(26 January 2023) In the mid-2000s, one of the most attractive things about Germany was the ease of finding a flat - and the cheap rents that went with it. Germans themselves were (not so) blissfully unaware of how good a deal they had.
Since then, things have changed. New-contract rents in Germany's major cities now equal those of neighbouring countries and good lettings are scarce. Yet this is not, as some think it is, a housing market in crisis. Germany retains admirable rental protections from which existing tenants benefit. Owners and landlords, too, are in a strong position. It's just not that great anymore if you're looking for a flat... Here's my analysis of the German housing market in The Local.
(25 January 2023) New year, same old Downing Street lies: and, as ever, it's good to have Annette Dittert on hand to skewer them with such verve. In this column for the New Statesman, she uses the metaphor of the Emperor's new clothes - apt both to sharp-suited Sunak and to her own role pointing out what should be the blindingly obvious! As ever, a pleasure to translate.
(15 November 2022) Germany's planned €49 ticket for local and regional public transport is genuinely transformative policy which will make using busses, trams, and trains easier and smoother than ever before while helping hard-pressed citizens as living costs soar - and if we’d never had the ill-thought-out €9 ticket bonanza this summer, it would be hailed as such. As it is, though, this important moment seems like an anti-climax. Read my take on the new ticket for The Local.
(14 November 2022) It's been a while since Annette Dittert's last column about British politics in the New Statesman. After all, as bureau chief for ARD in London, she'd had enough to be doing with her day job: Tory Leadership Drama No. 1, death of the Queen, the explosive Truss-Kwarteng Intermezzo, Tory Leadership Drama No. 2... So her examination of Rishi Sunak's current position is a welcome return to the written word - one which, as ever, I had the pleasure of translating.
(21 October 2022) Confession intime: the photos of me on this website are around 10 years old now. Whenever I mull over possible replacements, I'm shocked by how old I now look. In that, I'm very much like the current German government, whose fresh-faced 2021 look has - after eight months of continuous firefighting - deteriorated into a decidedly washed-out, haggard countenance.
Yet our tri-partite coalition, while no longer particularly photogenic and based on an agreement which Russia's actions have torn up, is doing better than many (including itself) think. With any luck, its participants will remember that and keep the show on the road. Read my thoughts on Germany's government one year in The Local.
(25 August 2022) If every one of Germany's beloved observers of our national neuroses, from the legendary Loriot right down to today's Jan Böhmermann, were to come together to parody our love of excessive complexity and petty busy-body rules through the medium of Covid legislation, they would probably have trouble coming up with something as absurd as what is proposed from 1st October onwards. Read my take in The Local.
(05 August 2022) Germany's energy crisis is the result of our decades' long failure to examine our strategic position and take action accordingly. Every government since Schröder's first administration in 1998 - and by extension the German electorate - is complicit, and now we must learn to live with the consequences until we finally sit ourselves down and (as our patronising turn of phrase has it) "do our homework". In The Local, I look at what went wrong, where and how, and ask why we still aren't doing enough to become energy-independent.
(16 June 2022) It's that time of year again: the sun is out, and so the city streets and country roads of Germany are full with cyclists - and with their most bitter enemy, motorists. There's something particularly poisonous about the car-vs-bike debate here, and The Local asked me to look at why.
(02 June 2022) Rebuilding Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies took every precaution to keep autocratic tendencies at bay - including, for instance, decentralising public service broadcasting and introducing a strong professional ethos of independence from government interference. In the north-west of Germany, it was a man named Hugh Greene (who would later go on to become DG of the BBC) who was instrumental in inculcating these professional ethics into what has, today, become NDR/ARD.
I'm sure that he would be delighted to know that, 70 years on, German public service broadcasting has been able to stay true to its mission - and concerned to read Annette Dittert's analysis of how the BBC is being hindered in fulfilling it in the UK. As ever, it was a pleasure and an honour for me to work with Annette as a translator.
(1 June 2022) There are plenty of plaudits going around for Germany's bold experiment to grant access to all local and regional transport for €9 a month in June, July, and August. Comparisons have been made to Vienna's €365 annual travelcard, for instance, and many see it as a quick and expedient way to make public transport more attractive and put money back in the pockets of the squeezed middle.
In my view, however, this fare gimmick will likely achieve the complete opposite. By making crowded busses and trains even more packed in summer and forcing operators to run at losses for which Federal Government has only vaguely promised to stump up, it could end up making public transport look worse and forcing fares up this autumn while stifling much-needed investment. Here's my take for The Local - along with some suggestions for what could be done better.
(17 May 2022) In Germany's federal system, regional elections have a habit of clustering – generally at points when national governments would rather not have people poring over electoral data. Certainly, just six months into their roller-coaster ride of a term and with Chancellor Olaf Scholz currently looking somewhat beleaguered, the Berlin 'Traffic Light' coalition would have preferred not to have its popularity examined at three regional elections.
What do state-level ballots really tell us about national politics, though, and how have the major parties come out of the recent elections in Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein, and North-Rhine Westphalia. Read my analysis for The Local here.
(10 May 2022) Most people know the principle of a false economy: buy something cheap and you have to replace it more often. A classic examples is shoes: expensive footwear lasts longer and so works out to be better value. Still, many people prefer - or have - to buy cheaper shoes.
This, in German, is called "milkmaid maths": eine Milchmädchenrechnung. And as a country, we have, due to the miserliness of our social security system, a problem with false economies on two levels: firstly, we force poorer households to buy everything cheap by keeping them on an absolute pittance; secondly, the exchequer has to plug the gaps with one-off credits and additional payments every time there is a crisis.
In an age of continuous crisis, we would be far better off making our benefits system fit for purpose, as I argue in The Local.
(22 April 2022) As the old saying goes: Jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne - Beginnings are always magical. And Olaf Scholz' first months in office went, on the surface of things, rather well. His adventurous Ampelkoalition was running smoothly and he seemed to be delivering the change he had promised. The high watermark was his Zeitenwende speech radically altering Germany's foreign and defence policy. Uncharacteristically, however, it would seem this speech wrote cheques he is not intending to cash. This, a difficult legacy, and his Merkelian tendency to shroud himself in silence are contributing to a steep fall in popularity, as I explain for The Local.
(12 April 2022) In the end, it all comes down to gas. Germany’s singular historic crime, the Holocaust, was perpetrated primarily in the gas chambers. Many of those murdered in the death camps were deported from what is today the Ukraine; many others never even made it that far, summarily shot like the tens of thousands at Babyn Jar near Kiev in 1941.
Now, eighty years on, civilians have once again been executed in the Kiev suburbs and there may have already been gas attacks further east. While Germany is not the perpetrator this time, it is complicit. And gas, albeit of the less intrinsically perverted kind, is the problem. It’s almost as if history is standing here shouting: “Look, a metaphor!”
It's one that we as a country and our industrial conglomerates - specifically BASF - have chosen to ignore. In The Local, I argue that we need to take action and stop importing gas now, however damaging the potential consequences for our economy. If our famed Vergangenheitsbewältigung is to be more than just gestures and monuments when history comes calling, we have no other choice.
(29 March 2022) It couldn't get more bundesdeutsch than this: the German federal government has abolished most CoVid restrictions but the federal states, who previously pushed for lighter-touch regulation, are mutinying to retain restrictions. In the confusion, most people think restrictions are being lifted - and lifted too soon - when, actually, they're not being lifted at all.
The result is that, as I explain in The Local, we are now in the worst of both worlds. Those few of us who think it is time to ditch restrictions have been palmed off with an alternative legislative reality; meanwhile, the vast majority are now scared sick despite the fact that, objectively, nothing has changed and Germany still retains one of the highest levels of CoVid stringency in Europe.
(16 March 2022) We all like to be proved right every now and then, but I can honestly say that there is no instance to date I would ever rather have been proved wrong on than this one. It would be wonderful if, after at least ten years of thinking that Germany - by buying almost all of its energy from Russia and neglecting its armed forces to a deplorable extent - has made itself horribly vulnerable to blackmail and failed its European allies, it turned out that I had been worrying about nothing. If, as it turned out, talking to Putin until we were blue in the face really *was* the right thing to do...
Here's a recent history I wrote for The Local of why post-war Germany has thus far proven congenitally ill-disposed to military spending - and of how we have already learned the lesson we are currently learning before forgetting it again.
Older news here.