To the National Theatre for David Hare’s one-man show on Berlin. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. Quite simply, it was embarrassingly, exasperatingly awful.
Hare, in person, is a fan of the southern English amateur/eccentric shtick. He makes much play of not knowing his way around despite having [...]

One of the original motivations for tomorrow’s EU summit was the perception that Nicolas Sarkozy’s aid plan for French carmakers was in effect encouraging them to preserve production in France at the expense of Slovakia and other central European countries.  In that light, how should one interpret the following apparently likely sequence of events: Government [...]

A handy chart in English from Dutch business newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Clickable map covers the EU-27 and includes debt, growth, unemployment, budget deficit and latest credit outlook.

Describing some events in the last months of 1989:
Meanwhile, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded
In Europe, by Geert Mak, p.718
I’m nearing the end of the book, and it’s living up to my initial impression. More, perhaps, when I’m [...]

The slow-motion Privacy Chernobyl at Deutsche Telekom goes on. Handelsblatt reports that investigators in the spying scandal there have discovered a document which proves that the company was spying on the members of its management board (Vorstand), as well as the members of the trade-union works council (Betriebsrat) and the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat), and a [...]

Dieter Wermuth, over at one of Die Zeit’s blogs:
Judging from December’s [2008] industrial production numbers, Germany’s social product will have shrunk by 1 percent to 2 percent, real and seasonally adjusted, in the fourth quarter compared with the third. That means that it retreated between 0.6 percent and 1.6 percent compared with the previous year.
To [...]

German finance minister Peer Steinbrück has made some enemies lately, giving an interview in which he accused the UK of “crass Keynesianism” and complained that it had spent so many years lecturing the rest of the EU about fiscal rectitude. The last bit’s pretty cheeky from a German finance minister, after all those years of [...]

The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.
Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well enough to cite here.
Death and destruction were meted out on a scale that is still [...]

The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin
An artefact is an ideology made manifest. The bell in this picture is the one made for the Reichssportfeld in Berlin, installed in the bell tower you can see behind it, brought crashing down when the damaged tower was demolished shortly after the second world war, repaired, and eventually rededicated as a [...]

It has come to this. Does anyone remember Nicolas Sarkozy of a year ago? Back then he was being feted by the anglospheric media as a French Thatcher, a neoliberal wind of change shaking a battery of outdated perceptions to its heart and mixing a few other metaphors whilst they were at it. We blogged [...]