Germany

Sorry – bit of an interregnum in the World Cup diary, caused principally by England’s pathetic capitulation. But still the tournament gives pleasure, perhaps to a greater degree than it has done in thirty years or more. Watching Brazil get stuffed on their own midden heap was an enormous pleasure. Their thuggery in the previous round, against Colombia, came back to haunt them; there is karma in football. That’s why Leeds Utd are still in the lower reaches of the Championship.  Germany were magnificent; Brazil gave in after the second goal — but truth be told, they were never terribly good. One thing bothers me, though — at the start of these games the opposing players are horribly matey and affectionate to one another.

So – Nigeria versus Iran, then. I wonder who Boko Haram were cheering for, surrounded by their infidel abductees in some sand-blown, bilharzia riven hellhole. I was cheering for our new allies, Iran. We are told every year – since about 1986 – that African teams will take world football by storm. And they never do. They’re as useless as were Zaire in 1974. But that won’t stop the BBC spending our licence fee money on the African Cup of Nations, for political reasons. And then earlier, an enormous pleasure to watch Portugal’s pouting moppets, each of them seemingly named after a seaside donkey, thoroughly thrashed by good ol’ dependable Germany.

I would rather live next door to a German than a Romanian. I thought I’d just make that clear. I don’t mean I’d rather live next door to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich than the humorously surreal dramatist Eugène Ionesco. I mean, in general, on average, given what I know about the people from both countries who have come here to live. Not all of them, obviously. Just as a generality, if you were to offer me the choice, without telling me any more about the respective merits of the people concerned, just here’s your choice, Rod – Germans or Romanians. I may be wrong, but I suspect most people in this country, if offered the same choice, would choose likewise.

The conviction of Max Clifford for indecent assaults feels like a vindication of the jury system, as did the acquittal of the many other showbiz characters charged under Operation Yewtree. One reason I keep raising questions of justice about the current obsession with paedophilia is out of suspicion that those most zealous in their accusations are unhealthily interested in the subject. This was the case with Clifford himself and, of course, with the newspapers with which he did business. Celebrity culture is, in essence, a form of pornography which incites powerful people to exploit unpowerful people. It acquires an extra twist of perversion when it turns on those it has incited. It should not be allowed that escape route.

Perhaps we are growing war-weary – weary, that is, of the gathering storm of World War One documentaries on the BBC. There have been so many, not just Max Hastings (for) and Niall Ferguson (against), but Jeremy Paxman keeping the home fires burning and the reheated I Was There interviews with veterans of the conflict whom age withered, unlike those who left their corpses to stink in the mud of Flanders. For all that, 37 Days, the corporation’s recent reconstruction of the events leading up to Germany’s invasion of Belgium, was utterly compelling, once again confirming the place of docudrama in the history schedule.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Anne Applebaum debate the Ukraine situation"] Listen [/audioplayer]‘You can’t always get what you want,’ chorused Mick Jagger, ‘but if you try some time/You just might find/You get what you need.’ The danger with Ukraine is that the western powers will get what they want, not what we need. I write this as one who has travelled in Ukraine, loved the country and seen that its people (though poor) are talented and energetic. Any reference I make to basket cases refers to the Ukrainian state, not the country’s human resources.

BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, has been headquartered in Germany since before the country formally existed. Founded in 1865 by the industrial pioneer Friedrich Engelhorn, it still occupies the vast site on the banks of the Rhine at Ludwigshafen where its first dye and soda factories were built. A third of its staff are employed in Rhineland Palatinate. It is a global company, yet as German as Goethe and gummi bears. A few days ago Kurt Bock, the firm’s chief executive, warned that its Ludwigshafen plant may soon be forced to close, with BASF’s German jobs relocated elsewhere. The reason, he said, was Germany’s soaring energy costs and the crippling green levies being used to pay for ‘renewables’ such as wind farms.

From repentance to restitution, Germany has done an exemplary job of facing up to its Nazi past — with a little help, it might waspishly be said, from the victorious Allies. Every aspect of life, from education and philosophy, to science, politics, music and the law, was held up to the light early on and thoroughly cleansed. There has, though, been one puzzling exception; a place where shadows linger. That is the art world. The discovery, announced this week, of almost 1,400 paintings stashed away in a Munich apartment, lifts the curtain a fraction, but only a fraction, on this hidden realm.