Author Archives: Mrs Tilton

About Mrs Tilton

Mrs T is on hiatus from AFOE. A running-dog lackey of the bourgeoisie, Mrs Tilton is (ahem) 39+. Irish, but has lived in Germany for many years. Co-director of the Max-Planck-Institut für hiberno-schwäbische Genmischung. Liberal in the proper sense (not libertarian or leftist.) Writes The 6th International.

Red light or green?

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You already know, because Alex has been doing such a good job of making sure you do, that the impending German elections will be as close-run as the related campaign has been shambolic. According to the polls, the Union and FDP will outpoll the currently governing SPD-Green coalition; but not by enough for a majority. What’s more, the Union has been slipping (slightly) of late whilst the SPD are (slightly) gaining. Black/Yellow (48%) are still doing better than Red/Green (42%), but not as well as Red/Green/Even Redder1 (49%).

What’s interesting about all this, though, is the number that’s not being loudly pointed at: Red/Green/Yellow, which is currently the same as Black/Yellow. This is the so-called Ampelkoalition (‘traffic-light coalition’, based on party colours). Down in the comments to one of Alex’s earlier posts there’s been some talk about this as an increasingly likely outcome of the vote, though one commenter begs to differ.

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Nazi sabotage from beyond the grave

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Far be it from me to poach on Alex’s turf, but here is a bit of German election madness that you won’t want to miss.

As you all know by now, the Left Party — which is basically the eastern PDS, the mutated ruling party of ancien régime East Germany, plus some hard-left western renegades from the SPD — has emerged as a strong potential spoiler. Now an easterner from the other extreme of the spectrum is doing her best to throw sand in the electoral gears.

She had to die to do this, so full marks for effort if nothing else.

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Not sentimental, and no France

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Until a couple of days ago, I was very nearly incommunicado for two weeks. We took the kids to Italy on holiday, you see, and found ourselves in a place with no television, no internets, not even mobile-phone reception. The tiny shop at the site doesn’t even stock English-language (or any other non-Italian) newspapers, and my Italian is, if that is possible, even viler and more vestigial than my Spanish. I found this isolation very pleasant altogether, and in some ways regret having to come back into the connected world.

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Cracking the Code

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In a recent post I noted that, despite some improvements, good corporate governance isn’t something Germans have an easy time getting their heads round. The Financial Times Deutschland reports that there might be a good reason for this: in Germany, it doesn’t seem to matter much how well a corporation is governed.

As the FTD reports, a new study from the consultancy Ergo Kommunikation maintains that ‘investors do not reward German firms that abide by the Corporate Government Code…. Their share prices profit just as little from a high level of transparency or disclosure of managing directors’ compensation.’ [My translation.]

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How do you say ‘corporate governance’ in German?

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About the bombings in London I have nothing useful to say, beyond expressing my sympathies for the wounded and bereaved and my admiration of Londoners’ stoic resolve. And as others, here and elsewhere, are expressing those things better than I could, I shall leave it to them to do so.

Instead I shall turn to another topic, one that is admittedly less dramatic, but important for all that. That topic is corporate governance; specifically, corporate governance as it is (or is not) implemented in Germany. In recent days German headlines have been full of two particularly interesting items: a corporate governance scandal of colossal proportions at a major firm, and now a significant governance reform that is unlikely to make top German managers very happy.

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Two peoples divided by a common language

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Clay Risen has a perceptive article in Slate today, warning non-German observers that Angela Merkel (Gerd Schr?der’s likely successor) is no Margaret Thatcher. But embedded in that article is this astounding sentence:

[T]he CDU … is actually an alliance between the more free-market-oriented Christian Democrats, from which Merkel hails, and the more economically liberal Bavarian Christian Social Union. [Emph. added.]

Would these two terms be viewed as opposites anyplace else than America? In any other country, would the term ‘economically liberal’, as applied to the CSU, make any sense at all? (For the thing about the CSU is that it is more culturally conservative and less economically liberal than its sister party.)

Which does not detract, of course, from what Risen hints at: ‘economic liberalism’ is a relative concept. If the Union, even under Merkel, proves more liberal than the SPD, it will be a difference of degree not kind; and I suspect of quite modest degree at that.

Free movement of persons, goods, capital, services and mortal remains

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Interesting piece today in the New York Times (reg. req.) on Germans having themselves cremated in the Netherlands. Wait; I should be more precise lest I alarm you — the article is about Germans arranging to have themselves cremated later. If you want to have your corpse burnt, the Dutch will do it with a lot less red tape. Much cheaper too; what’s not to love? And, thanks to the EU, Germans with bodies, but not money, to burn may freely access the Dutch cremation market.

Now that’s what Europe is all about.

?Enhorabuena!

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This morning Spain followed the example set by its one-time colonies in the Low Countries, legalising gay marriage.

Predictably, the post-Francoist Popular Party and the Roman Catholic hierarchy are not amused. One hopes they will take some comfort in the thought that the new law will not actually require anybody to marry a person of the same sex.

And perhaps they might reflect on this. There are many people who dislike cultural conservatism and Roman Catholic teachings, sometimes to the point of thinking these things morally wrong. And that, is, of course, their good right. It is not their good right, though, to marginalise cultural conservatives or Roman Catholics, still less to abridge their liberties. Well, then: sauce; goose; gander.

Ceci n’est pas une Warhol

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Not very long ago I spent some time in Frankfurt’s Museum f?r Moderne Kunst looking at the exhibition The Brutal Truth, which took this year’s top prize for international exhibitions from Beaux Arts magazine. (It’s too late for you lot, sorry; the exhibition’s down now.) TBT is a retrospective of the expatriate American artist Sturtevant’s work.

More or less her work, anyway; for her oeuvre consists of painstaking copies of the works of other artists.

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Guilt and responsibility

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Further to Doug’s eloquently silent post of the 27th instant: I’ve only noticed it now, but Amitai Etzioni put up a remarkable essay on his website a couple of days ago. It’s the English translation of an article he published in the S?ddeutsche Zeitung. That article, which you will have to pay money to the S?ddeutsche to read, has a rather better title than the translation does, but never mind that: just go to Etzioni’s site and read the thing.

Etzioni’s themes are guilt and responsibility. That’s all somewhat abstract, perhaps, considered in vacuo, but it is made sharply concrete by the facts that the article appears to have been occasioned by the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and that Etzioni is a Jew. What’s more (and this I had not known), he is a Jew from Germany (a K?lner, in fact), who as a child witnessed the highly civilised country of his birth transform into a ravening beast.

It would be perfectly understandable if Etzioni, as one of the rare Jews to escape the beast’s maw, dismissed his first homeland with a hearty ‘to hell with the lot of you, then’. He doesn’t, though.

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