Peter Kuras

In 926, Magyar warriors conquered the Abbey of St Gall in what is now northeastern Switzerland. Most of the monks fled but a certain Heribald insisted he would not leave the abbot until he had been given his yearly allotment of shoe leather. The other monks tried to persuade the “simple-minded” brother to leave but Heribald couldn’t be budged and so was abandoned to his fate. When the Magyars arrived shortly afterwards, they quickly realized that Heribald was no threat, but, having demanded that he take them to the Abbey’s treasury, they were enraged to find it empty. Convinced that the cock that adorned the roof must be made of gold, two of the Magyars climbed up to inspect it. One slipped and tumbled to his death. The second, attempting to demonstrate his contempt for the Christian God, pulled down his trousers and prepared to defecate on the courtyard below. He too lost his balance and fell to his death. Heribald was spared.

IN: The Times Literary Supplement

The inept recommendations of the Leopoldina can hardly be surprising given its membership. The panel that issued the report consisted of 24 men and two women. The average age of its members was over 60. One wonders how the institution arrived at the conclusion that it was more important to include a physicist specialising in the “mechanics of materials” than experts on the experiences of immigrants, people of colour, or women. Professor Jutta Allmendinger, a member of the Leopoldina (though not a signatory of its report), had no trouble in assembling a more diverse group of signatories to an open letter criticising the report – more than 40 female professors from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds have signed the letter calling for daycare centres to be opened more quickly.

In: The Guardian

Hancock’s errors disguise inconvenient truths about the German situation. Though Roche has developed tests and manufactures equipment, it is laboratories at universities, hospitals and government agencies that have taken the lead in testing for Covid-19 in Germany. Private laboratories have played a crucial role in Germany’s testing regime, but big business has not; according to statistics compiled by Akkredierte Labore in der Medizin, a trade group for the medical diagnostics industry, the six largest private providers of Covid-19 tests together account for 36% of the laboratories currently testing in Germany. Indeed, the distributed nature of the German response can be seen in the rapid increase in the number of facilities doing testing. Between 2 and 8 March, 43 laboratories conducted 36,067 tests. Last week, 97 laboratories conducted 313,957 tests.

IN: The Guardian

The strength of the far right in the formerly socialist states has allowed the rest of the country to distance itself from the resurgence of extremism. After all, democratic norms were never so thoroughly embedded in the formerly socialist part of the country; the West, in contrast, was supposed to be a stronghold of democratic sentiment. What’s more, an active culture of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or “dealing with the past”, is supposed to help Germans grapple with the nation’s history, dampening nationalistic impulses before they appear.

IN: The Guardian

In the late summer of 2015, when it seemed that the flow of refugees into Europe might never abate, German Chancellor Angela Merkel held a press conference. She’d just visited a refugee center near Dresden when she uttered what she surely thought was a throwaway line. “Wir schaffen das,” she said, or “We’ll manage this.” In its banality, the phrase seemed equally far removed from Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” and Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” Whereas politicians in the United States traffic in the aspirational language of marketing, political debates in Germany are couched in the language of trivial chores. You could say “Wir schaffen das” about the laundry, the grocery shopping, or taking out the trash. The phrase was typical of a politics that has long tried to bury ideology under layers of administrative detail. 

IN: Foreign Policy

Yet to claim that the AfD and Die Linke are in any sense comparable absent such evidence is itself a radical position—one that can only be held by those who are clinging desperately to a rapidly disintegrating political consensus. Such a position not only endangers what had been a successful government for the 2.15 million inhabitants of Thuringia; it also necessarily fuels the AfD. It legitimates its positions by making them seem no more radical than those proposed by Die Linke.

IN: Foreign Policy

If Handke is constantly probing the limits of form, it may well be  because he so thoroughly rejects another kind of inquiry.  When the journalists Mladen  Gladic and Jan C. Behmann asked Handke what he thought about psychology in an interview last year,  he replied that he thought it was, “an amusing game, like the horoscope.” The comment is only the latest in a long line of disparaging comments that Handke has made about psychology in general, and psychoanalysis in particular. Freud, one feels,  would more likely have been intrigued than offended. How can Handke not see that his  comment,  since retracted,  that the “Serbs were bigger victims than the Jews,” can only be true if it is meant psychobiographically?

IN: Foreign Policy

Yet meeting emissions targets in the energy sector became nearly impossible after Germans shuttered nuclear power plants in response to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. A more careful, more gradual shift away from nuclear power might well have helped Germany meet the ambitious targets it set in the 1990s, when it was a leader in the fight against global warming. Instead, Germany has now delayed the transition away from coal power until at least 2038, and the government has failed to intercede decisively against plans to mine coal in the Hambacher Forst—an ancient forest situated above a massive reserve of brown coal.

In: Foreign Policy

It’s easy to lay the blame for the bad election results and wavering faith on Kramp-Karrenbauer’s blunders, but such a view ignores both the structural dangers of her position and the more general instability of centrist parties around the world. Indeed, it ignores even the immediate cause of Merkel’s decision to renounce her position as party Chairwoman– “bitterly disappointing” election returns in West German Hessen. Kramp-Karrenbauer has indeed made enough unforced errors that discussions of her aptitude for Germany’s highest office seem warranted, but whether or not such errors will be relevant is a separate question: the forces that led to the Green Party’s spectacular recent election results were aligned well before AKK took power.

In: Foreign Policy

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the German state has long had difficulties preventing right-wing violence and apprehending its perpetrators because there’s substantial sympathy for neo-fascistic causes within the German government. But the situation is also more complicated– the diffuse structures of right-wing organizations make it legitimately difficult to differentiate between lone wolves and members of criminal conspiracies, and the ubiquity of online expression of rage makes it hard to differentiate serious threats from idle fantasies.

In: Foreign Policy