Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes

Chris Reiter is a senior editor at Bloomberg News in Berlin. Will Wilkes is automotive and industrial correspondent for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt. Their book Broken Republik: The Inside Story of Germany’s Descent Into Crisis was released by Bloomsbury on 6 March. The German edition, Totally Kaputt?, was published by Piper Verlag on 27 Feb.

Saturday

Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes

German reunification never really happened

From our UK edition

It’s not easy for Germany to celebrate itself. But on Friday, the country tried. At the official celebration festivities for the Day of German Unity, the city of Saarbrucken near the French border hosted musicians, breakdancers, acrobats, magicians, and oddly, two actors dressed as a ‘talking sofa’ to entertain visitors. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the official head of state of the Federal Republic, spoke, alongside Chancellor Friedrich Merz. French President Emmanuel Macron also took part, to underscore the European dimension of Germany’s reunification.

Sunday

Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes

Can German cars survive Donald Trump?

From our UK edition

In 2003, Donald Trump took delivery of a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a $450,000 German supercar that blended precision engineering with Formula 1 bravado. Photographed grinning over its bodywork in Manhattan, he looked every bit the unabashed playboy flaunting a new toy. Two decades on, he’s threatening to hammer the very firm that built it – and Germany’s car industry as a whole – with a 25 per cent tariff on European auto imports. Germany’s post-Cold War boom was built on a single assumption: that ever-deeper globalisation was here to stay. As we explore in our book Broken Republik and its German sibling Totally Kaputt?, the country’s carmakers made an all-in bet on the so-called End of History.