Category Archives: Germany

Here Hare Here

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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 regularly visited Berlin, as he tells us with monotonous regularity, since the early 1970s. Couldn’t he get a map? Or learn some German? But it’s crucial to the amateur/eccentric thing that your put-on ignorance isn’t read to affect your status. In fact, it wouldn’t work if it didn’t sit over a vast pool of arrogance and self-satisfaction; pretending to be a buffoon is a luxury for those who don’t have to worry about being believed.

Self-satisfaction. Yes, there is a lot of this. We hear a hell of a lot about his brilliant friends, that some of them are French government ministers, that he gets free tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic. He works through a repertoire of annoying gestures under his Michael Heseltine hairdo. And so much about buying property. Yes, now. Yes, from a well-known Marxist. But it wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the content.

Berlin was the centre of the confrontations of the 20th century. Hitler, then Stalin. Wall. Wall gone. Nobody wants to talk about it – imagine! The RAF bombed it a lot. The Nazis had several million Jews murdered. There are lots of new buildings, and some of them are not to his taste. But now it’s full of young Europeans who appear to be having fun. People tend to leave home and go there and find ways of life that their parents don’t understand (how does this differ from, say, San Francisco or Bombay?) The bastards.

Gripping stuff, eh. There was worse, though – a succession of tiresome jokes about pompous and patriotic Frenchmen, bureaucratic Germans, ignorant Brits, some truly weird politics, and some observations about Berlin scenes that were factually impossible. We got a lot of stuff about Tempelhof airport without hearing that he can’t always fly there, as he claims, because it’s been shut for three months. The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm is apparently a huge domineering building, rather like the Comedie Francaise, and it stands opposite a giant shopping mall.

None of these statements are true; I’ve been there, although like Hare I’ve never been to a play there. I don’t know if the comparison with the Comedie Francaise is valid. The theatre, for what it’s worth, is not at all huge and is situated discreetly behind trees. Am Schiffbauerdamm is a quiet river embankment – the name means “On the Shipbuilders’ River Embankment” which ought to be a clue, but then, Hare’s German is atrocious – with some nice restaurants, but which faces towards the huge railway viaduct that carries both the great east-west main lines and the S-Bahn through the city centre. (Hey, look at the overhead imagery.) In fact, the railway station the theatre looks across to (Friedrichstraße) was once the major crossing point between West and East Berlin, and far from a shopping mall, part of the station was once the border-control checkpoint known as the Hall of Tears (Tränenhalle).

Hare goes for a walk down what he refers to as the Ost-West Achse in the Tiergarten. Well, it’s been called the Straße des 17 Juni since 1953, which is quite important. When he comes to discuss the building of the wall, he attacks Prime Minister Harold MacMillan for not “calling for insurrection in the East”. The street name should have set him sensible. There was an insurrection in the East, on the 17th of June, 1953, when the workers of East Germany rebelled against what called itself the Socialist Nation of Workers and Peasants, the police vanished, the Party network vanished, and Walter Ulbricht’s government called the Red Army and the KGB in to save themselves. The rebels were crushed under the T-34 tracks, in some places literally. After that, and the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the CIA dreams of “rollback” (very popular with Joe McCarthy) were definitively consigned to the archive. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961, this extended beyond Europe.

What could MacMillan have achieved with this calling-for? Quite a few East German policemen and soldiers deserted rather than build the wall, but they had plenty more. The ones who did didn’t need any speeches on the radio, and one wonders if speeches would have moved the others. As Carlo Levi said about southern Italy under Mussolini, all that came from Rome were speeches on the radio, and the only thing MacMillan could have offered would have been speeches on the radio.

He could probably have got more people locked up or shot, in the best-case scenario. In the worst case, well – this was 1961, when worst-case scenarios were worse. During the Cuban crisis a year later, MacMillan and his defence secretary Peter Thorneycroft kept the leaders of RAF Bomber Command on a short leash, refusing to let them disperse the V-Bomber force for security because this would be an unmistakably provocative gesture, on bases several flying hours closer to Moscow than those of Strategic Air Command.

Hare is a long-time unilateral nuclear disarmer and pacifist. Does he really believe that what the international scene of 1961 needed was more provocation of a superpower by a major nuclear power? What on earth is he on about?

There is a broader issue here; the phrase “to call for” repels me more and more. Its function is to get you out of responsibility for your opinions. I didn’t want war – I merely called for solidarity with the US in fighting terrorism. It also acts as a way of escaping the healthy discipline of detail. It is telling that it is fashionable with the neoconservatives, the Decents, and the hard left all at once – all the retailers of the goods dream-hungry youth demand, according to Leszek Kolakowski.

I call for action on Darfur! But I say nothing of the mountainous problems of projecting force into the roadless and railless interior of western Sudan, nothing of whose infantry are to actually go and get killed there, nothing of who exactly they are meant to kill or threaten effectively to kill, or for what aims. I just called for. Let’s decommission this phrase, like a worn-out nuclear power station – switch it off gracefully, sever the lines and fill the damn thing with concrete, and watch it carefully for a hundred years to see nothing leaks out.

For a slightly more constructive critique, my partner suggested Hare retitle the show as being “Meditations on Flight No…” where the number is the BA flight from London to Tegel. She’s right – everything about it that wasn’t obvious, trivial, or simply wrong was more interesting as an account of international art-bureaucrat culture than of Berlin, or London.

For the EU summit agenda

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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 of Germany takes equity stake in Opel; Opel sells one of its German factories to Daimler, and Daimler aborts a project to build a new factory in Hungary since it will now have the extra German capacity?

Sentence of the Day

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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 all the way through.

Even More DTAG Surveillance Scandal

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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 whole gaggle of financial analysts and business and tech journalists.

Hilariously, it turns out that one of the targets of the illegal surveillance was none other than the current finance director; the company has been unconvincingly trying to deny that anyone in the current management was involved. Now it looks like they were involved both as participants and as targets. Surveillance cultures get like that. It was bad enough when they were just doing table joins across Lufthansa and Deutsche Bahn records and every expense account in Germany, but what I find specifically offensive about this story is that one of the human sources the snoopers used was…a journalist.

It will come as no surprise that the stool-pigeon was from the Bild Zeitung; I can’t wait to hear what the BildBlog has to say.

Not a Fountain of Optimism

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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 put it more dramatically, or as dramatically as it actually is: Industrial production including construction was in December 12 percent lower than it was a year previous. The crash has been ongoing since September. Extrapolating the fall from August to December to a year’s duration yields a trend of -33.6 percent (104.6/119.9 cubed, as four months are a third of a year) That is a considerably stronger contraction than in the USA (-16 percent) or the UK (-17.6 percent). In a year-on-year comparison, the German contraction is also larger. (My translation, original beneath the fold.)

Much more at the link, but the bottom line is that the crash will hit industry harder than services, and countries oriented toward export more than those oriented toward domestic demand. Germany is a world champion in both.

A decade ago when I worked in financial markets, I knew Dieter as a solid macroeconomist for WestLB. Glad to see he’s been writing for Zeit.

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Steinbruck twisting in the wind…

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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 Hans Eichel and the Bundesbank directors wagging their fingers at those irresponsible southerners, but let’s let it pass. Steinbrück got called into the British embassy, but very soon he had more serious problems.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment; what were his motivations? The first thing to remember is that an EU member state spends on average about 20% of GDP on imports from other members. The second is that industrial exports make up a really big chunk of the German economy. So if you’re Germany, and you don’t think the recession will be quite that bad, there’s an argument for sitting tight and enjoying about 20% of everyone else’s fiscal stimulus. Obviously the net leakage will vary depending on the exact details; a consumer-side stimulus like the UK one will probably leak more, a public works one like the French rather less, in so far as it’s labour-intensive and therefore nontradable. If, however, it involves buying a lot of Repower wind turbines, QCells solar panels, or Siemens trains and control electronics, well, perhaps not so much.

And arguably the UK consumer sector is less likely to import from Germany than it is from the world dollar zone, specifically China. The main exception is cars, but new car purchases are almost all on credit, and the sector is currently credit-rationed. So perhaps he was talking his own book? Surely, however, in this case he wouldn’t have attacked the stimulus in general. Another possibility is that he’s thinking of German politics. The more the rest of Europe stimulates, the more pressure on Steinbrück to do likewise – from the coalition partners, from the French, and from the SPD membership. After all, down at the provincial level, there have been rumblings for weeks about the NRW state government buying into the Opel plants if GM goes bust; the car industry is hugely important and it’s in deep trouble.

The French. Well, as Le Monde reports, Germany is being placed under intense diplomatic pressure by France and the UK. It’s a little-remarked on aspect of the crisis that Anglo-French relations have become very good, a continuation of a Blair government trend. Politically, it’s much more acceptable for a German government minister to have a public row with the British – but as the Le Monde article makes clear, there is considerable tension between France and Germany. So much so that Merkel publicly reiterated a commitment to Europeanness in a recent press conference.

So why is he clinging to the point? Probably because he wants to go into an election with a balanced or close to balanced budget as an accomplishment he can stick a big red SPD flag in, and not incidentally, write his name on. This implies he’s thinking of fighting the election across the centre ground, trying to score off the CDU and FDP, rather than trying to regain ground from the Left. But is this at all realistic? In an interview with Der Spiegel, none other than Paul Krugman declared that both Steinbrück and Angela Merkel have underestimated the seriousness of the situation. Der Spiegel also claims that the government is expecting a deficit of 3% of GDP. Elsewhere, on his own weblog, Krugman deployed the ultimate economic rhetorical weapon – The Economic Consequences of Herr Steinbrück, no less. Meanwhile, the chief economist of the OECD chipped in as well.

The upshot? What have we here? A €30bn German fiscal shot is apparently being prepared; note that the work is going on between Merkel’s office, the (conservative) Minister of the Economy, and the coalition partners, cutting Steinbrück and the Finance Ministry out of the process. Of course, he retains the power of the purse, but then, Merkel retains the Richtlinienkompetenz and could stick a directive down his shirt front. (Which appears to be what Nicolas Sarkozy is expecting.) Or he could be sacked. Either course would leave the SPD faced with a choice between its cabinet-level leaders and its membership; fighting for Steinbrück’s authority could involve fighting an election on a promise of fiscal restriction, just as millions of IG-Metall members are terrified of losing their jobs.

After all, down in the microeconomy, BMW is about to offer emergency funding to its suppliers and dealerships in an effort to prevent a wave of bankruptcies. ZF, the gearbox maker, is worried both about its unpaid bills from the car makers and also about the availability of credit to its subcontractors. Today’s meeting at the Kanzleramt looks like it’s going to be tasty, to say the least.

One Hour, Four Minutes and Ninety Years Ago

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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 difficult to fathom. On the columns of the memorial at Thiepval are carved the names of more than 70,000 Allied soldiers who fell in the area between July and November 1916, and who have no known grave. I was pointed to the photo by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, whose excellent posts on successive Armistice Days are moving, full of informative links and followed by astute commentary.

Though the events themselves are passing from living memory, the world shaped by the war is still all around us.

Update: Two more from TNH, 2002 and 2008.

Really Sick Buildings

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The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin

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 monument “against war and violence”. But it’s not only that.

The bell was forged by the Gussstahlfabrik in Bochum, the heart of the Krupp steelworks, and the plant which made the Prussian and German armies’ gun barrels. Its owners and top managers were a crucial influence in German politics, from the turn away from Bismarckian conservatism in the 1890s all the way to 1933. It was there that the revolutionary centrifugal casting process – spinning molten steel from a tube turning at thousands of RPM outwards like candy floss – was invented in the 1930s, that made the Nazi army’s 88mm long-range antitank guns. Ordering the bell from them was political architecture in many ways – not only did it please the heavy industry lobby, it explicitly reminded everyone of the real sources of the state power the whole master plan was meant to celebrate. The bell tower itself grows out of a war monument; but the bell grew out of the military-industrial complex.

Even its later history is telling. Despite the RAF bombing, which damaged the structure, it was still standing when the Olympic stadium was taken over by the British army, just as the bombers could never really finish off the steelworks that made it. The British blew it up for fear it would fall down unpredictably. Later, in the 1960s, it was restored – by none other than Werner March, the original architect of the project. No wonder people worried about faschisticher Kontinuitat. The bell itself was then, rather uneasily, plonked in its current position with its new and vaguely glib, but undeniably well-meaning mission; it’s hard to escape the feeling that it’s been a lot like Germany.

Strangely enough, the Reichssportfeld is the only stone building that scares me. All my associations for it are wrong; I’m used to the stuff as a material which weathers, grows moss, turns black with industrial smoke, gets sandblasted back to its original colour by ambitious mayors. Although the stadium is limestone, like a Yorkshire hill, it’s still terrifyingly perfect.

Not much light

Not much light

Keynesian Sarko

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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 a certain amount about how vacuous so much of this was; France, after all, did indeed go through a fearfully tough industrial restructuring in the 1980s, apparently entirely unnoticed by the media establishment. Its economic problems simply are not those of Britain in the early 1980s; anyway, a lot of people are now busy amending the level of confidence they have that those solutions were appropriate at all. (This London Review of Books article is required reading.)

Without the original radical-right dream, which had little enough substance to begin with, the Sarko presidency basically returned to its default settings and ran on under automatic control. Now, however, the banking crisis has given him a new dose of authority, much as it has to Gordon Brown; but nobody is talking about making everyone work more hours, or facing down the trade unions, now. Instead, Sarko has found his inner Gaullist; perhaps it was never so far away. Here’s the German newspaper whose website is slightly better organised these days; the factoid is that the prez wants to set up a state investment fund to buy into “strategic” industries, as part of a broader reflation strategy for which he intends to bring forward a lot of capital expenditure projects and cut taxes on business.

(Remember when “les caisses sont vides!” and scares based on funny figures were the order of the day? As Max Sawicky so wisely put it, there are no atheists in foxholes; we are all Keynesians again now.)

There’s more detail in Le Monde; especially, there’s one specific detail we’ll have to come back to. A lot of people have greeted the news of the fund with a certain degree of nonsurprise. Since when hasn’t the French government taken stakes (and influence) in “strategic” industries? The new fund will be managed by the CDC, the state-owned bank which exists to, well, invest in strategic industries. It’s no great surprise that the Germans, and specifically the CDU, are suspicious to critical at what they probably think is an invitation to put their money into the French military-industrial complex.

There is certainly a very traditional look to some of this proposal; the prime minister has ordered all the 93 prefects to hold monthly meetings with banks and enterprises on their turf to ensure the availability of credit, which as well as being suitably Bonapartist also reminds me of the passage in J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash about the importance of meetings that are held to do no business. Handelsblatt‘s blog duly hands out the pious opposition; they even descend low enough to say such things should be left to Russia.

But there’s an interesting detail in the Le Monde version which no-one else seems to have picked up; rather than Alstom, Alcatel, Thales, EADS etc, this new fund is meant to buy into small and medium-sized companies, which makes it considerably less of a classic military-industrial stitchup. That, at least, suggests that this project or perhaps this one might not be beyond its scope.

Over and beyond this, Sarkozy has revived the regular French suggestion of an “economic government” for the EU, or the Eurozone. Now, my problem with this has always been that the EU already has an economic government; it’s called the European Commission. However you cut it, it’s a governmental institution, and the great majority of its functions are economic; which goes double, as the economic functions are the ones in which it has exclusive jurisdiction. The usual suspects are delighted by this, and by the fact that there has been a summit meeting of Eurozone members. Oddly, they don’t seem to say much about the fact it was bookended by full European Council meetings, or that the plan it adopted originated in the UK, although much if not all of its content originated with VOXEU academics.

You could often get the impression that if the conversion of Europe into a single state occurred tomorrow, there are quite a lot of important people in France who would welcome it as a chance to call a Eurogroup summit meeting, such is the obsession. And there is no reason why they shouldn’t have it; after all, as the usual suspects point out, all it amounts to is a “point of contact”. However, one thing the crisis has shown up is that there isn’t a sensible economic distinction between the EU and the Eurozone; problems blow up in one and pass straight into the other, as do solutions.

Of course, the real difference between the Commission and an “economic government” is economic; it’s the member states who have serious money available, the Commission’s budget power being further restricted by its mandates under the CAP. And the upshot has been that no-one has really looked to the Commission for anything much in the crisis; it’s been either the ECB, or else the intergovernmental wiring that gets used. If they want to be relevant, now’s the time to put the Commission’s money where its mouth is and back something like the Sarkofund. If you want a soundbite, perhaps it’s time for it to move from funding the transition to membership to funding the transition…to the future! Corny!