Tag Archives: Germany

German Demographics

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The Berlin Institute for Population and Development published a study this week detailing falling population in certain parts of Germany, particularly economically depressed parts of eastern Germany, the Ruhr valle and the Saarland. In eastern Germany one of the developments that has been discussed on afoe it becoming clear: Deferred or deterred childbirth in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism will have an echo around 2015, as children who were not born around 1990 fail to enter prime reproductive years about age 25. Shortly after German reunification, birth rates in the former East Germany fell as low as 0.77 children per woman. The present rate for all of Germany is 1.36, which the study says is the lowest in the world. (I’m not completely sure of that; I’ve seen very low figures for Spain, Italy, Latvia and Hungary, but don’t have them at hand to check.)

The German newspaper whose website has moderately improved quotes the head of parliament’s Committee on Families as saying the main problem is balancing work and family. No kidding. And about 20 years late.

The accompanying graphic tells another tale: People are leaving poor areas and heading where the money is. Almost all of the big drops–10 percent or more–are in rural parts of East Germany. Can’t keem ’em down on the farm, even the old collective farm. This is a hundred-and-fifty-year trend and should not be fought. People are also moving to the suburbs; just look at the belt around Berlin.

Asia beats Europe in education

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From the BBC News site comes this disconcerting news:

Europe is falling behind Asia in terms of education and skills, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
It blames France and Germany which are criticised for mediocre education systems and their inherent class bias.

And further on:

“Europeans from difficult socio-economic backgrounds don’t receive the same educational opportunities as children from rich and middle-class families,” the study said.

It seems we are wasting a lot of potential here, not to mention the loss in future competitiveness and possible social unrest.

David Irving: My Part in His Downfall

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David Irving, as no doubt we all know, is beginning his new career as a jailbird, in the great grey walls of the Josefstadt prison next to the even greater and greyer Landesgericht between Vienna’s city hall and its university. Now, there are plenty of facile things to say about this: freedom of expression is vital, dammit!/Nazis must be suppressed!/What if he was a Muslim? But I hope to raise some others.

Total disclosure: I participated tangentially in Irving’s lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. At the time I was a student of the world Holocaust authority, Professor Peter Longerich, who was one of the team of historians who acted as expert witnesses under the direction of Professor Richard J. Evans. Whilst Longerich was known to be preparing for one of his court appearances, he asked me to borrow various works of reference from the Bedford Library at Royal Holloway for him. I was not pleased, some time later, when the librarians demanded I pay fines on the books, although Irving’s defeat was some relief.

Irving is a liar who deserves nothing but contempt. (Richard Evans’s book on the case is strongly recommended for detail.) It cannot go unremarked that he has always chosen to “challenge conventional wisdom”, in the charitable way people put it, in front of audiences who are both already converted to his point of view and willing to pay well for confirmation of theirs. His lecture circuit – mad US militias, western European fascists, apartheid South Africa – speaks for itself, as do those who admit to financing him.

And there’s the rub. In Britain, his nonsense might just be tolerable. But this is in a sense a luxury afforded by a lack of fascists. I can think of many countries where this is so:
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Katja Gelinsky’s Peculiar America

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The German newspaper whose web site is now marginally better organized has two reporters based in the United States for its main news section. One, Matthias Rueb, is said to be one of the paper’s heavy hitters. They post him where they want to have an impact, certainly within German debate, and if possible at a European level or in the host country. (The paper has several such correspondents.) This is not his story.
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Islam, internal discussion; pt 1

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a reference I read a while ago and found very interesting with respect to Islamic reform movements.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17054

Also, just two weeks ago, there was a highly praised symposium in Bonn with, among other speakers, Tariq Ramadan, about this very topic (some add. info, for those who read German) –

http://www.qantara.de/uploads/463/Schimmel_Symp.pdf

http://islam.de/4661.php

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub5C2BFD49230B472BA96E0B2CF9FAB88C/Doc~E51FA69281734495BB6E9C87271C8049C~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

Interestingly I just found out that, Christoph Luxenberg (psd) has written a new book that is about to be published. If it is anything like his “syro-aramaean interpretation of Qran”, a book (which is my translation, I don’t think the book has been translated yet) in which he linguistically deconstructs the classical readings of the Qran, eg arguing that using the syro-aramaean reading the famous huris for whose attention martyrs/terrorists blow themselves up are not virgins but “crystal clear grapes,” this will be fuel to the flames these days.

Googling his name I found an interesting article in German in which he argues that alleged referenced to the hijab are, according to his reading of Arabic, referring to a “belt intended to cover the loins” rather than the head – http://www.phil.uni-sb.de/projekte/imprimatur/2004/imp040204.html (in German)

And Der Spiegel international called up Ayan Hirsi Ali and talked about caricatures and “Submission II”.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,399263,00.html (in English)

Is The German Economic Recovery Really So Sustainable?

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Of course, I could be accused of only latching-on to the data that suits me, and it is true that there has been some reasonably optimistic reporting about the German economy of late: we had the German IFO index, and there was the apparently world cup driven consumer confidence index rise. So todays news that retaill sales fell by 1.4 % in December as compared with November while German unemployment rose in January for the first time in four months must have come as a bucket of cold water for some. Not here at Afoe though, since at least one of us has been stubbornly maintaining (and here) that a sustained internal consumption driven recovery was one thing which was definitely *off the cards*.

“Unexpectedly weak German retail sales figures for December have setback hopes that Europe’s largest economy is staging a comeback. Retail sales in the Christmas month tumbled by 1.4 per cent compared with November, according to the federal statistics office. Economists had expected a rise. The figures will heighten fears that overall German growth weakened at the end of last year.”

“Unemployment in Germany rose in January for the first time in four months, the Federal Labour Office reported today. The seasonally adjusted jobless total increased by 69,000 to 4.699 million from December, pushing the rate to 11.3 from 11.2 percent. In unadjusted terms, the jobless total rose by 408,000 to 5.012 million, taking the rate to 12.1 percent.“

… and the cross is a symbol advocating crucifixions

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You will all recall, I’m sure, that Germany had a problem with nazis sixty or so years ago. After this problem had been cleared up (primarily by non-Germans), the Germans resolved that they didn’t want that sort of thing to happen again. And towards that end they enacted some laws.

One of those laws is § 86a of the Criminal Code. In pertinent part it reads:

Mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu drei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe wird bestraft, wer … im Inland Kennzeichen einer der in § 86 Abs. 1 Nr. 1, 2 und 4 bezeichneten Parteien oder Vereinigungen verbreitet oder öffentlich … verwendet.

(Any person who, on German territory, distributes or uses symbols of a party or association listed in § 86 para. 1, 2 and 4, shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or with a monetary penalty.)

The parties and associations in question include what the statute somewhat coyly calls ‘the former national-socialist organisations’.

Though nobody decent likes a nazi, a prohibition against displaying their symbols on pain of criminal penalty does rub rather against the liberal grain. Still, this is Germany, and one can understand why Germans feel they need to take a sterner line against this sort of thing than would, say, Americans.

Now you have all heard about the annoyance of skinheads and other excrescences of neo-nazi yoof culture in Germany. What you might not know is that there is also a countervailing and at times rather, ehh, exuberant anti-nazi cultural stream. This ranges from admirable young students acting earnestly against racism and xenophobia to beersodden neonhaired neopunkers who (one sometimes suspects) know as little about what they oppose as their fuzzy-skulled adversaries know about what they espouse, save that it pisses off their opposite numbers. Wherever on this spectrum of seriousness Germany’s young antifascists fall, many of them are united in the use of certain popular symbols to express their disdain for the brown. These symbols are typically displayed as buttons or on patches sewn (or quite often, safety-pinned) onto one’s bomber or biker jacket. You’ll find some pictures below the fold.

Whether idealistic antifascists or mohawked louts, these are not the sort of people, surely, that § 86a was meant to sweep up. Yet as the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, a few German prosecutors have been using this law against them, and some German courts are handing down convictions.

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Merkel In Moscow

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Fresh from asking G. W. Bush to put an end to Guantanamo, Anglea Merkel is now in Moscow. High on the list will be both Iran, and democracy in Russia. Quite timely really that someone who grew up in East Germany and can read the riot act to him in her most charming Russian should be catapulted into the front line like this.

Certain things seem to stand out:

Merkel………..agreed with U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday that it was time to refer Iran to the UN Security Council over its refusal to abandon uranium enrichment technology that could enable it to get atomic weapons.

Germany is the world’s top exporter of goods to Iran and would have much to lose if Tehran faced sanctions. It exported 4 billion euros of goods to Iran last year.

The chancellor, who grew up in Germany’s formerly communist East and speaks fluent Russian, is under pressure from the opposition to confront Putin on reports that the development of democracy and human rights in Russia is slowing down.

“It seems that Putin will agree not to vote no, but will abstain. A yes vote would be better,”

As Alex noted, Merkel has already “been impressively successful in building authority in foreign affairs”. Could this be anything to do with the fact that authority-building on internal matters is likely to be much more uphill work, or could it be that we are going to see a German Foreign Affairs Chancellor, restricting herself internally to arbitrating between the otherwise warring factions of her government? That could be one way to make it work I suppose.

Atlanticism Goes Only So Far

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Der Standard is reporting that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that “an institution like Guantanamo cannot, and cannot be allowed to, exist for any length of time” and promised to take the matter up with George W. Bush. Those people who expected less criticism from Germany of the War On Terror are clearly about to be disappointed.

It’s a tough move from Merkel, who has been impressively successful in building authority in foreign affairs despite the frankly bizarre position of her government, hanging by a thread from Franz Müntefering’s ego.

Nollaig shona daoibh

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Now of course I cannot allow Edward to remain the only afoer offering our readers holiday greetings in an obscure Celtic tongue. And I’ll throw in a nice wee pressie to boot: nazis in disarray!

Back in September 2004 I wrote in a comment to a post about neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany:

As many have pointed out, electoral support for the extreme right in Germany is a fickle and transitory thing, and the Union has a habit of picking up the strays. The Reps and the DVU have had their 15 minutes, now it’s the NPD’s turn. With any luck, this election will have been their high water mark.

Well, it looks like that is indeed the case, and just in time for Christmas, too.

As the Frankfurter Rundschau reports (auf Deutsch), three NPD members of Saxony’s state parliament have left the party (and its parliamentary fraction) in the past week. Two of them have signed on to a programme for those seeking to escape neonazi circles, and all have requested police protection. The NPD are left, then, with nine of the twelve seats they won in the last elections. Their shrinkage has an immediate and positive result: thanks to the reduced size of the NPD fraction, the party lose half the committee positions to which they are entitled. They also forfeit a portion of the state money every party gets.

The party itself is livid, of course, stamping their booted little feet and fuming about ‘treason’ and ‘conspiracy’. I believe the word they are looking for is ‘Dolchstoss‘.