Germany

Thursday

William Cook

A voyage along my grandfather’s coastline

My grandfather was born in a huge white house on the Baltic coast of eastern Germany, and ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by this enigmatic tideless sea. I’ve travelled along its southern shore, from Germany to Estonia, but I’d always wanted to sail across it, and last month, at last, I did, aboard the Queen Victoria on Cunard’s Royal Viking Adventure. I joined the cruise in Stockholm (the other passengers had sailed here from Southampton). Why had no one ever told me what a stunning city this is? Perched on a little island, the old town is perfectly preserved — a cluster of cobbled alleys, patrolled by blond, athletic Swedes. As we set sail, the view became even better.

Friday

Anne Jolis

The European market hangover – bad news is bad news again

In the latest Spectator, Liam Halligan takes a sobering look at European markets bearing the brunt of sanctions against Russia. 'The western economy that’s suffered most, by far, is the largest one in the eurozone. Germany’s manufacturing thoroughbreds have sunk tens of billions of euros into Russian production facilities in recent years. . . . 'This helps explain why, having grown 0.8 per cent during the first three months of 2014, German GDP shrank 0.2 per cent in the second quarter. The eurozone’s powerhouse is now on the brink of recession. Industrial production dropped 4 per cent in August, the biggest monthly fall since early 2009. Exports were down 5.8 per cent — again, the steepest drop since the Lehman collapse in 2008.

Thursday

William Cook

Tate Modern’s latest show feels like it’s from another planet

‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966 Who says Germans have no sense of humour? OK, so their writers tend to be a pretty gloomy bunch — but like loads of other German artists, from Otto Dix to Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke’s paintings are illuminated by a dry, mordant wit. It’s encapsulated in an early doodle called ‘Mona Lisa’ (1963), which hangs near the entrance to this hugely enjoyable retrospective — the first comprehensive survey of his eclectic, eccentric work. ‘Original value $1,000,000,’ reads the handwritten caption. ‘Now only 99c, including frame.’ That Polke’s pictures now sell for many millions (with or without frames) adds another layer of meaning to this student jape.

Liam Halligan

Europe will reconcile with Russia, and soon. It can’t afford not to

After months of escalating tensions over Ukraine and talk of a new cold war, Russia and the West could soon reach a surprising rapprochement. The eurozone economy is suffering badly and sanctions against Russia are partly to blame. Winter is also upon us, and that reminds every-one Vladimir Putin still holds the cards when it comes to supplying gas. The clincher, though, is that Ukraine is heading towards financial meltdown. Unless an extremely large bailout is delivered soon, there will be a default, sending shockwaves through the global economy. That’s a risk nobody wants to take — least of all Washington, London or Berlin. Sanctions against Russia were always going to hit western Europe hard.

Martin Vander Weyer

Storm warning: the world economy’s October troubles aren’t over yet

October is always a turbulent month, and I’m feeling uneasy about this one. The FTSE100 index, which looked set to break through 7,000 in September, has lost more than 500 points since then — and would have lost more but for manoeuvres in the mining sector. Pessimism stalks the bond markets, and even a falling oil price is read more as a harbinger of faltering growth than a stimulus for further recovery. Ebola is the new volcanic ash cloud, and attention is focused on the apparently incorrigible weakness of the eurozone — where the biggest problem is what was long seen as the most potent solution, namely the German economy. Fiscal discipline, strict wage control and relentless pursuit of export success made Germany the locomotive of Europe for the single-currency era; but a 0.

Sunday

Mary Dejevsky

A Lab-Con coalition? It’s not as crazy as you think

In the few days since Conservative defector Douglas Carswell gave Ukip its first Westminster MP and John Bickley scared the pants off Ed Miliband by almost snatching Heywood and Middleton from Labour, there has been much talk of a broken mould and a new age in British politics. listen to ‘John Bickley: ‘If there was an Olympic medal for hypocrisy, Labour would win gold’’ on audioBoom Election geeks have posited half-a-dozen or more governing permutations in the event that Ukip makes big gains next May.

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

All my doubts about Anselm Kiefer are blown away by his Royal Academy show

In the Royal Academy’s courtyard are two large glass cases or vitrines containing model submarines. In one the sea has receded, dried up, and the tin fish are stranded on the cracked mud of the ocean floor. In the other, the elegantly rusted subs are mostly suspended like sharks in an aquarium: a fleet in fact, all pointed in the same direction. These works are the visitor’s first sight of the vast and glorious exhibition by Anselm Kiefer (born Germany, 1945) currently occupying the main galleries of Burlington House, and they are apparently related to his interest in the Russian poet and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. At once we are confronted by several Kiefer themes: war, poetry (he says poems are ‘like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the next ...

Thursday

Martin Gayford

‘I like vanished things’: Anselm Kiefer on art, alchemy and his childhood

At the entrance to Anselm Kiefer’s forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy visitors will encounter a typically paradoxical Kiefer object: a giant pile of lead books, sprouting wings. When I asked Kiefer to explain this strange object, he immediately — and characteristically — began talking about alchemy. Lead, of course, was the material from which alchemists hoped to make gold. ‘But at the beginning,’ Kiefer explained, ‘it wasn’t just a materialistic idea, it was a spiritual one: to transform matter into a higher spiritual state.’ So, I suggested, in a way all art is alchemy: transforming one substance — paint and canvas, for example — into something else entirely. ‘Yes, certainly,’ Kiefer replied.

Thursday

William Cook

The enigma of Werner Herzog

Strange things happen to Werner Herzog — almost as strange as the things that happen in his haunting, hypnotic films. In 1971, while making a movie in Peru, he was bumped off a flight that subsequently crashed into the jungle. Years later, he made a moving film about that disaster’s sole survivor. In 2006, while filming an interview with the BBC in Los Angeles, he was shot in the belly by some nutter with a small calibre rifle. Most film-makers would have been turned to jelly by this terrifying interruption; Herzog simply laughed it off, cheerfully dropping his trousers to reveal a bleeding bullet wound, and a natty pair of Paisley boxer shorts. ‘He has become a catalyst for extraordinary events,’ says his British producer Andre Singer.

Thursday

Taki

Six decades and two chat-up lines

 Gstaad In this freewheeling Swiss village of the 1950s, the unconventional was the norm and monumental drinking commonplace, but the manners of the players were always impeccable. Yes, there were ladies of lower-class parentage and with a dubious past, but they covered it up with a grand manner and an affected aristocratic confidence they had learned through experience. That’s how things were back then. The slags that pass as celebrities today would not have lasted a minute. Some might think it snobby, but it was nothing of the kind. One just had to act in a certain manner and that is all. Everyone knew where everyone else came from, so it wasn’t even a pretence.

Thursday

Philip Booth

If you want a lesson in how not to run an economy, take the Eurostar

For the last five years, politicians of all shades have been banging on about how we should adopt this or that aspect of German economic policy. George Osborne argued in 2011: ‘We want to learn the lessons of the successful Mittelstand model, which has operated in Germany for many decades.’ Only a few weeks ago, Vince Cable argued: ‘Britain has not been as good as competitors like Germany in turning ideas into wealth creation.’ The German economy seems to be widely admired, despite lagging behind Britain’s for nearly a generation. It is true that Germany had a better post-crash period than the UK, but its financial sector was smaller and many of its problems were hidden from view.

Saturday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: How to talk to a pacifist

‘Keep your temper’, from The Spectator, 8 August 1914: ‘When a nation goes to war the policy of the Government nearly always fails to carry with it the convictions of a minority.  It is, of course, very rare for a Government who make war to find themselves without the support of the majority – for, as a rule, they would not even contemplate war without ascertaining the general tendency of public opinion – yet such cases have happened. It is probable that the majority were opposed to the war of George III. and Lord North against the American colonists.

Thursday

Mark McGinness

Hitler’s Valkyrie: Unity Mitford at 100

On 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born, the fifth child and fourth daughter of David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, who admired the actress Unity Moore. Grandfather Redesdale suggested Valkyrie, after his friend Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. The fact that Unity Valkyrie had been conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold, made it all the more portentous. A few weeks after her birth, Unity and her mother (‘Muv’) joined ‘Farve’, who was with his regiment in Newcastle. His quarters were so cramped that Unity was laid to sleep in a drawer.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: ‘Why has it come?’

From ‘Topics of the Day’, The Spectator, 8 August 1914: ‘How does it happen that within a week Germany and Austria-Hungary are at war with France, with Russia, with Britain, with Servia, with Belgium, and that it is exceedingly likely that to the list will have to be added Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark, and later Italy, Roumania and Greece? ‘…Our answer is one which we feel bound to give because we believe it, even though it may seem to a section of our readers unjust to Germany.

Tuesday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Are the lights going out?

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 8 August 1914:  ‘A good many excellent people are talking now as if the present war would mean the destruction of all civilization. That, we venture to say with all respect, is rubbish. Civilization is a far tougher plant than these good people imagine. That the war is a terrible evil, and that it will bring great sufferings, we admit as fully as can the most determined pessimist. It is, indeed, because we feel this so deeply that we have struggled hard in favour of those preparations which alone could have averted war, or, at any rate, might greatly have shortened it. Nevertheless the war, frightful as it must be in its consequences, is not, in any true sense, without parallel, nor will its effects be permanent.

Sunday

Philip Mansel

How to ruin a country – the belligerent life of ‘Kaiser Bill’

Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941 John C.G. Röhl, translated by Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge The role of personality in politics is the theme of this awe-inspiring biography. This is the third volume, 1,562 pages long, of John Röhl’s life of the Kaiser. It has been brilliantly translated — the labyrinth of imperial Germany navigated by many headed subdivisions in each chapter — by Sheila de Bellaigue. The fruit of what Röhl calls a ‘dark obsession’ with the Kaiser, it had its origin when, writing about Germany after the fall of Bismarck at the apogee of social and institutional history in the 1960s, he realised that he was analysing not a modern government but a court society.

Molly Guinness

‘We believe Germany made the war’

The 1914 editions of The Spectator in the days surrounding the declaration of war give a sense of bewilderment. At first they couldn’t believe it would happen. After Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Serbian nationalists on 28th June 1914, Austria-Hungary’s handed Serbia a list of demands, which looked like a provocation of war: ‘It is hard to see how Servia could acquiesce in them without in effect making an admission of guiltiness which she must naturally feel it impossible to make.

Friday

The Spectator

Germany’s forgotten war

Britain is braced for the anniversary of the outbreak of world war one. Memorials and events are taking place across the country this weekend. Not so in Germany, where reticence reigns.  This week’s Spectator features a piece by Antonia Oettingen, a descendant of Karl Max von Lichnowsky, the Kaiser’s ambassador in London from 1912-1914. She explains why Germany is shy about the Great War. 'In 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm had an ambitious task for my great-great-great uncle Karl Max von Lichnowsky. He sent him to London to be our ambassador there, with orders to try to ensure Britain’s neutrality (at the very least, in cases of conflict with Russia and France).

Matt Ridley

What about August 1714? 300 years since the Hanoverian accession

The centenary of the start of the first world war is getting much more attention than the tricentenary of the accession of George I, which also falls this week. As far as I can tell, no new biographies of the first Hanoverian king are imminent, whereas books on the great war are pouring forth. You can see why. The replacement of a plump, if benign, queen by an ‘obstinate and humdrum German martinet with dull brains and coarse tastes’ (Winston Churchill’s words), who presided over a huge financial scandal and died unlamented after a short reign, need hardly detain us. But forget the royals and focus on what we might call the reshuffle among politicians that accompanied the change.

Tuesday

Raoul Ruparel

Can the European Union agree a sanctions regime for Russia?

David Cameron talked tough on sanctions yesterday, suggesting that he had the German and French support. I believe he means what he says and is serious about following through with sanctions. I could even be convinced that France and Germany have hardened their positions to the point where they are genuinely willing to consider ‘stage three’ sanctions (which would hit specific firms and possibly sectors of the Russian economy). However, I remain far less convinced that the EU as a bloc can find a clear and united position – as Open Europe noted with its Dove/Hawk scale the divergences between countries are huge and the motivations for their positions is incredibly varied.