WorldcrunchStay updated on Germany with Worldcrunch. Comprehensive articles on German politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural highlights with translations from leading international sources. Focus on Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, German engineering, philosophy, modern art, and events like Oktoberfest and Art Basel.
BERLIN — It is becoming chic in Germany not to vote — and to make sure that everyone knows that you didn’t. It used to be just the poor and unemployed who failed to show at the polls, and, ashamed, they hid that fact. Now abstainers come from educated, well-off circles, and opinion polls warn […]
MUNICH – A single electoral poster sums up Angela Merkel’s campaign: a collage of 2,100 photos, all taken by anonymous “Angie” fans, displayed on a 2,400 square meter billboard outside Berlin’s central station. Germany’s Future Is In Good Hands, it says. Of Angela Merkel, we only see the two hands, shaped in a triangle, a […]
There’s just one place the European Central Bank’s gender requirements won’t apply…
BERLIN — BMW plans to introduce its electric i3 car this year, which raises the question of what’s going to happen to the old batteries that, for the purpose of powering electric cars, must be discarded well before they have actually been depleted. It’s a riddle the car company is hoping to solve together with […]
MUNICH – When Johannes Langner (not his real name) heard about the grade, he wished he’d never written the paper. He found the outstanding mark, virtually the highest available in the German grading system, almost embarassing — after all, he’d never in his life set foot in a philosophy seminar. He’d been hoping for something […]
Long flight delays have a price, but the airline industry is applying serious downward pressure on European regulators.
A Polish army officer got himself deported to Auschwitz to document war crimes in the concentration camp. Now for the first time, Germans can read this vivid account.
Don’t call it a *pound* – Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen houses a huge number of formerly stray dogs, cats and other species in luxe-like quarters and remarkably attentive individual care.
Dachau politicians have been looking for a way to deal with the Nazi heritage of their German city. That eventually led them to the Polish town of Auschwitz. Notes from a difficult journey.
BERLIN – Denise from Sossenheim does it. “Mmm…,” it says under the picture of ochre-yellow lentil soup. David from Berlin does it too. On his Facebook page he shows what looks like the pizza he ordered for lunch with the words “Super Pizza” written underneath the image. For many young people, photographing their food and […]
–Op-Ed– MUNICH — We Germans have always struggled with the euro crisis. We talk about it a lot, muse about what would happen if the euro zone split up, bitch about those nasty countries frittering our money away. But there’s one thing we don’t do: suffer from the economic crisis. On the contrary. Even if […]
A German writer is fed up with the hypocrisy of an exhibitionist society outraged by the limits of privacy. Yes, you are being monitored. Now get back to your celebrity Twitter feed.
An enterprising German trains his pooch to become the country’s first dope-busting dog-for-hire.
ÜBERLINGEN AM BODENSEE — Nadja Schotthöfer and David Schuster decided against the German Dream — a semi-detached house with garden, flat-screen TV, living room suite, fitted kitchen. They live in a yurt, where their child was born. Outside, a warm wind caresses the tall grasses, and it smells like hay drying in the sun. The […]
In Germany, eight university hospitals have opened outpatient sports psychiatry facilities to treat depression for the “over-worked-out.”
After decades behind bars, a court suddenly orders the release of a lifelong criminal in Bavaria who says he’s unprepared to be “out there in the world.”
HANNOVER – It’s 2 p.m. on an early summer Wednesday at an Autobahn rest stop near Hannover, in north-central Germany. Robert, starting out on the last big stage of his journey, plans to hitch a ride to Cologne. He’s making an unusual exception to journeymen rules on this one — letting a non-journeyman like me […]
HAMBURG – Frank Gundelach is a numbers guy. He knows about stock market prices, interest payments and going rates for real estate. In fact, his boss at Sparkasse bank in Hamburg promoted him to lead the real estate department — a position with many responsibilities, and the perfect job for a rational person like him. […]
Grades reveal very little about human ability. That’s why the German Railway’s new application process downplays past academic performance.
MUNICH – It would certainly be nice if all customers were treated well when they shop in supermarkets. But can supermarket employees also expect to be treated with respect? Recently, in a London branch of the UK’s Sainsbury’s chain, a checkout lady refused to serve a customer because the employee felt ignored — the shopper […]
BERLIN – Chances are, you don’t know anyone with professional interests quite like biologist Heike Reise. She and her colleagues at Germany’s Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Görlitz are studying the sex life of slugs, also known as “naked snails” for their lack of shells. Every year the scientists catch and observe primarily field […]
BERLIN – It wouldn’t have to be a real monarchy. But a little royal glamor, just a taste of that feeling that we too had a special family with grand historic traditions: that would be nice. And how great it would be if we had something like a due date that stirred commotion nationwide, and […]
The 82-year-old “godfather” of F1 has built the motor sport into a billion-dollar business with a very Bernie-centric system. But bribery charges may force the sport to find a new formula.
Berlin-based Die Welt is not taking lightly a recent EU directive that backed French bans on imports of new models of German-built Mercedes.
BERLIN – It’s an animal story with a happy ending, five years in the making. A Berlin woman who’d lost her tabby cat “Pauley” in 2008 had an almost unthinkable surprise waiting for her at the capital’s Tierheim animal shelter. “When I got the letter a few days ago from the shelter saying my cat […]
BERLIN – Anyone who owns a Trabant — or “Trabi” as the East German cars are called these days, often with a mixture of affection and amused derision — really wants to own one. But probably not as a financial investment, because even a beautifully maintained Trabant P601 fetches no more than 3,000 euros. Instead, […]
BERLIN — They hardly had to beg Renate Künast. The chairwoman of Germany’s Alliance 90/Greens parliamentary group and former minister of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture was thrilled to open last week’s Ethical Fashion Show in Berlin. It’s right up her alley. “This is a countermovement to mass production,” she says. Slow Fashion instead of […]
HERZOGENAURACH – The thing with the brush shoes gets Helmut Fischer going to this day. The small man with the friendly smile and pirate goatee sits in the visitors’ room of Puma Deutschland in the small, central German city of Herzogenaurach. Around here, Fischer is known as “Mister Puma.” The 63-year-old has been working for […]
Ralf Winkes has tried his hand at a number of different careers: waiter, taxi driver, stock broker. But the 44-year-old German may have finally found his calling…
A new documentary on German television uncovers the notable tax revenue and nationwide implications of being the “biggest whorehouse in Europe.”
BERLIN – At the end of Oranienstrasse in the Berlin borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Gürkan runs a tailor shop. The 41-year-old conservative Muslim, of Turkish origins, is all for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan“s taking a hard-line stance against demonstrators in Turkey, who began their protests over development plans in central Istanbul’s Gezi park. “He has […]
Tuesday, June 10, 2014 UKRAINE TO CREATE HUMANITARIAN CORRIDORS Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced creation of “humanitarian corridors” for eastern Ukrainian civilians to leave areas where Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation” in under way, Interfax reports. Human Rights Watch said it welcomed the decision, while leaders of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic expressed their mistrust at the […]
In Germany, efforts are on to increase the number of male teachers. Here’s the tale of a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who wound up on very different terrain.
Eat that octopus before it slithers away, call the maggots to your turning cheese, and other moving selections from the living menu.
MUNICH – People notice you when you’re with a baby – and not only when it’s screaming its lungs out in the supermarket. Just being pregnant earns a woman kudos for having a special kind of radiance. Once the child is born of course parental beauty is not usually the thing others remark on – […]
BERLIN – The shock came in his first year of training. His employer – the BMW motorcycle factory in Berlin-Spandau – asked Johann Gundel to don a strange suit: the “age suit,” with weights in it. Gundel could hardly move in the suit. His joints stiffened, and every step was an effort. Gundel, blond, slim […]
The findings raise serious questions of international law. German officials have denied knowledge of the operations.
That’s just one way to say, “getting in the sack…,” which is all they’re about. Are you impressed?
After a wave of nostalgia for the Communist regime of East Germany, debate is opened in Germany about whether Communism was as bad as Nazism.
A dark history is reopened after Green leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit won a Prize for “exemplary democratic disposition.” Digging into his and others’ past finds shocking acceptance of pedophilia.