Friday, March 29, 2024

Washington’s hawks seem to be doing all they can to provoke Iran into a conflict

By Andreas Zumach

During the critical final phase of the negotiations over the nuclear deal with Iran in March 2015, John Bolton published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

When President Donald Trump named …

A tale of three mayors

A tale of three mayors
By timesmedia

ROSTOCK

The future mayor of Rostock is Danish. In the city’s mid-June elections, Claus Ruhe Madsen captured 57 percent of the vote. It’s been 20 years since Madsen, fresh out of university, came to Germany to get away for a …

Targeting tolerance: Is far-right terrorism on the rise in Germany?

By Ronen Steinke

It was after midnight, but Walter Lübcke, 65, was still sitting on the terrace of his house in Wolfhagen-Istha, a small town near Frankfurt. The local politician, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, lit a cigarette. He could probably …

The intolerance and hate shown by AfD representatives in the Bundestag is by no means commonplace in Germany

By Peter H. Koepf

Germany has a problem, and that problem goes by the name of Alternative for Germany (AfD), “the most popular party” in certain parts of eastern Germany. No one would question that. Paul Hockenos, in his New York Times op-ed from …

The history of “German Angst” could serve as a lesson for today’s democratic societies

By Frank Biess

In May, the Federal Republic turned 70, making it by far the longest-lasting political formation in the history of modern Germany. It will soon have outlived the German Empire (1871–1918), the interwar Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945) …

Chimera: The hegemonic transition to China

By Ulrich Menzel

The hegemonic transition from the UK to the US was peaceful and promised normative continuity. The hegemonic transition to China will be conflictual and accompanied by a shift in the normative paradigm.

On Feb. 17, 1941, Henry Luce published his …

The histrionic debate over nationalization and forcible expropriation in Germany distracts from a more urgent conversation

By Albrecht von Lucke

In early May, Kevin Kühnert, who heads the left-wing SPD youth organization – the Jusos – sparked national and even international discussion. In an interview with the weekly Die Zeit, asked whether he favored the collectivization of the automaker BMW, …

Women in Germany are still massively under-represented in positions of leadership in business, politics and culture, but they themselves contribute to this stagnation

By Inge Kloepfer

They do, in fact, exist – women in leadership positions in Germany. Janina Kugel and Lisa Davis, for example. And, since the beginning of this year, Birgit Bohles. The first two women are board members at Siemens and the third …

German companies are doing well in the US, but Trump’s unorthodox trade policy is producing a “climate of instability”

By Nikolaus Piper

Economically, at least, things are just fine between the United States and Germany. Bilateral trade is flourishing. America is the biggest consumer of German goods worldwide, ahead of France and China. Exports across the Atlantic rose last year by 1.5 …

We often hear that more R&D is necessary to save our climate, but the necessary technologies have long existed – we just have to put them to use

By Marlene Weiß

In 2010, The Washington Post ran a Tom Toles cartoon that regrettably seems to become more and more relevant from year to year. The cartoon depicts researchers in 2060 still searching for a breakthrough technology to solve climate change; what …

Facebook is funding research on media, ethics and innovation. Welcome promotion or damnable colonization of journalism by a tech giant?

By Thomas Schuler

It was a bit of good news, at least for the Rheinische Post: “Facebook is promoting journalists in Germany,” ran a May 2018 headline of the Düsseldorf daily. “Facebook is honoring a pledge to invest in the struggle against …

Daimler bends: How the automaker’s new CEO, Ola Källenius, intends to leads the company into the future

By Martin Gropp

Ola Källenius seemed to be in an almost motionless state as he watched what was likely the most important moment in his career. Roughly 5,000 people had traveled to the annual shareholders meeting in Berlin to witness Daimler CEO Dieter …

China wants to consolidate its emergence as a world power based on the new supercontinent of Eurasia, as the US and the EU look on from the sidelines

By Katja Gloger

The city of Khorgos in Central Asia is a barren steppe. It’s unbearably hot in the summer, and temperatures in the winter can get down to a teeth-chattering minus 40 degrees Celsius. Until a few years ago, this patch of …

When Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins flew to the moon 50 years ago, they used German technology

By Philip Artelt and Nana Brink

Nothing is impossible in the land of opportunity. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said US President John F. Kennedy in …

Zee Germans & their dogs: Dogs are popular pets all over the world, but there’s something special – one might say odd – about the Germans’ relationship with their four-legged friends

By Bettina Weiguny

In Germany, you can joke about everything,” quipped Peer Steinbrück recently, “except about dog owners.” And Steinbrück, a former German finance minister under Angela Merkel, would know. While still a politician for SPD, he became well known for his quick …