Germany

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The Kremlin’s plan to create a new wave of Ukrainian refugees

From our UK edition

What is the limit of Ukrainian civilians’ endurance? In nearly four years of relentless war, Ukraine’s people have faced summary executions, ‘drone safaris’ where unmanned aerial vehicles hunt people down city streets and constant bombardment of cities by swarms of drones and missiles. This winter their remarkable resilience faces its severest test yet as Russian forces reach a tipping point in their systematic attempt to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure. In each of the past three winters, Vladimir Putin has attempted to render Ukraine’s cities uninhabitable by plunging them into darkness and cold, without success. But this time it looks like the Kremlin’s campaign to weaponise winter may be succeeding.

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine

European countries are expanding their militaries. Why aren’t we?

From our UK edition

Following America’s extraordinary raid on Venezuela last week, Donald Trump has pointed to Greenland, which belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, as the territory he plans to turn his attention to next, staking a claim he has made repeatedly since his return to the White House. Trump said this week that America needs Greenland ‘for national security. Right now’. He told reporters he is ‘very serious’ in his intent. The US President might be claiming Greenland in the name of peace and stability, but there is every chance his neo-imperial attempts to see off the threat from China and Russia will backfire. Will his actions herald the return to a land-grabbing, power--flaunting global order like that of the 19th century?

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

What Ukraine really needs from Europe

If bear hugs were army divisions and brave words cash euros, Volodymyr Zelensky would have ended his tour of European capitals this week the best-armed and best-funded leader in the world. "We stand with Ukraine," vowed British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer after hosting a summit for Zelensky and top European allies at Downing Street on Monday. "We support you in the conflict and support you in the negotiations to make sure that this is a just and lasting settlement." Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that "nobody should doubt our support for Ukraine" and added that "the destiny of this country is the destiny of Europe." France’s President Emmanuel Macron promised that Europe has "a lot of cards in our hands.

Tuesday

Andreas Roth

The steady erosion of academic rigor in German schools

German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social-insurance contributions and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards. Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, I have learned that challenging students is now frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my colleagues agree that standards have plummeted.

Christmas
Jane Stannus

How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus. How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious.

WIne
Roger Kimball

Four Twenty Five’s wine list is better than most

I was recently invited by friends to a small birthday fête at Four Twenty Five, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest New York restaurant at (wouldn’t you know it) 425 Park Avenue. It was, as Bertie Wooster might have put it, oojah-cum-spiff, a worthy companion to the Terrace and Nougatine, those other famed New York refectories by Jean-Georges. I won’t bore you with the victuals, which were so far from boring themselves that it would take more than a column just to enumerate those toothsome morsels. Instead, let me mention a couple of the wines we enjoyed, noting for posterity that the wine list at Four Twenty Five is one of the most extensive and thoughtfully selected in New York City. I hope to have occasion to make a thorough study in the years to come.

Thursday

Katja Hoyer

Why can’t Friedrich Merz just say sorry?

From our UK edition

‘We live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world,’ began a seemingly innocuous speech by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last week. The words that followed earned him the wrath of the largest state in South America. Just back from the Cop climate summit in Belem, Brazil, Merz declared that his delegation had been ‘glad to return from that place’. When he’d asked the accompanying journalists if anyone would like to stay, ‘nobody raised their hand’. Appearing to compare their country unfavourably to Germany, Merz’s remarks offended many of Brazil’s leaders.

Andreas Roth

The catastrophic dumbing down of German education

German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social insurance contributions, and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards. Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, the equivalent of a grammar school, I have learned that challenging students is frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my colleagues agree that standards have plummeted.

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine

Is Germany ready for military service?

It’s finally crunch time for Boris Pistorius’s plan to reintroduce military service in Germany. Following a delay of several months thanks to the country’s snap federal election campaign at the start of the year, the defense minister’s new "Modernization of Military Service" draft law is currently being debated in Berlin. Under Pistorius’s proposals, all 18-year-olds will be asked to complete a questionnaire that will gauge their willingness and ability to carry out military service. For men, the quiz will be compulsory; for "other genders" – including women – it will be optional. Those who declare themselves willing to serve will be invited for a formal assessment for recruitment into the armed forces, while anyone refusing to fill out the questionnaire could face a fine.

military

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Should the Nord Stream saboteurs be extradited to Germany?

The identity of the saboteurs who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 was for years the western security establishment’s worst-kept secret. Just two weeks after a series of explosions within the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark crippled three of the four undersea natural-gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany, Scandinavian diplomats in Brussels were already being quietly briefed that the most likely culprits were Ukrainian. By January 2023, a forensic investigation by German police had discovered traces of the explosives on board the charter yacht Andromeda and found that the vessel’s movements aligned exactly with the location of the blasts.

Nord Stream

Friday

Tim Shipman

Tim Shipman, Ian Williams, Theo Hobson, Lara Prendergast & Lisa Haseldine

From our UK edition

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Tim Shipman says that the real war for the right is yet to come; Ian Williams examines the farce over the collapses China espionage case; Theo Hobson argues that the Church of England is muddled over sex and marriage; Lara Prendergast reads her letter from America; and, Lisa Haseldine goes on manoeuvres with the German army, the Bundeswehr. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Friday

Zak Asgard

Cigarettes and currywurst in Big Berlin

From our UK edition

I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says, ‘That’s for you to decide.’ I order the beer anyway. It is small (klein). I don’t tip. This is Berlin. Berlin is big.

Thursday

Elisabeth Dampier

Never date a German man

From our UK edition

Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution. Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of romantic consumerism: perfumes, clothing and even mugs depicting scenes from the novel were sold.

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Why France hates Macron

From our UK edition

One of the pleasures of spending the summer in France is that I can turn aside from our national problems and concentrate on those of our neighbour. They are similar but gratifyingly worse. You have to know someone quite well before they will open up about their own politics to a semi-outsider. I used to feel the same way when our own politics were chaotic in the aftermath of the EU referendum and French friends would approach me with that characteristic note of smug condescension to ask what on earth was going on. Emmanuel Macron is the ablest President of France since Charles de Gaulle. Yet he is hated across the political spectrum. The young are especially venomous. I once delivered a series of lectures in France on the global response to the Covid pandemic.

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

Clerical skulduggery on the far borders of 1830s Germany

From our UK edition

Königsberg is no more. Now known as Kaliningrad, it forms part of a small Russian exclave surrounded by Lithuania and Poland. It is probably here that the third world war will start. Before it was bombed flat and ethnically cleansed, the historic Baltic city formed one of the main centres of the German province of Prussia. Old Königsberg was a port and a -meatballs-and-potatoes kind of place, but also one of the battlefields of the Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born, lived and died there. One of the questions he struggled with was how to reconcile the claims of human reason with the need for faith in the divine.

Thursday

William Moore

Border lands, 200 years of British railways & who are the GOATs?

From our UK edition

38 min listen

First: how Merkel killed the European dream ‘Ten years ago,’ Lisa Haseldine says, ‘Angela Merkel told the German press what she was going to do about the swell of Syrian refugees heading to Europe’: ‘Wir schaffen das’ – we can handle it. With these words, ‘she ushered in a new era of uncontrolled mass migration’. ‘In retrospect,’ explains one senior British diplomat, ‘it was pretty much the most disastrous government policy of this century anywhere in Europe.’ The surge of immigrants helped swing Brexit, ‘emboldened’ people-traffickers and ‘destabilised politics’ across Europe. Ten years on, a third of the EU’s member states within the Schengen area have now imposed border controls. Can freedom of movement survive in its current form?

Thursday

Salley Vickers

There was no escaping the Nazis – even in sleep

From our UK edition

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, who as a Jewish journalist and a communist had been barred from publishing, found her sleep wracked by nightmares that unmistakably reenacted the terrors of the Nazi regime. Deprived of her regular employment, her own dream experiences prompted the subversive if dangerous idea of recording the dreams of her fellow citizens. ‘I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had, as it were, dictated,’ she wrote. Citing a dictum of a Nazi official that in Hitler’s Germany no one has a private life except while asleep, the material she collected demonstrated how dreams ‘as minutely as a seismograph’ can record impinging external realities.

Lionel Shriver

How governments gaslight

From our UK edition

The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping up my entertainment end of things, I’ve forwarded the pictures to multiple correspondents myself. See, news stories have been accumulating – and many similar stories doubtless remain unreported – about Muslim immigrants harassing and sexually assaulting native Germans trying to cool off. In response, some helpful bureaucrat has generated a series of images whose crudely drawn cartoon format makes light of the problem while wilfully, defiantly misrepresenting it. Below ‘Schubsen ist nicht lustig!’ (‘Shoving is not funny!’), a white boy and vaguely brownish boy push a terrified black girl towards the pool. Below ‘Stopp! Grabschen verboten!

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine

Can freedom of movement survive Europe’s migrant crisis?

From our UK edition

Freedom of movement in the EU received another nail in its coffin yesterday after Poland became the latest European country to introduce checks along its shared borders with fellow member states. As of next Monday, Warsaw will start enforcing border controls at crossings shared with Germany and Lithuania.  The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that he felt compelled to introduce border checks in particular to ‘reduce the uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border to a minimum’. The source of Tusk’s angst is the tougher border regime introduced by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz less than two months ago.

Thursday

Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army

From our UK edition

Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing to build ‘the strongest conventional army in Europe’.