-demand; no-one else in Europe leads in this sheepish way and it was only possible for Merkel because over the past four years she had no real opposition and a terminally weak coalition partner.

Now this passive governing style has to change. The absurdity of the Merkelian position became clear in the second half of last year. Germany has no policy on Afghanistan even though Barack Obama sees it as the central challenge to western foreign policy. For six months Germany has avoided a debate on Afghanistan because Obama had not made up his mind what to do there. Then after a long learning process Obama emerged as a Diplom-Afghanologe and is about to tell everybody (at the Afghanistan conference next week) what he expects them to do. Germany will be unhappy with Obama’s demands but cannot supply a counter argument because it has not developed its own ideas.

So, Angela Merkel is not going to get a statue any time soon. True leadership – the kind that restores trust in the political process –means the willingness and ability to persuade your citizens to do something they do not want to do. Merkel is going to have to learn to talk to the Germans in a different way. Tell them what is happening, what is required, stir enthusiasm for the Bundeswehr, lead a change in social attitudes. Just because she helped topple Helmut Kohl, doesn’t mean that Merkel has his talent. He talked Germans into making serious sacrifices for unification, and he even persuaded them to drop the deutsche Mark for the Euro. Angela Merkel remains top of the German popularity polls because she has never taken the kinds of personal risks that Kohl did. She will have to do a lot better if she is going to rank much higher than say, Kurt Kiesinger, in the pantheon of modern German leaders. I am not even sure she will have an airport named after her. If she does in my lifetime then I look forward to the future newspaper headline: “Fog grounds jets, spreads confusion in Angela Merkel International Airport , Templin”

Sorry these postings are coming late – I’ve been busy finishing a book which I hope you will all read!

I don’t need an Advent calendar to tell me that Christmas is hurtling towards us like a train without brakes. No, I don’t need to open the doors of a calendar with plump little cherubs, all I have to do is read Bild Zeitung. Precisely three weeks before Christmas – same procedure as every year – it carries an article with the headline: Krebsgifte in Kinderspielzeug; wie schlimm ist es wirklich? All Bild wants to do, of course, of course, is protect our children (tip: “Sie sollen keine Speilwaren kaufen, die stark nach Chemie riechen”). Or is it perhaps a subtle attempt to persuade Oma to buy (boring but non-toxic) German-made wooden toys rather than Chinese plastic junk? Whatever the reason, Bild’s annual toy-horror-show is a fixed part of Germany’s hidden advent calendar. Other dates to note: November 23-30, the pre-Advent week, when 32 per cent of German women buy their Christmas presents. No wonder advertising budgets of newspapers improve radically from November 5. Optimal time for a reporter to ask for a wage rise from his Chefredakteur: December 5, after the November advertising figures have arrived, raising his spirits.

            Now I am not claiming that Germans turn into robots, consumer-automatons, at Christmas. But there are, shall we say, distinct buying habits that can be tracked just as ornithologists follow the migration patterns of birds or the hibernation behaviour of grizzly bears. Twenty per cent of German men – OK, I don’t have an actual survey, but ask the shop assistants in KaDeWe – buy presents for their partners on December 23. And on average they take 12 minutes to make the decision. How many couples – ten per cent? – promise not to buy each other presents this Christmas (“schließlich sind wir Erwachsene”)? And how many women end up breaking their word and buying something, which then embarrasses their empty-handed partners who are then grumpy for the rest of the Feiertage? The advent calendar should in any case be extended to December 27: the day when Berliners rush to Tauentzien to exchange their unwanted presents. Open the doors to that calendar window and you would probably see a picture of a frustrated shop cashier tearing out her hair.

            So much for the seasonal rituals. But this year, pre-Christmas strategy seems to be a little different. People are busily mobilising their financial resources in order to keep their Christmas at roughly the same level as every year. The reality is that most Germans feel that they are worse off than in, say, 2006; Christmas is the moment when you realise it. As a result many people are cashing in their reserves in order to spend on presents. The Schmuck-Ankaufstellen are springing up everywhere; I keep expecting my local Kebab shop (which already sells Lotto tickets, Currywurst, coffee and the FAZ) to set up a stand buying and selling gold. The prices of the Edel-metals are going through the roof and jewellers will tell you that more and more women in Berlin are selling their bracelets.

            But there are other treasures too. On the notice-board in Reichelt on the Knesebeckstraße someone is selling his complete Roy Black disc collection. How he must have loved Roy Black! And how sad that they have to be sold in this way, at this time. At my own supermarket, now called Kaiser’s again after undergoing more name-changes that St Petersburg, the notice-board has become a snapshot of a hard Christmas. Somebody offers a biography of Willy Brandt (gebunden, sehr gut erhalten) for 8 euros instead of 25 euros (the seller, surely not Egon Bahr who lives around the corner?), a Herren Lammfellmantel size 52 is going for 100 euros, lots of people are trying to sell their Ferienwohnung (Bad Harzburg, 57 square metres, 58,000 euros) and the prices have been coming down over since the autumn, an Elektroauto mit Fernbedienung for 15 euros, an original verpacktes Autoradio CD for 50 euros. There are Barbies, Playmobil, Astrid Lindgren, Cornelia Funke: it’s as if the whole community is on a leaking lifeboat and needs to shed weight quickly, as if everything has to be converted into cash before December 24.

            Is this not what the Merkel government wants? Spend, spend, spend – boost domestic demand and keep up growth in the coming months? Well, yes. Except that a lot of this money is being spent on goods made in China. The German consumer Christmas is Chinese; 75 per cent of the toys being sold are made there. One factory outside Shanghai produces 10,000 Christmas items for Germany. Plastic snowmen with plastic carrots for noses; Santa hats with bells on; tin angles with harps. The only German item in the German living room in this Christmas is likely to the natural Christmas tree. If you get a practical plastic one with flashing lights that will, of course, be Made in China. So the attempt to increase German growth by encouraging Christmas Kaufstimmung will largely benefit the country that is Germany’s leading rival in the world export tables.

            As for that genuine German tree – you shouldn’t really have it. Sie wissen schon: Klimaschutz. There are some Christmases when you just cannot win. Christmas 2009 is one of them.

Just down the street, on the way to the pub, an executive with two young boys has rented a house with a long front garden. There is no discreet back garden since the S-Bahn runs directly behind the house. So, in the summer life is lived in public view. We see the lady of the house arguing with the au-pair girl; we see one boy hit another and pretend that he didn’t; we see toys scattered over the grass, wooden trains and plastic bricks and lifeless Action Men like some miniature disaster. In the winter, the garden furniture is covered and the au-pair girl back in Australia, but the wooden train catastrophe is still there and so are the boys. I peeked in through the gate briefly the other day and one of the boys spotted me and came running down the path, shouting “Opa, Opa!” Until then it had been a perfectly agreeable day; there had been a cheque in the post and the receptionist from the doctor’s in the downstairs flat had smiled nicely. Put crudely, you do not, in your upper-mid 50s, want to be mistaken for anyone’s grandfather. The boy stopped when he realised his error. I ushered him closer and hissed into his ear: “Tell your mother that you urgently need a pair of very thick glasses.” Then, satisfied that I had made a 4-year-old cry, I continued my path to Floh where almost everybody is older than me.

            But these wintery moments continued all week. On Tuesday I found that I was the only person in a roomful of colleagues who knew that Leonid Brezhnev was once leader of the Soviet Union. I am stuffed, it seems, with perishable knowledge, like a deepfreeze that is full of forgotten out-of-date pizzas and half-eaten Haagen Dazs. Then, on Wednesday, I strolled (on the other side of the road from the myopic grand child) to the bakers, bought coffee and Schrippen, and found myself addressed as “Junger Mann”. There was a time, when I first started to live in Berlin, when I would have been flattered. Foreigners with a basic command of Hochdeutsch often find the crudity of Berlinisch to be the single biggest obstacle to liking Berliners. I don’t mean the chaotic grammar, the missing genitive, the mangled Akkudativ, the passive-aggressive “wa”. We can all sympathise with that. It’s a tricky language. No, it’s the sheer proletarisation of language, the attempt to drag the world down into a basic vocabulary of 350 words. Berlinisch favours the third person – “Na, weeß er denn jetzt, wat er will?“ – and in doing so mirrors the language of bureaucracy. It removes the possibility of poetry, of grace. If you have ever been to a Bavarian wedding feast and heard the sing-song on the Polterabend, you will know it is possible to be both witty and linguistically creative and musical. The problem with Berlinisch is not that it’s dialect but that it forms part of the defensive wall of the insecure Berliner.

            So, “Junger Mann” is, of course, not flattery but irony. What is meant, in fact is: old man. I’m not usually this sensitive. In fact, I am rather contemptuous of the American feminists who complain about being called girls. The US writer Miriam Kotzin was moaning in her blog last week about how she (a woman in her sixties) was addressed as “young lady” by her doctor (who is in his early 40s). “I find an implied hierarchy in the phrase,” she says, “with the person wielding it assuming the power.” Well, maybe she is correct in her analysis. A doctor does have power over a patient. In Britain nurses often call their patients “dear” or “love” or “sweetheart” even though the people lying in the hospital bed might be professors of archaeology or bankers with a heart bypass. In these cases, the terms of endearment hide a kind of embarrassment, a temporary reversal of the social order. It is strange but is not intended to annoy or insult.

            But the use of “Junger Mann” in Berlin is an attempt at Proto-revolutionary egalitarianism. It’s a way of saying: I’m a baker, you’re a journalist; I don’t much like serving you because behind the apron, we’re all the same, flesh and blood. In fact, she says to herself, I’m better placed: you’re old, I’m young. I mused about this on my walk home, a complicated trip because a. I forgot the Schrippen, b. I had to avoid the Opa, Opa house and c. it was raining hard. Back at the office I rang up the one man who is older than me in the office, a Germany expert on the brink of retirement.

            “Lighten up,” he told me. “You’ve been in Germany too long. The Berliners say Junger Mann and Frollein because they forget people’s names. It’s the Amnesia-capital of Europe. Anyway why are you complaining about rudeness? You’re the rudest man I know.” And wo er Recht hat, hat er Recht. Berlinisch is as crude as it is rude but it is the ideal idiom for fatalists. Remember the old Zille joke. He’s sitting at a Stammtisch and his friend reads out from a paper:

            “Hier steht, det bei jeden Atemzuch, den ick mache, een Mensch stirbt.“

Zille thinks deeply for a while.

And replies: “Warum nimmste denn keen Mundwasser?”

I come from a military family and so I can well remember my (English) father’s withering contempt fort he Bundeswehr, its concessions to the individual, its subversive concept of „Bürger in Uniform“. He was, by the standards of the time, an enlightened man but he was sure of one thing: armies had to be strong, otherwise they had no function. And strength meant ignoring dissent. Leadership and a clear chain of command, not democratic consensus. I was an adolescent, in perpetual conflict with my father, and so delighted in praising the Bundeswehr. “If you want blind loyalty,” I told him, “buy a Schäferhund.” He threw a shoe at me.

            The fact is non-German Europeans like me, growing up in the 1960s admired the “Bürger in Uniform” concept because we thought it undermined the army, and we considered all armies to be redundant. Since then, of course, I have changed my mind. And Germany has quietly discarded any pretence of having a democratic military. K-T zu Guttenberg promised this week that he would make the new 6 month Wehrpflicht into an effective training programme but we all know that conscription is doomed in Germany, dead as a dodo.

            And that’s really just fine; it is time for the Bürger to take off his uniform, and soldiers to be soldiers. But what Germany needs now is radical changes in other institutions that are being managed as if they were part of the Prussian military. Hospitals, for example, where powerful Chefärzte are treated like generals who cannot be challenged or contradicted. Academic institutes where professors expect lowly researchers to produce the work for his articles. Or state (öffentlich-rechtliche) television where Intendanten are regarded as commanders on horseback leading the battle for Quoten. All these institutions are stuffed full of talented people yet the old-fashioned chain of command, the muzzling of criticism, throws much of that creative energy away. Why do German universities come so low down on international league tables? Why is German television so poor compared to foreign competition? Not because there is a shortage of intelligent, gifted people but because of the way institutions are managed.

            Germany needs a cultural revolution, an opening up. Take German football clubs. Players used to be working class boys who, in return for obeying orders, could make themselves wealthy. Now players are more articulate; they are young millionaires with advisers, and they want the management to listen to their views. Philipp Lahm quickly found out where that leads. Bayern München will not accept publicly expressed criticism; a soldier is allowed to grumble in the barrack-room but not confront his superior officer. Why did Lahm make his doubts about team strategy public? Because no-one was listening when he tried to express them privately. No wonder that Robert Enke was afraid to go public about his depression. He had seen what had happened to Sebastian Deisler at Bayern. O-Ton Edmund Stoiber damals: Deisler war “eines der größten Verlustgeschäfte” des Vereins. Was Enke scared of becoming a Verlustgeschäft?

            It could be that other countries apart from Germany have these problems; the fear that institutional managers have of losing their authority, of accepting criticism without looking weak. But it is a long time since I have seen a football manager in England, Italy or France behave like Felix Magath. “He is like one of those crazy colonels in the First World War or the Crimean War who would yell at his soldiers so that they would be more afraid of him than of the enemy,” said an English friend after we had watched one of Magath’s tantrums. But football is not war; good, modern management is not based on fear. If your boss rejects intelligent suggestions, if he accuses you of disloyalty for thinking independently, then tell him to buy a Schäferhund. You are not in the army.

Germany is governed by ritual, as strange and as rigid as those of the Japanese. Instead of the oriental tea-ceremony though, the Germans have the Second Breakfast, the elegantly packed, lovingly unpacked Leberwurstbrot, which must be consumed between 09.30 and 10. The other day I went to the bakers for a cup of coffee – my espresso machine still hasn’t been repaired – and found that I had to balance my cup and my Fleischsalatstulle on the very edge of a zinc table because the place was full of orange-glowing rubbish collectors, carpenters and gardeners. The bus driver from the M 19 popped by and so did the policemen who should have been keeping an eye on the local Jewish Mahnmal. “Aha,” said a Tagesspiegel reader, instantly recognising me from the 20-year-old photograph that graces this column, “you celebrate Bergfest too?” Mountains give me nightmares – I have long argued for making Bayern flat – so I didn’t understand the reference. Apparently the Bergfest, and my apologies to readers who have always known this, is celebrated at 12 o’clock on Wednesday because it is the summit of the working week. From then on, it is bergab towards the well-deserved weekend.

            Fine, I thought, I have learned something new. But the next day, while walking the dog, I noticed that all my fellow Bergsteiger were sitting in the cabins of their trucks – the guys from Alba, from the Gartenbaufirma – eating Leberwurst at precisely 09.30. It was like that irritating television advertisement for Knoppers – das Frühstückchen. “Morgens halb zehn in Deutschland”. It is as if the stomachs of the whole German population have been programmed to rumble since their first Pausenbrot at school. How many calories does a German Handwerker need? How many Puddingbretzel have to be consumed before he can successfully check your tyre pressure or fix your sink? How many hours does he spend actually working?

            Many cultures have a 2. Breakfast culture. In Plattdeutsch it’s called Fofftein. We can deduce from the word that the North German spends no more than fifteen minutes on his Brotzeit. The Berliner, according to my investigations, takes 45 minutes. Perhaps a certain Bundesbank director could do the appropriate calculation to see how much time is crumbling away every month. Germany seems convinced that it has made the Giant Leap into a service society – shopping until 21 Uhr on Fridays! – but it is still held back by archaic routines. Or have you ever tried to ring a plumber at 10.15 a.m.?

            The answer – obviously – is to introduce the Anglo-Saxon model. The priority of the new government has to be to persuade the nation to eat the full English breakfast every morning. Scrambled or fried egg, baked beans, grilled tomato, two sausages, mushrooms, fried bread. Tea with milk. Cornflakes or porridge. The resulting boost in productivity should put Germany on the path to growth. XL.

            Now, you don’t have to be a top dietician to work out the problem with the English breakfast. It was devised in the Industrial Revolution to give workers the 3,000 calories they needed to dig in the coalmines; by four o’clock, they had burned up the energy and were ready for teatime. But you don’t burn 3,000 calories by working in a Call-centre. So, there is the risk of getting fat. Not, though, if you use high quality ingredients and eat in moderation. In that case, the breakfast can do you nothing but good. Organic eggs, home-made bread, grilled bio-tomatoes, meaty tight-skinned sausages from Bünger in the Westfälische Strasse. Britain is full of happy 80 year olds who have eaten the bacon-and-egg breakfast all their lives, all fitter than I am. Germany should convert now. Schwarz (the colour of blood pudding) and Ei-Gelb is the perfect political constellation to transform the early morning German diet, to push a Herzogian Ruck through the intestines of the nation. And who knows – maybe you will be able to get your washing machine fixed at halb zehn in Deutschland.

Modern romance began with the film Casablanca. The smouldering saga of Bogart and Bergmann had everything one needed to structure a 20^th century emotional narrative: adultery, betrayal, forgiveness, jealousy, bribery and a spectacular parting. I remember one horrific argument with a girlfriend in the 1970s which ended with her shouting: “I’m leaving the country – don’t try and follow me!”, a line which surely carned a place in Casablanca II. But most of all I remember – as everybody does – the tragic departure in the airport.

            Obviously, we all know that airport was not Tempelhof but every time I went to see someone off there I became a little bit more like Humphrey Bogart. It represented everything good about air travel and I don’t just mean the airlift, that extraordinary model for humanitarian relief. Tempelhof was a reminder that Germany was at the spearhead of aeronautic innovation, and that Berlin used to be a creative hub for engineers, daring pilots, inventors, designers, pioneers.

            If you need to refresh your memory I can only urge you to visit the splendidly elegant Galerie Bassenge in Grunewald. It is Versteigerungswoche there again and among the exhibits are original photographs, catalogues and old magazines that chart the beginnings of aviation in Germany. Exactly 100 years ago, the first Deutsche Fliegerwoche was held on the airfield at Berlin-Johannisthal. Hubert Lathan achieved the first Überlandflug, from Johannisthal to Tempelhofer Feld, building on the work of the Lilienthal brothers and the advances in Zeppelin technology. The first Internationale Luftschiffahrt-Ausstellung (ILA) was held in Frankfurt in 1909 but three years later, a much broader and exciting exhibition was being held in the Ausstellungshallen next to Berlin Zoo. Seven airships and 25 planes – the halls must have been huge.

            All this largely forgotten history is recorded in the Bassenge exhibits. Those were the days when Germany really led the world and when hundreds of thousands of fascinated Berliners gathered in Tempelhof to watch Wilbur and Orville Wright fly round the field. The 20^th century wars turned planes into weapons, but Berlin was still at the heart of aviation when the wars ended. Ullstein-Verlag and BZ awarded huge prizes in the 1920s to German pilots – not because they were trying to subsidise a new air force for a new war but out of a love of sport and engineering achievement.

            Now all that has been lost by closing Tempelhof as an airport. Schnee von gestern, you will say: the referendum has been lost, decisions taken. Well, I understand the Senat plan for Schönefeld and I really do hope that it becomes a major East-West terminus. But the plans for Tempelhof are the product of suburban minds, without flair. A housing estate, a park, a fashion fair. Some of the most interesting ideas in circulation came from outside the closed circle favoured by the Senat. The retired engineer Anton Heyne for example who has been trying to stir interest in “Tempelhof – Hof der Tempel”: each major religion would be encouraged (at its own cost) to construct a house of worship, a Christian church, a mosque, a synagogue, a Hindu temple on the Tempelhof. In close proximity, the churches would be forced to interact, cooperating for example on a joint museum of religious suffering.

            These, and other ideas, are interesting but they react only to Tempelhof as a very large urban space. What do you do with such emptiness? Fill it, of course, with big concepts. But these designers and planners are missing the point. Aeroplanes are the essence of Tempelhof. The referendum (however flawed) clinched the issue: it will never again be an airport. But Tempelhof could none the less upheld the spirit of flight, stay true to its history.

            The obvious starting point is to make space available for a large – I would like to think Germany’s largest – aerospace museum. Real dynamism will only return to Tempelhof however if the ILA is shifted from Schönefeld to Tempelhof. Next year will be the last in Schönefeld, because of the imminent opening of the BBI. The aim is to move to Selchow. This is a bad plan: Tempelhof is the perfect location, a reminder that there is continuity to German success. The very first ILA a century ago lasted 100 days and attracted 1.5 million people. That is something to aim for; other big air shows, Farnborough in Britain, Le Bourget in Paris, attract major business deals but also help put financiers in touch with new ideas in aerospace. Whatever happened to Cargolifter, the ambitious scheme to develop a new generation of airships? Zeppelins that could transport aid to earthquake zones? It went bankrupt, disappeared into the Brandenburg sand. Nowadays the big assembly hall houses Tropical Islands; an over-heated over-crowded entertainment centre where you can pretend to be on holiday in the Caribbean. I went there once (don’t ask why) and there were pommes frites floating in the water. That’s not how Cargolifter should have ended. The Germans were good at flying; now their wings have melted. Bring ILA back into the centre of the city, to an old airport that can still inspire the young, and maybe, just maybe, something will take off again in this city.

Guido Westerwelle disappeared from view for a few hours last week and the word among my compassionate colleagues was that he was just exhausted; emotionally, physically. In need of sleep. Well, you can certainly understand that. A few weeks ago he could buy mangoes at my local greengrocers; now he has to discuss his daily movements with his security team. His world has shrunk at the very moment when his political career expands. But my very unreliable sources have a more fanciful explanation for Westerwelle’s missing hours: he was whisked away for re-education to a Schloss (or what the Prussian aristocracy used to call Schloss – in fact, an old Gutshaus that was converted into an Altersheim in the DDR and now made into a kind of academy with cracked windows and linoleum on the floors. Some say it looks like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts school and this would be appropriate since the house outside Berlin is where apprentices learn the schwarz-gelbe magic, the dark arts.

            This is what could have happened, who knows, in the basement cinema room. A short film is running and the introducing title is: GW PK 28.09.09. An elderly teacher stands near the screen. GW is transfixed by his own image. A BBC reporter poses a question in English. On the film, GW snaps: “Hier in Deutschland ist es üblich, dass man hier deutsch spricht.”

            Teacher, touching the screen wiht a long cane:

            “What is wrong here?”

            “Nothing,” says GW, “they speak English in England, we speak German in Germany. Finde ich gut. Selbstbewusst.”

            The teacher sighs.

            “Take notes: foreigners react badly to the slogan Deutsch für Deutsche. Now let me ask you, without intruding too much in your private sphere: are you wearing boxer shorts?”

            GW nods.

            “Did you cooperate with the Angela Team?”

            “Yes”, says GW.

            “Do you appear in talk-shows? Are you a VIP, a Very Important Person? Do you phone using the city-tariff? Is your friend a Marketing and Events manager? Have you been brainstorming with Brüderle? In a meeting?”

            Having established that Germany is the very last country to speak German, the Schwarz-gelb guru continues with the film of GW’s unhappy inaugural press conference.

            O-Ton GW: “Und damit das nur gleich klar ist: wir können auch gern mal außerhalb einer Pressekonferenz fabelhaft uns zum Tee treffen, und dann sprechen wir nur englisch.”

            „Herr W – do you see nothing wrong here?“

            “Why? The English drink tea, don’t they?”

            “First: ‘fabelhaft’ is a Cabrio-drivers word. Second, you are saying that German is the only acceptable business language and English is for teatime. You are reducing a foreigner to an ethnocentric caricature. What next: drunken Russians, curry-eating Pakistanis, snail-eating French?”

            “It was a joke.”

            “Leave the jokes to the English. It is the German role to laugh. The correct response to a question posed in English is to say, in fluent English, ‘I love the English language but forgive me if we speak now in German’. This demonstrates to the world that you are not afraid to talk publicly in a foreign language.”

            The film continues.

            O-Ton GW: “Es ist Deutschland hier.”

            Teacher: „This is your third mention of Germany in 90 seconds.“

            GW: “Why not? Wir sind tatsächlich in Deutschland.”

            The teacher sighs and tugs his yellow jumper; he has advised many would-be foreign ministers but none has been quite so stubborn.

            “This was not a geography lesson. The reporter was almost certainly already aware that he was in Germany.”

            Will young Guido listen to his elders? I hope so, because they know that the first week after winning an election is not about re-organising the power apparent or bargaining about policy. It is about setting a tone. The correct tonal pitch for a future foreign minister and vice-chancellor is to be modest and sunny and promise the world that they will be dealing with an open and self-confident Germany. It is not about being zickig to the first foreign reporter who asks him a public question. When Angela Merkel faced a similar conference in 2005 she was asked (by a foreign reporter) “are you happy?”; she answered with all the joy of someone has just buried her pet dog in the garden. The world suddenly realised what it was dealing with – an overly rational, slightly melancholic, hesitant leader. It took 18 months and a WM to shed that image.

            In the case of both Merkel and Westerwelle, there is a simple explanation – the sudden onset of fatigue after a long campaign – for their lack of charm. But in Westerwelle’s case the problem is deeper, at least for those with a long historical memory. Does the FDP still have a deutsch-national gene? And does Westerwelle perhaps reflect that? The FDP, after all, was the party of Erich Mende, the Ritterkreuz winner who became vice-chancellor to Ludwig Erhard. It was the FDP who urged a gesamtdeutsches Ministerium; it was the FDP who kept the Vertriebene issue alive for many decades. It was Mende who urged the withdrawal of missiles from west and “Mittel”-Deutschland in the late 1950s. Now we have an echo of that with Westerwelle’s wish to get rid of all tactical nuclear missiles form Germany.

            Of course the FDP changed under Brandt-Scheel, but even then, there was a dark strain to some of its policies. The FDP is a curious party and it has always attracted strange, unpredictable personalities (Jürgen Möllemann for example). So what we foreigners want to hear from Guido is something simple and optimistic, a Yes We Can; we want a Germany that is willing to cooperate enthusiastically in beating global recession and global terrorism. The past 18 months has seen Germany withdraw inside itself and now it needs to open up again. The old Guido would have caught the mood and tried harder to charm has audience. The new Guido, with his exaggerated seriousness, looks like he is afraid of power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laUJzGMUEI4