Category Archives: Germany

the political thought of 1890 with the genetics of 1890, in 2010

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There’s been a great deal of fuss about the Bundesbank director Thilo Sarrazin’s book, in which he argues that the “upper layers” of German society ought to be encouraged to breed for fear of Muslims, etc, etc. The SZ points out here that he confesses to just making up his numbers:


Es ging um die Frage, woher Sarrazins viel zitierte, im Brustton der Faktizität vorgetragene Behauptung eigentlich kommt, dass siebzig Prozent der türkischen und neunzig Prozent der arabischen Bevölkerung Berlins den Staat ablehnten und in großen Teilen weder integrationswillig noch integrationsfähig seien. Sarrazin gab zu, dass er keinerlei Statistiken dazu habe. Er gab zu, dass es solche Statistiken auch gar nicht gibt.

But I’m not sure if anyone has pointed out quite how strange Sarrazin’s thinking is.

Für ihn ist die Unterschicht sowieso schon lange abgeschrieben, der Genpool degeneriert. Denn bereits seit dem 19. Jahrhundert sei die deutsche Gesellschaft immer durchlässiger geworden, “auffallende Hochbegabungen” hätten damals in Preußen bereits die Möglichkeit bekommen, das Gymnasium zu besuchen. “Das bedeutet aber, dass die Entleerung der unteren Schichten von intellektuellem Potential bei uns weiter fortgeschritten ist als in Gesellschaften, deren Durchlässigkeit sich erst später entwickelte.”

He thinks, or at least claims to think, that because the German (and specifically Prussian) education system has given the lower classes the opportunity to go on to higher education since the 19th century, Germany has a problem – the masses have been emptied of “intellectual potential” too early.

What strikes me as telling here is that it’s not just that Sarrazin’s political thought is trapped in the Wilhelmine era – his understanding of genetics is, too. This post of Razib Khan’s on the great early-20th century debate between the biologists who rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s work, and the biometricians, who had been trying to link data gathered on the range of human traits with the Darwinian inheritance, explains why.

The biometricians were essentially trying to operationalise Darwinism with early statistical methods. This gave them a problem; a lot, but not all, of the variation in biological traits at least seemed to be nice and smooth, movement along a well-behaved curve. With no other model of inheritance available, they assumed that genetics was a simple process of blending – children were an average of their parents. This had wide-ranging consequences; it implied that regression to the mean would apply to people. We would all eventually be average. From there, it wasn’t hard to predict that we would all, eventually, be mediocre and that racial degeneration was inevitable.

This is one of the great intellectual accident black spots – a nauseous gap in the barrier by the roadside. Experimental work, like Mendel’s, showed that something else was happening. One of the problems was that statistics itself needed to advance to resolve the debate. There is a very good reason why Francis Galton was both an important early statistician and a eugenist, and why it would eventually be a statistician, R. A. Fisher, who demonstrated that a Mendelian process was observable in the biometric data.

But by that time, the original mistake had set off a great avalanche of analogies. Social Darwinism and everything that followed from it was out there. It’s a horrific thought that its consequences have a lot to do with statistical methods, and it’s telling that Fisher published in 1918. The important point about Mendelian genetics is that it’s discontinuous – it doesn’t blend down to the average. Variation is conserved; not only will the German working class continue to produce bright kids, the elite will occasionally toss out a Sarrazin.

Germany!

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In the wake of Germany-Argentina, I think it’s fair to say that perhaps a lot of the national soul searching about the England team is wasted. Even this initially attractive analysis. The explanation is very simple: Germany are fantastic, will probably win the World Cup, will probably win the European Championship, and might win the next World Cup as well.

In many ways, they implement one of the essential, classic approaches to football – push and run.

Chris might have a point in an inverse sense; if you wanted an anti-Taylorist approach to football, Germany would do rather well. No beanpoles, stars, ball-hoggers, or goal hangers. Just eleven very good general-purpose players with a wide range of skills, operating in a plan with broad outlines and lots of scope to adapt.

J. Carter Wood reports, amusingly, on the team’s impact on sociologists; the Prenzlauer Berg blog has a practical solution.

Germany has new Queen, needs new President.

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Earlier today, German President Horst Köhler resigned, effective immediately (BBC coverage). His constitutional successor, and now German acting head of state is Social Democrat Jens Boehrnsen, who is the mayor of the state of Bremen and in this function speaker of the parliament’s upper chamber (Bundesrat). A new President will have to be elected by a special constitutional assembly, the Bundesversammlung, within 30 days. Despite Germany’s Presidency being largely ceremonial, and even though Mr Köhler was a generally popular President during his first term and reelected for a second five-year term in 2009, he recently came under attack for lacking a certain inspirational aura, and, worse for someone who was director of the IMF, lacking intellectual leadership in financially troubled times.

Mr Köhler’s resignation may not be sufficiently bad news to kill the national celebration following Lena Meyer-Landruth’s victory in the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest – and the World Cup is around the corner. But his claim that his resignation over an interview that he should not have given – he stated that an export-orientated country like Germany may need to deploy troops to protect its economic interests which unsurprisingly caused a lot of confusion given German history and the obvious unpopularity of military deployments – was “inevitable” because of the dignity of the office seems a bit hyperbolic and thus more as yet another display of what many people have begun to worry about: nine months after taking office, the German government is increasingly in disarray, both conceptually and electorally. In a recent poll, only three per cent of the Germans said they would vote for the junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats, which means they lost about 10% of the vote since last September.

Sure, this is only a snap shot, but it’s also a bit more – it’s fundamental disappointment about this government’s performance from day one on. The parties’ as well as the government’s competence in a number of important areas, notably economics, is challenged on a daily basis. Even members of Parliament are complaining publicly that they are supposed to simply sign off on economic legislation they don’t understand and that the government apparently isn’t able to explain. Imagine how the average voter must feel.

So maybe Mr Köhler’s resignation was a last act of leadership. The debate about who will succeed him will likely be a little different from the usual backroom coalition decisions about who will become President. It will likely become a rather public debate about leadership in difficult times. And that’s both good, and a problem, since the amount of people who may be up to the job and fit the political requirements is rather limited.

Off the top of my mind, I really can’t think of anyone but current finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. So let’s help Angela Merkel and make the contest a bit more exciting with a little short list of our own – who’s your best bet for “Germany’s next President”?

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Hugh

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Edward Hugh and Paul Krugman and even Dani Rodrik are in agreement, as Ed meets the elite; although we don’t know how much Spain’s external account needs to swing towards surplus in order to get the economy growing, we know it needs to be going that way, and therefore it’s a choice between “internal devaluation” – i.e. wage cuts for everybody – of the order of 20% or else, departure from the eurozone.

I cannot support this contention.

Let’s have some axioms – things that have to be true, and which are generally accounting identities.

Number one: Exports to Mars remain a losing business. Therefore, the world economy cannot but have a balanced trade account. One man’s current account deficit is another’s surplus. This is true by definition. It is also true, but less so, of the eurozone – of course, the eurozone has a net imbalance with the world, but it is true that if a eurozone country has a current account surplus with the rest of the eurozone, a sufficient current account deficit must exist elsewhere in the eurozone to match it.

Number two: The money has to go somewhere. One man’s trade deficit is also his capital account surplus. If Spaniards want to buy more German goods than they sell Spanish goods to Germany, absent a massive extra-eurozone trade surplus, somebody must lend them the money. Similarly, if Germans want to sell more goods to the eurozone than they buy, they must do something with the surplus of euros that results.

Number three: The money still has to go somewhere. Stashing your export sector earnings in ultra-safe eurozone government bonds, like a stereotype German, is an economically identical activity to borrowing German money to spend on stereotypical Mediterranean corruption – for example having real-estate banks managed by the Church, although how DEPFA or IKB Deutsche Industriebank were any better is not obvious. Every Sparbuch is the flipside of a tax break for a mobbed-up developer setting fire to a Greek hillside. Obviously, it would be silly to hold individual German savers responsible – but the Great Banks of Frankfurt, the institutions through which the German trade surplus is recycled?

And it is no sillier than holding individual Greeks or Spaniards responsible, which is what Ed Hugh, Paul Krugman, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the CEO of Banc Sabadell, etc, etc, actually propose to do.

As Ed rightly says, the real issue is “where will the growth come from?” With recovery, everything else will be surprisingly easy; his example of Finland is a case in point. Another would be the UK budget consolidation of the mid-90s, or for that matter, of the post-war era. Without it, there is arguably no point in worrying – in that case, in the fairly short term we are all dead, and default, euro failure, and an unquantifiable degree of misery are inevitable.

Unfortunately, although his analysis is correct, Ed’s prescription is very unlikely to lead to growth. What export market for Spanish goods is there that will outweigh a 20% hit to aggregate demand? Who will buy? What will they buy, that is currently overpriced by 20% divided by the percentage of marginal cost accounted for by labour? Labour is asked to fork out, but where are the guarantees that this patriotic sacrifice will achieve anything? One might well conclude that the actual content of this proposal is in the bit that is clear and well specified – the 20%.

To be more rigorous about this intellectually, think of it as follows; Spaniards suffer the 20% wage cut, and all else remains equal. We have no reason to think all else does not remain equal. No doubt this reduces the Spanish trade deficit by some number. This implies that the eurozone exporters – Exportland – see their trade diminish by the same value. The Spanish trade account is balanced, but we are all, on balance, poorer. And it is possible that the eurozone exporters will redouble their efforts to cut prices and hold onto market share – they have no reason not to, and in fact it is their core national economic strategy to export at all costs.

The only way this approach might not actually be deflationary at the eurozone level would be if it caused prices to fall sufficiently that they undercut Chinese prices; this is unlikely, and anyway would represent the export of European deflation to the poor.

So, to sum up so far, it’s just as possible to have a beggar-your-neighbour “internal devaluation” as it is to have a beggar-your-neighbour devaluation. The difference is that the “internal devaluation” option is also a beggar-yourself-and-indeed-everyone-else policy, and one that will create more actual beggars. And, in fact, beggar-your-neighbour internal devaluation accurately characterises the policy of Exportland’s economic leaders.

There is, of course, an alternative – it is the sunshine policy. Pay Germans more money – perhaps 20% more – and they can spend it, among other things, on one of Spain or Greece’s biggest exports, which happens to be sunshine. The dangerous imbalances would be reduced; demand would be created for the products of whatever new industries Ed’s new circle can think of. After all:

Put another way, thanks to the foreign funds which flowed in to finance the housing boom Spain became a major imports powerhouse, with the consequence that both the trade and the current account deficits deteriorated sharply, while a significant part of Spanish industry simply died. One of the major tasks of any recovery programme is to bring this industry back to life. In this sense what Spain’s economy needs is not rejuvenation but resurrection.

Better yet, there is a simple policy lever available to make this happen. German wages are essentially set by the annual bargaining round between IG-Metall and the Industriellenvereinigung, which acts as a price leader for the rest of the economy.

Surely, though, we need to cut, cut, and cut again to stay competitive with China? Well, this statement would be interesting if it wasn’t wildly counterfactual. At the current relative wage rates, it’s blindingly obvious that eurozone exporters are not succeeding in beating Chinese producers on price. They are doing so on their products. And, soon enough, the question will be absurd because the Chinese will themselves be looking over their shoulders – apparently, GDP per capita in Shanghai is comparable to that in Lisbon. The only future strategy is to have good products; after the bubble world of the 90s and 2000s, we’re back to the late 80s view that the future belonged to whoever had the best products and supply chains.

Some other ideas: perhaps the ECB should make it a policy objective to run over the shorts? There are surely some hints here.

Fitch, meanwhile, thinks that Spain’s creditworthiness is adversely affected by its plans for internal devaluation, but I am on record as saying that anyone whose investment decisions were guided by credit rating agencies would have lost their shirts three times over in the 2000s – once with Enron, once with the alt-telco bonds, and again with mortgage-backed securities. (I’m also the proud owner of the domain name standardispoor.com, if anyone has ideas about what to do with it.) However, our hypothetical investor would have avoided these catastrophes, because they would have had no money to lose in them, having already lost it all in Russian GKOs in 1998, Thai or South Korean corporates the year before, or Mexican government bonds in 1994.

I commend the proposal of just sitting back and being rich, as Harold MacMillan once said, to my readers, and indeed to the CEO of Banc Sabadell, who no doubt has greater expertise in this matter than myself.

Why Should the UK have All the Fun?

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North Rhine-Wesphalia had state elections yesterday and returned a local parliament that shows no clear majority coalition. NRW, as it is often known in Germany, is the country’s most populous state, with roughly 18 million inhabitants (about 10 percent more than the Netherlands).

Initial returns showed dramatic losses for the Christian Democrats (CDU), less dramatic losses for the Social Democrats (SPD), comparatively big gains for the Greens and the Left, along with losses for the FDP that were minor compared with the last state elections but major compared with 2009′s national elections. These same returns projected a one-seat majority for an SPD-Green coalition. Difficult, but workable.

And then the counting continued.
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Alternative to the ECB

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A.K.A. The Bundesbank

Just a quick note for Matthew Yglesias and the three of our readers who read both his blog and ours.

He’s rightly exercised about Greece and its implications for the eurozone. The positions of the ECB and the anti-inflationary approach of the ECB come in for particular criticism. He writes,

Rather than try to run monetary policy that would be suitable for the median European economy, the European Central Bank has insisted on trying to run monetary policy that would be suitable for Germany. And not even suitable for Germany in general, but “suitable for Germany according to hard money fanatics.” That’s probably bad for Germany, but there’s certainly no reason to think it’s appropriate for southern Europe.

The ECB is a Frankfurt-based central bank that is extremely cautious about inflation, in which all members of the eurozone have a seat at the decision-making table. The alternative to the ECB is a Frankfurt-based central bank that is extremely cautious about inflation, in which only German central bankers have a seat at the decision-making table: the Bundesbank.

In the years before the introduction of the euro, only the UK and Sweden managed marginally independent monetary policies, as they do today. (Indeed, German supremacy within European monetary policy dates as far back as 1983 with Mitterrand’s turn away from nationalizations.) Whether Greece weathers this crisis, leaves the euro, or some larger mechanism brings monetary union to an end (unlikely in the extreme), monetary policy will still be made in Frankfurt. The ECB may not be all that good for some eurozone members, but if that is true, then surely a return to the Bundesbank as Europe’s de-facto central bank would be worse.

Evaluation: Ernest May, Strange Victory

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I’ve just been reading Ernest May’s Strange Victory – Hitler’s Conquest of France, which I was recommended in this thread at Abu Muqawama.

Strange Victory‘s main point is that everything you think you know about the German invasion of France in 1940 is wrong. The French (and British) armies weren’t catastrophically ill-equipped for modern war; the French tank park was almost a third bigger than that of Germany, and the advantage was concentrated in the newer and heavier types – the French had many more Somua S35s and Renault B1s than the Germans had Panzer III and IVs. In terms of quality, the B1 and the British Matilda were the heaviest tanks either side deployed; the S-35 was probably the best all-round tank on the battlefield. The French Army’s historic strength, its artillery, disposed of a huge advantage in big guns.

Similarly, there is no reason to believe that French morale was particularly poor, or worse than that of the Germans. Where they had the opportunity to fight, the French fought; in the Gembloux gap in Belgium, Rene Prioulx’s French Cavalry Corps – actually, a pair of armoured divisions – fought the 3rd and 4th Panzers for four days, covering the First Army’s move up to the Dyle line. They lost 105 tanks to 160 for the Germans; some German accounts suggest that had they kept going, rather than breaking off the engagement once the main force was in place, the whole German front in the north might have collapsed. On the other side of Antwerp, the 9th Panzers ran into another French armoured division, and this time lost another hundred tanks for the loss of five French. May quotes a German cavalryman’s account of their horses screaming in terror as French tanks surged towards their lines, a reversal of every traditional account of 1940.

Even the hapless 9th Army in the Ardennes, May argues, did better than might have been reasonably expected; it was made up of the bits and pieces of the French Army, with a high concentration of the oldest reservists and youngest conscripts, the last pick of equipment, a lot of ageing dug-out officers, and sent to guard a front no-one expected to be important, where it met the very best the Germans had to offer. May argues that it was no worse than the German forces facing the Maginot Line in Army Group C, or the Leeb Museum as the troops called it after its commander and the quality of its equipment. Had they been facing a concentrated attack by Prioulx’s tanks, they might have been routed as the 9th French Army was.

So what happened? How did the Allies end up with the best of their armies, and the whole of their mobile forces, successfully defending positions two hundred miles from the German schwerpunkt? May begins at the beginning, examining the German and French planning processes. It is a commonplace that the Allies did exactly what the Germans were hoping they would. Up until the early spring of 1940, however, the German army was planning to do exactly what the French were hoping they would – to commit their forces to a westwards push across Belgium and southern Holland, something like the Schlieffen plan of 1914.

The Allies planned to counter this with a left-flanking manoeuvre pivoting on the Ardennes, rolling the motorised 1st and 7th French Armies and the British Army, including three French armoured divisions and a British tank brigade, onto a river line running half-way across Belgium. This would provide a shorter line and defence in depth, and would concentrate the Allied strike force directly opposite the Germans’. This was roughly the plan – plan D – that they put into effect on the 10th of May, 1940.

The Germans were never satisfied with their plan; it was obvious to both sides that Germany could only lose a long war, as Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction recently bore out. And the General Staff plan for the Western Front didn’t offer much chance of a decisive victory. Germany needed a battle that would transform its strategic position. May describes the emergence of the final plan, which moved the main attack from the area around Liege to the southern Ardennes, as a collective product, pointing out that the first person to call it the Manstein plan was von Manstein. He certainly did have a major influence on it, lobbying against the original plan until he was transferred away from Army Group A headquarters to shut him up. But so did many others.

Hitler correctly realised that the original plan wouldn’t do. But he also offered his own inimitable negative contribution – why not decide not to decide where the main attack should go in, and make the decision on the night? Eventually, the debate was settled by a string of major war-games designed to test the three competing proposals. As it turned out, the original plan usually delivered stalemate in Flanders, and occasionally, defeat. Hitler’s proposal reliably resulted in failure, varying between mere fiasco and the French conquest of the Ruhr. The Group A plan usually worked.

That the war games were an accurate simulation was the work of the General Staff intelligence branch, Foreign Armies (West), led by General Tippelskirch, with Colonel Liss in charge of the French desk. One of the duties of this office was to act as the enemy commander during war games. The French and German intelligence services were radically different; France had invested hugely in intelligence collection, with formidable capabilities in photo-reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and agent-running. Germany, short of cash, was also short of information; however, the Germans had compensated by concentrating on analysis. Tippelskirch’s staff spent most of their time studying what would now be called foreign doctrine – how potential enemies thought about war, how they trained for it, and how they made decisions.

Their conclusions about France was that the French Army relied heavily on centralised command and control, which was implemented through staff procedures that generated extremely detailed written orders and reports. Also, the French communications system was much more effective vertically than it was horizontally – in the name of security, landlines and dispatch riders linking major headquarters were preferred to radio, which meant that French army units had to have very detailed instructions in order to coordinate with their neighbours. One of the few clear technological advantages the Germans had over the French was their Enigma-encrypted mobile radio network – which they had developed to support their own concept of Auftragstaktik.

Therefore, they proposed that the greatest weakness of the French Army would be in responding to unforeseen events. Whatever the final plan would be, it could only succeed by forcing the French to abandon their own plan; if they got to execute their own plans, they would win. When Tippelkirch and Liss got in character for their parts as French generals, they played them as men trapped by their own thoroughness.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to design a plan that would confront the French with an unexpected crisis and force them to abandon their own plans. It had to stay unexpected. French intelligence certainly had the data to find out what the Germans were planning; they identified most of the Panzer divisions from aerial photos and radio intercepts, discovered that two of the four major supply depots in the Western theatre of war were located in the Eifel, just across the border from the Ardennes sector, and analysed German aerial reconnaissance overflights statistically, showing that they were concentrating on a rectangular zone behind the Ardennes and leading towards the coast. They interrogated a shot-down reconnaissance pilot and got him to spill the beans on his targets, which all lay in this area. All this data was written up in careful summaries and delivered to the commander in chief, mixed with a vast quantity of noise and German disinformation.

But the French understanding of intelligence specifically barred intelligence officers from commenting on the content of their reports; rather like traditional journalists, they were not supposed to editorialise or speculate. Judgment about the enemy’s intentions was left to the commander; detailed planning was left to the operations branch. The very quantity of data that the Deuxieme Bureau delivered to Gamelin, Georges, and the rest every day meant that nobody was asking questions about its meaning. As the Germans installed extra railway sidings and temporary bridges in the Mosel valley, put in more telephone lines, and cleared parking space next to the roads leading towards Luxembourg, the French general staff was drowning in reports, endlessly revising the detailed plan for the move into Belgium, and creating an entirely new and ambiguous headquarters shoehorned between the General Staff, the Northern Front, and the Commander in Chief.

One book that doesn’t come out of this well is Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France 1940. May is scrupulously courteous to Horne, and credits him with providing the definitive account of combat in 1940, but it’s impossible not to revise your opinion of Horne as a result of this book.

For example, Horne doesn’t mention that the French divisions cuirassees, whose role as part of the strategic reserve he discusses at length, weren’t actually armoured divisions in the sense of a unit equivalent to a Panzer division. Rather, they were more like a British Army Tank brigade, a force made up of heavy, slow-moving tanks intended to lead a set piece assault on a fixed front. French doctrine foresaw that they would break through the enemy lines, and then let the “light mechanised division”, which had as many tanks as a Panzer division, pass through and exploit the breach. The DC would move back into reserve and put its vehicles back in order.

As a result, they didn’t have the mobile logistics or supporting arms of an armoured division and couldn’t manoeuvre like one, no matter what the high command wanted of them. This – not specific French incompetence or cowardice or Communist infiltration – explains why they were frequently in the wrong place, and why the 2nd DC could be caught with its tanks on one side of Rommel’s 7th Panzers and its soft-skinned vehicles, including all the fuel, on the other. It is true that the French never succeeded in using the three DCs effectively. It is also true that their tanks simply had to move to the battlefield by rail.

And there is far too much national-character stuff in Horne. May takes a much harder line with himself on this. Also, he is more able to recognise that a lot of postwar Gaullist writers wrote the way they did because they were politically on the Right and in the grip of the prejudices of the pre-war era. There is simply too much cheap frogbashing in the world to add to it. You can often hear the effort being made to resist it in Horne’s prose, but too much leaks through.

This story has a sort of tragic duality. The Germans won because they had been able to plan more like a democracy than democratic France or Britain – they constantly questioned their assumptions, criticised superiors, and threw out bad ideas – but they would never do so again, precisely because of their triumph over France. Hitler rapidly convinced himself it was all his own work, and the independent authority of the army was permanently destroyed. The technology – tanks, close air support, and mobile radio – and the doctrine of Blitzkrieg had been validated. Many people concluded that fascism itself had also been validated – they had seen the future, and it worked. The prestige of the Nazi Party and of Hitler rose to a degree that finally saw off any hope that the military would depose him; at the same time, the generals were faced with the possibility that Germany had a combination of technology and operational art that might actually win. Between Hitler’s triumph, and their new status as potential world conquerors, the generals’ opposition to Nazism faded, and any hope of limiting the damage went with it.

The last man in East Germany

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What must it have been like to be a Stasi case officer in the autumn of 1989? What did they do? The answer, in this fascinating piece in Der Spiegel, was that they kept going to the office. In fact, they kept on going about their spooky business – questioning detainees, trying to recruit informers – until the evil day when the mob stormed their headquarters in the Normannenstraße. This weird transition is captured in the testimony of the last prisoners left in the MfS detention centre.

Take the case of Manfred Haferburg. Haferburg, a reactor engineer from Greifswald who was a shift supervisor on East Germany’s only nuclear power station, was arrested in May, 1989 trying to flee the DDR via Czechoslovakia. His Slovakian girlfriend was in the next compartment on the train and got away. He, however, was extradited back to East Germany and dumped in a secret prison. It was within the Hohenschönhausen detention centre in Berlin, but the prisoners were deliberately kept in ignorance of where they were. The lights were switched on and off at 15 minute intervals, 24 hours a day. One day, in November, he was dragged from his cell, punched in the guts, and thrown into a van. He expected to be shot, but eventually he was left on a street corner to ask passers-by where he was.

There is a classic Berlin joke about the drunk who gets lost and asks a policeman where he is. The cop tells him he’s on Leipzigerstraße, Berlin-Mitte. Spare me all the details, he says – can you just tell me which country? In fact, he was in the Köpenick district of Berlin, but the first passer-by he asked of course gave him the street name, and he had to press them to find out he was in Berlin, thus playing out the joke for real.

Round about the same time, another prisoner suddenly received a TV set in his cell. Uwe Hädrich had been arrested for attempting to emigrate on the 13th of September, 1989. The TV could only be tuned from outside the cell, so he could only watch official TV; of course, the famous press conference with Günther Schabowski was very official indeed. But that didn’t affect the charges against him. The wall gone and the borders open, he remained detained, accused of espionage and illegally crossing the border, subject to constant interrogation and solitary confinement. (Hädrich was an executive with the DDR’s consumer goods system, and therefore presumably a show-trial candidate.) Eventually, on the 7th of December, the new Modrow government announced that there were no political prisoners in East Germany.

Except for Herr Hädrich, of course. He was suddenly released that afternoon, as if he’d been forgotten about in all the excitement and only now remembered. According to the files, he was the last political prisoner. He went home; back in jail, the Minister of Security himself, General Erich Mielke, had just been booked in and assigned the very cell Hädrich had left.

But the revolution, the emptying of the jails, and the mere arrest of its chief didn’t stop normal operations at the Stasi. At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, a Stasi case officer called on Hädrich to ask him questions about whether he had contacted the Federal German embassy in Hungary. Every day, the case officer arrived to quiz Hädrich, and presumably wrote up his findings back at the office.

Hädrich’s family had begun to go shopping in West Berlin. But Hädrich didn’t dare cross the line, still less refuse to speak to the case officer. The further questioning carried on deep into December, after citizens’ committees had moved into some of the regional Stasi directorates to stop them destroying the files, while Hohenschönhausen itself filled up with disgraced communists. The East German PTT was renting mobile phones to journalists, devices they had to borrow from Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin operation, and whose very existence in East Germany would have been unimaginably illegal a few weeks before. Every day up to and including the 22nd, the Stasi man made his clockwork appearance and Hädrich answered the questions.

There is something grimly theatrical about this setting. In a sense, Hädrich and his interrogator were the last men still living in East Germany.

Finally, four days after the sack of the Stasi headquarters, he moved to southern Germany and never came back. Well, he did come back once, wishing to speak to the diligent case officer. It turned out that the last spook was now running a souvenir stand on the Alexanderplatz. Hädrich couldn’t speak to him.

Are the Germans taking over Romania?

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Not quite those Germans.

What’s happening in Romania, then? Handelsblatt reports. It’s time to pick a president, and the Social Democratic candidate looks in a strong position – although he finished second by a few points in the first round of the French-style presidential election, he’s got promises of support from several other parties, notably the Liberals and the Hungarian minority.

Fascinatingly, though, as part of the agreement with these groups, he’s promised to appoint the independent mayor of Sibiu – Hermannstadt in German – as prime minister. That’ll be one Klaus Johannis. Yes; he’s a Transylvanian German, the first time that a member of this minority will head the government. Of course, Romania has a hell of a lot of problems; the economy’s going to shrink between 7.5 and 8 per cent this year, there’s an IMF requirement to cut the public sector deficit to 7.3 per cent of GDP at the same time (ah, the IMF – never an institution to risk popularity by changing its ideas), and the country’s elite is full of old spooks from the Ceaucescu years.

But I can’t help but be amazed at the idea of a Romanian government that includes the Hungarians and is headed by a German, within 20 years of the revolution and 5 years of the CIA operating a secret jail in the suburbs of Bucharest. Well – non- or quasi-revolution might be more like it, which just adds force to the point. There are other reasons to be cheerful; HaBa also points out that there is some €32bn in EU funding heading that way in the next few years, which ought to help. If you want an inspiring European story, it’s right there.

However, they also note that the Renault Logan car factory accounts for 2 per cent of GDP and 15 per cent of net exports. I guess they can’t really be criticised for pinning their hopes on export-led growth when the UK and Germany are doing exactly that.