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…

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.)

Germany's election is as interesting as East German architecture, informed sources say. (Photo: Brett Neely, 2008)

Germany’s election is officially boring, the NYT has spoken. The headline says it all:

In Dull German Race, ’08 Dinner Is an Issue

I’ll grant the Timesfolk the dullness, but no one should be that surprised. Having gotten over the idea that political leaders should inspire fevered passion about 64 years ago, German politicians often play it safe and gray. But yeah, given that the economy just went through the worst recession in 60 years, the state’s finances are shot and no one really knows what to do with the banks, I guess you’d expect a bit more passion out on the stump.

Today, cycling through the Tiergarten, I finally saw the first big collection of election posters I’ve seen all season. Given that we’re at T-minus 31 days until the election, that’s sort of wild by American standards. Then again, I’m sure 80 percent of the electorate will vote, so maybe it doesn’t matter that it’s boring.

View from the Kiki Blofeld terrace. Image by danny q via Flickr

Berlin’s awesome “beach-side” bars along the Spree River could be (temporarily) saved by the collapsing commercial real estate market. Thank you, Great Recession!

There’s a lot of empty space in this city thanks to the last economic collapse (hey there, End of Communism!) and a whole series of bars/beach clubs have popped up along the Spree on plots of abandoned land. They’re awesome, low-key, DIY places that mostly involve hanging out on the banks of the river and enjoying a reasonably-priced beer (click here for annoying NYT “Berlin is sooooooo awesome” coverage).

I was just  at Kiki Blofeld, one such place (pictured to the right), the other night when a friend told me that Bar 25, across the river was closing soon. Today’s Berliner Zeitung says the land’s owner, Berlin’s street-cleaning authority, has given the bar a temporary stay of execution. And the article says at least one bar appears saved because a property developer has stalled plans for a massive building project on that stretch of the river.

I don’t really understand the obsession with mega-projects in this city. They already went through that phase, check out the Olympic Stadium or the Reichsluftfahtrsministerium (I love spelling that out) to see how that worked out. But even the recent projects, like Potsdamer Platz, have been a commercial disaster. There are already big, new marquee buildings along the Spree further down, and those always seem empty when I go past. The fact is, the big companies that are going to move into that kind of high-end real estate are perfectly happy in Frankfurt, Munich or Stuttgart. Why would they want to come here? Unemployment is stubbornly high and incomes are low.

Sure, the recession has brought lots of human misery with it (and will continue despite the recent ‘recovery’), but at least Berliners may hold onto their open space along the river for a while longer.

August is known as the Sommerloch in the German news business, the summer hole. Like in the US, it’s when the crazies (think of those who say health care reform will lead to toilet paper rationing) can get their 15 minutes without breaking a sweat. Here, Vera Lengsfeld, a Berlin candidate from a marginal district who belongs to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats has put up a poster that has both her and the chancellor displaying a little decolletage with the slogan “We have more to offer.”

(Lengsfeld, incidentally has a fascinating personal history. She was a Communist Party member in East Germany who was expelled for protesting the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles. She was later arrested by the Stasi, the East German secret police and sent into exile. Upon returning to Germany after the Wall fell, she found out her husband had been spying on her for the Stasi, which led to their divorce. She was active in environmental politics and was a member of the Green Party before moving to the much more conservative CDU.)

The only two reasons this story is zinging around the German press are 1) great pictures and 2) despite the fact that the election is only seven weeks ago, the conclusion seems so foregone (another Merkel-led CDU coalition) that most pundits here seem to have given up. The Social Democrat’s, the CDU’s rivals and current coalition partners, seem out of steam and out of ideas. The polling data says that even if the German public doesn’t believe the CDU’s promises to cut taxes after the election, they’d rather vote for another round of Merkel than the SDP’s hapless candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has all the charisma of a dead fish.

It’s weird to watch as an outsider because there are many legitimate questions to raise about how Merkel has governed (or punted, as in the case of rescuing the banks) but instead, the election seems destined to be fought with empty slogans and saucy posters.