Archiv der Kategorie: politics

cinema, German Politics

Mission Impossible.

It may sound a little prejudiced, but it’s true. Ethan Hunt, aka Tom Cruise, finally found an impossible mission – in Germany, of course.

Wolfgang Thierse, President of the German Bundestag made it clear that it will indeed be impossible to shoot some action scenes for the next Tom Cruise star vehicle, Mission Impossible 3, in the glass dome of the Bundestag. After Cruise had visited the dome in April, the studio’s location manager had asked for permission to shoot there but was turned down because of concerns regarding the “dignity” of Parliament.

Dignity? On which planet do Mr Thierse and his advisors live (although I have a hunch this was Thierse’s decision. It sounds just like him…)? Turning down such a huge PR opportunity for German Democracy with the alleged “dignity” of the Bundestag is beyond me. What’s undignified about visualing the new Reichstag, a symbol of German Democracy, to a billion people, many of whom will probably have only seen images of the building with Hitler or the Kaiser parading in front of it. What’s undignified about raising people’s interest in Berlin? What’s undignified about shooting a movie? It’s certainly inconvenient, but I am rather sure overlapping schedules were not a fundamental problem. Sure, most films set in, say, The White House, aren’t actually shot there – but does that matter for the “dignity of the institution”? Besides, what was more undignified – Denzel Washington’s “Murder at 1600” or the questionable election procedures and results in Florida?

To be at least a little balanced here, I haven’t read the screenplay – and if I had, I would not tell you for free. So maybe it is indeed objectionable with respect to some concept of dignity. But I don’t think so. Quite honestly, I have a feeling the decision to keep Cruise out of the Bundestag is telling more about the way representative Democrcacy is understood by senior German politicians – including Wolfgang Thierse – than anything else. Must dignity always mean distance? Remember cosy Bonn? And would Thierse have declined the request to use the dome for a Yo-Yo Ma documentary? A video for Herbert Groenemeyer? I’m sure there’s a line somewhere, but does it exclude action movies?

The rejection is a little reminiscent of the extremely embarrassing debate preceding Christo and Jean Claude’s wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995, which was later hailed as impressive art and an opportunity for Germans to re-embrace the Reichstag building as a cornerstone of their Democracy.

But at least some politicians seem to have learned this lesson. Walter Momper, former Mayor of Berlin, and currently President of Berlin’s state Parliament has offered his chamber as an alternative to the producers. His bid might be successful as the film will be shot in the Babelsberg studios just outside Berlin, where – suddenly – more and more “Hollywood” movies are being shot – predominantly because studios in Los Angeles are far more expensive.

Mr Momper therefore rightly grasped the opportunity to benefit from supporting this kind of “reverse outsourcing” without undignified excuses. But then, he doesn’t have a dome…

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Iraq, US Politics

Colin Powell. The Sad Truth.

Colin Powell seems to be a man whose pride apparently gets in the way of seeing the world as it is. Recently, he contested a statement by the likely democratic nominee for President, J.F. Kerry, that he had been marginalised in the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Yet as a list compiled by Brad DeLong amply demonstrates, this is exactly what happened.

But there is an item missing on the list that I find particularly telling about the way in which Mr Powell has been treated by his colleagues, and, in particular, by the President. Last May, when the White House tried to slowly improve relations with the allies it had seriously alienated with its pre-war behavior, Colin Powell was sent to Berlin for the first meeting with the German administration after the heydey of conflict in the UN security council in February 2003.

But while Colin Powell met with the Chancellor, the President had nothing better to do than embarrass the German government, but even more so his own Secretary of State, by “accidentally” running into a meeting of VP Cheney with Roland Koch, the truly conservative Primeminister of the German state of Hessen. Here is what I wrote about their meeting last May.

Of course, everybody got the message… as did Colin Powell.

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German Politics

Me, And The Party.

Gentle Readers,

I know some of you have been following my rants from the early days back in Summer 2002, some have joined in the heydey of political blogging, back in Spring 2003, and some may not have followed the blog at all, and just clicked the wrong button on their mouse.

Well, for those of you who know my writings, and who know the German party system, I have a question: Which party, if any, do you think, should I be a part of?

Weiterlesen →

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compulsory reading, German Politics

He won’t give quite the Horst.

Sich zum Horst machen – loosely translated “to give the Horst” – is a rather old fashioned, 1970s way to express that someone has seriously embarrassed himself. The German idiom had sudden hopes for a revival last week when CDU, CSU and FDP announced that Horst Köhler, then still managing director at the IMF, would accept their nomination for the almost exclusively ceremonial German presidency.

Not that this specific Horst did not have the most outstanding professional merits and, moreover, commanded the trust of Helmut Kohl, who had nominated him – a few years ago – to run the East European Development Bank. Surprisingly, this fact was never really mentioned in the explanations of yet another defeat of Mr Schäuble, the long-time frontrunner for the nomination but for several years now a veritable enemy of his former mentor, Helmut Kohl, who, by all means, can still pull some strings in the CDU.

But the fact that Mr Köhler was completely unknown to the wider German public made the nomination certainly a little bit more risky than it would have been in the case of a nomination of Mr Schäuble. There was – and there still is – a tiny chance that his candidacy could turn out to give the Horst, quite literally.

But there are also advantages. He can start from scratch, building on the enormous advance of trust that those that know him, professionally, and personally, have injected into the German discourse after the nomination.

Today was his Coming Out. After an interview with Der Spiegel it was time to get on the bigger stage and show his face to the people he will likely soon represent: He was given an unsurprising warm welcome by the conservative lead print medium Bild (that has recently been scorned by the chancellor” )
before going on tv tonight for a one hour interview.

Before, when his supporters tried to explain why he would be the right President in times of change, most arguments focussed on his professional and international background. But even after being only briefly introduced into Mr and Mrs Köhler’s life by an only slightly gifted and scarcely briefed interviewer I am far more confident than before that he is indeed not just intellectually the candidate we need: He is not the early capitalist IMF monster as which some will try to paint him in the coming months. But hailing from the poor background of a large refugee family that lost everything three times until he was ten, he is someone who knows first hand that sometimes, change may be for the better. And he seems like an exemplary father even in light of a tragic illness of his daughter and a certainly unpleasant teenage fatherhood of his son.

Despite evidently carefully crafted questions and answers on these personal issues, both Mr and Mrs Köhler showed an understandable, visible uneasiness. There certainly is a difference between theoretical readiness for an office and the practical torment that he – and to some extent his family – will go through in the next months. Some things in Germany did change since he left six years ago. For one thing, the government has moved to Berlin, and so has much of the “political” media. The cosy interaction of politicians and journalists back in the good old days in Bonn are certainly gone. There may still be a bit more of an informal consensus banning overly extensive, certainly unethical reporting about politicians’ families, but that consensus is certainly wearing thinner and thinner. So this aspect will take some time to get used to.

I am almost certain the new “first family” will get used to it. I suppose they will see this as just one more challenge and feel the obligation to serve – out of a sense of duty. In the Bild-interview he said he felt deep gratitude and the need to give something back to the country that let a farmer’s son rise to President by giving him the opportunity of education. Now that’s what I call a “German Dream!”

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German Politics

Hamburg. Quite Spontaneous.

What’s happening to my blogging spontaneity? Whenever I try to write about something important I end up writing an almost finished 1500 word article which is to academic and dry to read. I hope that’s just a phase.


So today I will briefly say something about last week’s Hamburg election that I wanted to say last Sunday but have not since. I actually started a post at fistful but guess what, it became longer and longer, and wasn’t actually finished when I had to leave. The poor unfinished article is still saved as draft…


OK, I know this will be counterintuitive and contrary to many of the analyses you may have read or seen with respect to Ole von Beust’s stunning victory in Hamburg. I argue, and I think this is backed by some early demographic analyses I have seen, that the election is not simply good for Mr von Beust or the CDU but also – to some extent – for the Chancellor.


To be sure, Gerhard Schroeder would have preferred an SPD victory, but this defeat is, in my opinion, actually strenghthening his political agenda within the party. The demographic election analyses will show (I assume they will in the end, some preliminary numbers broadcast did indicate this) that – to the extent that federal politics influenced this election – the SPD’s worst enemy was not, as suspected, the people’s general reform fatigue, but rather the public’s disappointment about unprofessional legislation and lack of real leadership. The latter, of course, is a straightforward consequence of the SPD’s internal struggles between reformers and those old style loony lefts whose constituency is leaving the party in scores.


Thus, a dissection of the Hamburg election will show that the cahncellor was right in his claim that much of the SPD’s difficulties lie in the communicative realm, which was politico-parlor for internal disputes. These quarrels, alongside sloppy execution, less so the SPD’s policies, were the main culprits for this defeat.


He will certainly make the loony left feel it. And rightly so.

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oddly enough, US Politics, USA

An Ambigous Tour Of The Oval Office.

More people than usual are concerned about the quality of the administrational work done by elected officials these days. Domestic German examples abound and include the recent scandal surrounding the “world’s most advanced vehicle toll system”, which is so advanced it has to be protected by not deploying it; and, of course, by a 1700-pages contract that, with hindsight, should alarm Brussels because, to me, it looks like a bad example of how to grant hidden subventions to national industrial champions.

In the US, on top of all the credibility problems, the administration has to fight different, but equally embarrassing issues of quality management. With regard to the story of the day, a voodoo finance concept to save the (also demographically challenged) US social security (pension) system, Matthew Yglesias claims that the problem is inherent, that this Presidency is all about abiguity.

Note that the president’s habit of proposing not actual legislation, but rather vague “principles” that tell no one anything about anything is quite systemic. … People on the Hill have literally no idea what the president thinks about this or, really, any other issue. Apparently the White House staff doesn’t know either – the speechwriters just write stuff and the president says it and no one knows what anyone’s talking about.

I’ve always said that too many people are probably underestimating Mr Bush. And maybe that is still correct. But, then again, “maybe” may not be sufficient with respect to defining the political guidelines of the most important polity on the planet.

Let me invite you to the White House oval office for some first hand, apparently only slightly edited streaming evidence, provided by President Bush himself. It’s a document that is, in my opinion, rather illuminating about the character of his presidency. It is oscillating between moments of rather informed historic comment, Cowboy paintings and marvel Bushisms. It seems that indeed, the ambiguity we can witness on tv each day is not simply in policies or PR.

Seriously, what is one to think of a President who can in one moment rather precisely explain historical details and in the next moment go on to state that “these windows are magnificient – they let in the sunlight…” – in this strangely clumsy manner we had to witness so many times.

Well, I don’t know.

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