After two-plus years in Berlin, I’m moving to Washington, DC. This is a positive life development but has had an adverse effect on my posting, which was never frequent to begin with. I may also need to change the subtitle of this blog.

Anyway, stay tuned. For better or worse, you’ll soon be hearing a lot more of me if you live in the States and listen to too much public radio. If that doesn’t apply to you, my greatest hits will continue to be available on this site.

Now, an homage to another ex-Berliner…

November 9th is a complicated day in German history. In addition to marking the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was also the day in 1938 when Nazi-led mobs attacked synagogues, Jewish businesses and Jews on the streets of Germany. In 1918, it was the day the Weimar Republic was founded and in 1848, it was the day the last of the German revolutionaries of the 1848 revolutions was executed, marking an end to Germans’ first attempts at creating a constitutional government. That’s German history for you, the highs are stratospheric, the lows hellish.

While there is plenty of coverage of the day, including some of my own, I’d like to share one story, told to me by a neighbor.

She and her husband have lived on my street for 42 years, when the neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, was in such disrepair that balconies often collapsed without warning. Many buildings were still heated by coal and bathrooms were often shared between several apartments.

In the fall of 1989 one of their two daughters fled to the West via Hungary, like so many East Germans did that autumn, precipitating the regime’s collapse. The second daughter had remained and was barely out of school, just 19 or 20. It was early November and suddenly, perhaps like any teenager, she wanted an apartment of her own.

She went with her mother to the nearby office that doled out apartments to see if one was available but none were even though there were dozens of empty apartments nearby because so many people had left the country in the past few weeks. They leave the office and the daughter turns to her mother and said, “Mother, this is the last straw, I’m going to the West, too. I just can’t be here.”

The mother looked at me while telling this story and said, “I had just lost one daughter a few weeks before and didn’t know if I would ever see her again. And then my other daughter says she wants to go to the West too. Because she couldn’t get an apartment. It was the worst day of my life.”

The mother walked back into the housing office. One of the women working there was an acquaintance and sees that the mother is near tears and pulls her aside to ask what’s wrong. The mother explains and the housing woman says, “I can take care of this.”

She goes into a back office and returns a few minutes later with a key, saying, “This one will work.” The mother goes outside and gives the key to her daughter, who’s overjoyed about the apartment and stops talking about going West. It was November 7, 1989.

Two days later, it’s all irrelevant, the mother tells me, the Wall is gone and the fear that families could be separated, never to reunite again, is gone. And she says that day, November 9, 1989, was one of the happiest days of her life, not just because they could travel freely, but because her newly shattered family was made whole once again.

Angela Merkel officially got sworn in today for a second term as Chancellor. Instead of the hapless Frank Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democrats at her side as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor (as is traditional for the smaller coalition partner), she now has Free Democrat Guido Westerwelle (or, WesterWave as fans of his English skills would like him to be known as).

Yay Guido, right? I don’t think so. Despite a record share of the vote last month, I think Westerwelle and the Free Democrats played their hand terribly in the coalition negotiations. They probably could have gotten the Finance Ministry if they had been stubborn, but Westerwelle followed tradition and took the Foreign Ministry, even though he has little background or interest in foreign affairs (favorite WesterWave word so far: the “outland”). Not that I necessarily think their program of massive tax cuts and slashing social services would have been particularly sound policy, but I think that if you’re as fanatically devoted to these things as the FDP is, you might have fought a bit harder to make sure you control all the levers of government that will allow you to attain your goals instead of handing them off to another political party. Plus, the Chancellor traditionally sets the foreign policy agenda enough as it already is, so if Westerwelle turns into a weak foreign minister, as I believe he will, the important parts of the portfolio simply become assimilated into Merkel’s office.

Going back to the Finance Ministry (the building itself being the single biggest point of continuity between the sweet, soft lovey-duddy Germany of today and the Nazis), Wolfgang Schaeuble, elder spokesman, dark knight and illegal campaign contribution bagman extraordinaire of the Christian Democrats is Finance Minister instead of Westerwelle or another FDP member. Why this matters is that even though the CDU signed onto tax cuts, Schaeuble’s the kind of guy who’s likely to lock up the national credit card and sic the dogs on anyone who tries to spend more than Schaeuble thinks is possible.

The FDP’s weakness shows elsewhere too. Philip Rösler, the new FDP Health Minister may be a photogenic 36 year-old but he’s barely been in politics and now he holds what’s likely to be one of the more contentious ministries in government (though the health care system is way better here than in the US, there are big financing holes right now that are going to have to be fixed). It’s not clear to me that Rösler is going to be able to unite the FDP and CDU on some kind of common health policy that’s going to make anyone happy. In which case the status quo will hold, which Merkel by temperament probably prefers.

In other words, even though Merkel’s CDU (and their Bavarian CSU allies) holds the smallest share of seats ever in the Bundestag, she seems to have managed to concentrate power even further in her hands and rather than assert themselves, the FDP simply rolled over and asked to have its tummy scratched with some tax cuts that may not even happen. Nice work, Angie.

A store in Berlin that only sells products made in what was East Germany. (Photo: Brett Neely, 2009)

It’s anniversary time in Germany. Twenty years ago, the Socialist Unity Party lost its hold on power as thousands of East Germans took to the streets in peaceful protests. It was a hopeful time, and certainly the most peaceful revolution German history. But it wasn’t all sunshine and light after thousands of companies were closed and millions thrown out of work afterward.

My most recent story for Marketplace is about the companies that survived what Germans call Die Wende, the turning point. I had much, much more for the piece but when you’re working with three minutes, a lot gets left on the cutting room floor.

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A Berlin bus advertising one of the city's biggest brothels (Photo: Brett Neely, 2009)

Berlin is, and has been for a long time, broke. The city has lots of debt, it’s one of Germany’s least productive cities in terms of economic output, the number of citizens receiving social services is high. Etc. Sort of like DC, only much more livable and less dysfunctional.

You wouldn’t pull this revenue-generating measure off in DC though. The city’s transit agency has buses advertising for one of the city’s biggest brothels. Presumably that’s a lucrative ad contract to land.

The Artemis Web site even has a charmingly-written English section: “Artemis is a perfectly styled club, one of the most beautiful and largest wellness brothel establishments in Germany.”

Makes me think they’re marketing themselves to yoga-loving sex tourists.

Of course, Berlin lets anyone advertise on their buses. The southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg has cheeky ads on Berlin buses that say, “It’s nice here, but have you been to Baden-Wuerttemberg?” It’s hard for me to imagine Georgia or Arizona taking out that ad on a DC city bus.

I haven't seen this one around Berlin, but I've seen plenty like it. Image by skep via Flickr

So Germany had an election. You might have heard. The words “boring” and “uninspiring” were overused. The Social Democrats got thrashed, there’s four more years of Angie and Germany’s new foreign minister is a free-marketeer named Guido. What was missing from the analysis was the observation that parties catering to affluent, well-educated, socially-liberal voters collared nearly 30 percent of the vote. The yuppie block in German politics has gotten some electoral clout. Where can this possibly lead? State-subsidized lattes?

First off, Guido Westerewelle’s Free Democratic Party. They’ve always been the odd one out in German party politics but under Westerwelle, they’ve pushed their low tax-loving, environmentally friendly (though they’re for nuclear power), vaguely pacifistic message toward younger voters (Westerwelle also unsuccessfully tried to rebrand the FDP as the ‘fun’ party a few years ago…which went down as well as you can imagine). While the big parties are hemorrhaging members, the FDP has been picking up new ones (an important source of funding in Germany as campaign contributions play a smaller role than in the US). The ideal new FDP member is a 30-something urban dweller who makes well over the median income, is highly educated and owns their own small, vaguely creative business. The FDP brought in a record 15 percent of the vote last night.

Then there’s the Greens. While they may still have a hairshirt brigade on hand, plenty of the Greens’ members and supporters mostly differ from the FDP yuppie set in that they work at non-profits or vaguely intellectual enterprises rather than own businesses. My favorite quote from the Local’s blog last night by the excellent Ben Knight who as at the CDU mothership captures the difference:

“The Greens are going to have to think hard about who they are. Sooner or later, they are going to admit they are basically the same as the FDP. I’m from Cologne, you see them all the time, they drive around in Porsches and buy €2 Eco-bread.”

Though the Greens ran a totally lame campaign and saw their party’s most charismatic and promising member lose his Bundestag seat, they still also managed a record-breaking share of the voting, getting 10 percent.

Last, there’s the brand new and rapidly-growing Pirate Party. I met their Swedish counterparts a few months ago and while I may be stretching the yuppie thing slightly, the Pirates also bring up a (mostly male) young, well-educated and presumably somewhat affluent demographic. They’re single-mindedly focused on online freedom in the same way that the Greens were about the environment in the 80s. But you can only be that concentrated on a single-issue if you’re not so worried about unemployment or other issues. Though they’ve been around for just a few months, they pulled in two percent of the national vote, which is crazy by German standards. By comparison, the neo-Nazi NPD, which has been around much, much longer, got 1.5 percent…Germany has more nerds than Nazis.

So how does a sizable yuppie block bend the political order? I’m not sure because though yuppies may share affluence and education, there are plenty of ways in which they differ. It probably means less support for old-line blue collar jobs. It’s hard for me to imagine an FDP/Green/Pirate government giving two squats about the plight of auto workers. All three parties are heavily focused on privacy issues. Still, it’s fascinating to see three yuppie-friendly parties doing well because Germany’s population is aging fast and I would have thought that the parties would be courting older voters instead. But since party identification used to happen early in Germany and last for life, the newer and smaller parties figure there’s no sense hunting Germany’s retirement homes for voters.

(As a parenthetical aside, there actually are plenty of yuppie types inside the big parties, too. But both the CDU/CSU and the SPD have been losing supporters in droves over the past decade. The SPD had over 40 percent of the vote in 1998, now it’s 23 percent. Similar, but less dramatic story with the CDU/CSU.)

For much of the past year, I’ve been covering the soap opera that is GM‘s troubled European unit, Opel for pretty much every outlet I’ve worked for, including Marketplace, NPR and Deutsche Welle. Now that GM has agreed to sell a controlling stake to Magna, it looks like everything I reported would be a problem with the deal has come true.

The Antwerp factory I visited appears to be on the chopping block, despite being one of Opel’s most efficient production locations according to union leaders. In the zero-sum terms of today’s car business, axing Antwerp means saving German factories (and jobs in a German election season). Indeed, just 4,000 jobs will probably be cut in Germany, less than expected earlier this summer.

Oh right, the German government is underwriting the Magna deal and got testy about funding other bidders when it became clear that they would lay off more German workers.

Belgium, along with Spain and the UK, which all have Opel factories likely to be closed or heavily cut, are…upset. And they’re going to the European Commission and trying to sink the deal now that it’s official and the layoff negotiations are underway.

As for the workers and retirees I spoke to in Antwerp over the summer, they were sanguine then about what could happen but I suspect they’re worried now. My inbox has been getting multiple press releases a day about demonstrations and protests. Ultimately though, the only hope those workers have is if the EU puts the screws on Germany in the next few months. Otherwise, at least they have a European-style safety net to fall back on rather than wind up in the European equivalent of Detroit.

Then we crossed the border into Bosnia.

First off, though we were well into Bosnia, we noticed the Croatian flag flying everywhere, a sign that ethnic loyalties trump national ones. We didn’t make it to the Serbian regions but I can only imagine that there’s barely a sign that the Bosnian state even exists there.

Shelled-out building in Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. (Photo: Brett Neely, 2009)

Then you notice the war damage, visible nowhere else we visited in the Balkans. By war damage, I mean bullet holes in occupied buildings and totally shelled out buildings in the middle of otherwise-busy cities.

For a little context, the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war, was signed in late 1995 (almost 14 years ago if you need to count).

Perhaps the most understandable, but still disturbing, sign that things were not well, were the road signs themselves. As a multi-ethnic country, Bosnia has pledged to respect the language rights of Serbs (who use the Cyrillic alphabet) and non-Serbs (who use Latin script). Almost every road sign we saw had the Cyrillic script spray-painted out.

Reconciliation is clearly another generation or two away.

Road sign in Bosnia with the Cyrillic script vandalized. (Photo: Brett Neely, 2009)