Berlin

Wednesday

Ed West

Germany is facing a ticking time bomb of rage

I’ve learned that it’s best not to say anything about a terrorist atrocity on social media, especially not if it confirms one’s political prejudices. It just looks crass, or it has when I’ve done it. Try not to say anything profound either, as it will probably look insipid; also ideally do not make any point about similar atrocities occurring in less well known parts of the world, as people will quite reasonably think you’re just scoring points. And best not to bother with the tweets of solidarity, which are superfluous these days surely; France and Belgium and Germany are our close allies, friends and neighbours, and it goes without saying

Tuesday

Ross Clark

It’s nonsense to claim that Isis benefits from Brexit. But that won’t stop some people trying

While a storm has blown up between Nigel Farage and Brendan Cox this morning over the role played by Angela Merkel’s migrant policy in the Berlin Christmas market attack, the Today programme managed to find a man with a possible alternative explanation for the carnage: Brexit. Yes, really. This morning’s show ended with a man, introduced as a political scientist who has advised the French and German governments on counter-terrorism, offering the wisdom: ‘Brexit isn’t helpful…I mean so-called Islamic State were celebrating Brexit…we need to grow stronger, we need to find responses which are not only security-based , we need a common foreign policy.’ The idea that Islamic State ‘celebrated’

William Cook

Could the German left join forces to oust Angela Merkel?

German party politics has been overshadowed by yesterday’s atrocity in Berlin. But in light of this tragic event, which Angela Merkel has said was probably a terrorist attack, party politics actually matters more than ever. Increasingly, it seems next year’s Bundestag elections will be the defining event of 2017, not just for Germany but for Europe – and last week’s change of government in Berlin was a sign of things to come. On the face of it, ‘Social Democrats take control of Berlin’s city council’ looks like an inconsequential story. Berlin has always been an SPD stronghold after all. However, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Before September’s

Douglas Murray

Here we go again – but this time, Je suis Berlin

Well the year isn’t finished, but thanks to what looks to be the combination of the world’s most peaceable religion, a truck and a temptingly bustling Christmas market in Berlin I’m going to have reprise my most frequently written piece of recent years. So here we go again. On Monday night a truck was driven into a busy pedestrian area in Berlin. In the immediate aftermath the media were understandably wary. It could be a Glasgow-like accident or it could be a deliberate act. Struggling with this conundrum the BBC plumped for ‘Lorry kills nine at Christmas market.’ Naughty lorry. To date the attack still doesn’t have a hashtag that’s

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Twelve killed after lorry ploughs into Berlin Christmas market

Twelve people have been killed after a truck ploughed into shoppers at a Christmas market in Berlin. Dozens more were injured, some seriously. Police were initially cautious about the motives behind the incident, describing what took place as a ‘probable terrorist attack’. But at a press conference this morning, Angela Merkel said ‘we must assume it was an act of terrorism’. The German chancellor also said that: This is a very difficult day. I, like millions in Germany, am outraged, shocked and deeply saddened by what happened yesterday in Berlin. Twelve people who were still with us yesterday, who were looking forward to Christmas and had plans for the holiday, are no

Thursday

Bob Colacello

The woman who invented selfies

It took a while for Brigid and I to get to know each other, not to mention like each other. But then it was total lifelong devotion. At first, when I started out at Interview, in 1970, Brigid would give me The Glare, which was the negative equivalent of Nancy Reagan’s The Gaze. One or two seconds of that killing look were enough to put across Brigid’s message: stay away. But a few years later, she gave up speed, moved to a proper apartment on East 22nd Street, and took a steady job as receptionist and transcriber of Andy Warhol’s tapes at the new Factory at 860 Broadway. That was

Thursday

William Cook

Berlin: The return of German pride?

On a windswept square beside the river Spree, across the road from Berlin’s Museum Island, there is a brand new building which epitomises Germany’s shifting attitude to its imperial past. For 500 years this was the site of the Berliner Schloss, seat of Prussia’s royal family. After the second world war it was demolished, and now it’s being rebuilt from scratch. The Berliner Schloss has always been a barometer of German history. It was the residence of Frederick the Great, that daft enlightened despot who put Prussia on the map. In 1914, Kaiser Bill addressed his loyal subjects from its balcony. In 1918, Karl Liebknecht stood on this balcony to

Thursday

Dominic Green

Towards the best of all possible worlds

The flour is what matters, and not the mill, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his notebook in 1799. ‘When we ask what time it is, we don’t want to know how watches are constructed.’ A telling assertion, considering Lichtenberg’s place and time. For nearly two centuries, the ‘mechanical philosophy’ had ground down tradition and metaphysics into reason and material processes. Enlightenment metaphors were mechanical: God as the divine watchmaker; or, in Leibniz’s image, the Cartesian mind and body as two clocks, synchronised but separate. As an experimental physicist, Lichtenberg practised the Enlightenment method, experiment and induction. But his frustration with matter and reason was Romantic. He was ready, in Anthony

Thursday

David Horspool

A five-ring fiasco

The ambitions of the founding father of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin — that they should be ‘the free trade of the future’ and provide ‘the cause of peace’ with a ‘new and mighty stay’ — were at once wildly optimistic and strangely prescient. Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism, the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst. To anyone who believes that the excesses of the Games over the past 50 years or so have betrayed a purer original legacy, these two books by

Thursday

James Woodall

Brothers grim

One of the more obscure winners in recent years of the Berlin film festival’s Golden Bear was a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by the esteemed Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio. The film, called Caesar Must Die, consisted of prisoners staging the Roman drama in their own high-security jail in Italy. The most dedicated Shakespearean or, indeed, lover of Italian cinema will have found it quite hard to enjoy. It was a tough, depressing watch. But that’s the Berlinale all over. It favours a certain toughness and prides itself on films that engage politically, that are nakedly ‘art’ rather than obviously mainstream. Often it goes out of its way to

Wednesday

Steerpike

Team Corbyn left red-faced over Berlin hostel Twitter ‘hack’

Over the weekend a number of strange tweets were emitted from Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account. The Labour leader appeared to be taking his call to attack the Tories — and not other members of Labour — to new heights when he tweeted ‘Davey Cameron is a pie‘ along with ‘Here we… here we… here we f—ing go!!!’. While the tweets were swiftly deleted and put down to the account being hacked, new information has now come to light surrounding the incident. The Times Red Box reports that the ‘hack’ occurred in a hostel in Germany. One of Corbyn’s staff was enjoying a break in Berlin when the orders came to tweet from

Thursday

Norman Lebrecht

Musical maestros and football managers have more in common than you think

You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two months ago the Reds were running about headless as a newly wrung chook; today they are putting the fear of perdition into the best teams in the land. Or take Leicester City. Last season they were locked in an epic, desperate small-town struggle for Premiership survival. Today, they are top of the League. What changed? Both teams have the same players as before, same strip, roughly the same formation. The only new face is the manager’s. Change the boss and — presto — the mood picks up, tempi get faster,

Thursday

Nick Robinson

Diary – 26 November 2015

Scientists are experimenting with growing replacement vocal cords in the lab, as well as transplanting them from dogs. That was the Sun’s imaginative angle on my somewhat croaky debut as a Today programme presenter (only one of mine is working properly). It led me to ponder which species of donor would be fitting for my new role. Rottweiler? Too aggressive. Terrier, perhaps? Annoying after a while. Maybe a shepherd or a pointer would fit better with the mission to explain? All suggestions gratefully received. Bar one, that is. Husky is out. If my first programme had not been dominated by events in Paris, I had planned to talk about the

Thursday

Justin Cartwright

Fear, loneliness and nostalgia: a return to Johannesburg

Oddly enough, the cabin service people on the plane are constantly eating during the night, helping themselves to the first-class snacks. They are bulging out of their uniforms. They cannot pass each other in the aisles without difficulty. This is the sort of thing you notice during a long flight; at least the sort of thing I notice. I arrive in the morning at Johannesburg after an 11-hour flight from Heathrow, to promote my new book, Up Against the Night. I am met by a minder who turns out to be the wife of an admiral in the South African navy. He is stationed in Pretoria. I point out that

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The swastika was always in plain sight

In 1940, when Stephen Spender heard a German bomber diving down towards London, he calmed himself by imagining that there were no houses, and that the bomber was ‘gyring and diving over an empty plain covered in darkness’. The image consoled Spender with his ‘smallness as a target, compared with the immensity of London’. But it also exposed the ‘submission of human beings to the mechanical forces that they had called into being’. It seemed to Spender that entire nations were gripped by the ‘magnetic force of power’. People ‘no longer had wills of their own’. As Tolstoy complained in the second epilogue to War and Peace, this sort of

Thursday

Caroline Moore

Complicated, but unfussy

Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory died in 1983; Logan in 1991. Though shaped by the same era, their accounts of their lives are tonally worlds apart. Logan is flamboyant, self-regarding, lyrical, self-pitying; Amory plainer, braver, yet less self-revealing. Both, of course, are fictional, and both are protagonists woven by William Boyd into novels where they rub shoulders with historical characters. Amory, however, born into an era in which Vivians, Evelyns and Beverleys could be of either sex, is female. Boyd’s representation of a certain sort of female voice is pitch-perfect, chiefly because he is not

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Wholly German art

Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As a conductor, he stands out in a profession increasingly given to the eclectic, and to performances of music outside the western canon. The practitioners of art music have almost all surrendered to the requirement to reach out, to experiment with the new and the non-European, and to mesh their endeavours with conscious gestures of social improvement. Thielemann could hardly be more out of sympathy with the prevailing mood. He is noisily devoted to musical excellence at all costs, and to long apprenticeships rather than flashes of stardom. There have been

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Orchestral infallibility

Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret discussion they have chosen Kirill Petrenko — reminds one of little less than the election of a pope. In both cases the expectation is the same: the organisations are so iconic that they must continue into the future without a hitch and without question. Whatever sort of job they are doing, or have done, they have become too much a part of normal life to be abolished. Why is it that symphony orchestras of any standing are expected to survive indefinitely, where smaller musical organisations, though they may be just

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Sea sound

It’s often not visual images that stimulate memory but a smell, a taste, the sound of pebbles crashing on to the beach, ice cream being scooped into a cone, seagulls circling overhead. Where was I when I first heard that sound? That’s why the National Trust (in association with the British Library sound archive) has just announced its Coastal Sounds of our Shores campaign. We are all invited to send in our own audio recordings from the beach: short, five-minute clips, impressions taken outdoors, in real time, which capture what the seaside means to us. Not photos, or postcards, but an online archive of sound memories. Interpreting our surroundings through

Tuesday

Norman Lebrecht

The new head of the Berlin Philharmonic was no-one’s first choice

Let’s face facts. Kirill Petrenko was no-one’s first choice as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His name came into the reckoning only after 124 orchestra members split fatally down the middle in an all-day election on May 11, half of them voting for the German favourite Christian Thielemann and the other half for the blazing young Latvian, Andris Nelsons. By nightfall, the players were at each other’s throats and wiser heads knew they had to seek a third candidate, a compromise. But who? The Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel, who set the orchestra alight last week, had ruled himself out. So had Daniel Barenboim, Mariss Jansons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and other