The Hoff: how I ended Cold War:
IN OTHER ageing rocker news: David Hasselhoff is back in the Reich.
The 58-year-old television star – currently judging
Britain’s Got Talent
– goes on tour here in April to promote his new album,
Real Good Feeling
. For those with short memories, Hasselhoff made his name as the man upstaged by a talking car in 1980s TV hit series
Knight Rider.
He is also the original “big in Germany” star after his 1989 smash,
Looking for Freedom
, became an unofficial anthem of German unification.
Hasselhoff’s happiest memory is performing at the Brandenburg Gate, still surrounded by the Berlin Wall, on New Year’s Eve 1989.
The American star is certain his stirring anthem for freedom played a pivotal role in the end of the Cold War, and he’s expressed hope that historians will give him more credit for his part than the media has to date.
"I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the museum at Checkpoint Charlie," said Hasselhoff to TV Spielfilmmagazine, his tongue firmly in cheek.
No standing by hermanfor Merkel as Bundesbank chief rides into the sunset
IT’S TIME someone slipped Angela Merkel a glass of schnapps and slapped on the Tammy Wynette. The German leader stands accused of breaching Auntie Tammy’s cardinal rule for strong women: Stand By Your Man.
The man in question is Axel Weber, the 53-year-old hawkish head of the Bundesbank, who had a minor meltdown on Tuesday and decided it was time to go.
“You’ll have bad times and he’ll have good times, doing things that you don’t understand,” trilled tragic Tammy.
How true, Tammy, how true.
The Bundesbank chief confessed to colleagues in private that he was tired of his role as a “political football”. For a year he has come under attack for questioning the wisdom of allowing the ECB to buy up sovereign bonds of struggling euro zone members. He repeated his criticism in November and, thoughMerkel shared his concerns, she held her tongue, even when Dr Weber came under fire from the ECB for breaching the cloak of discretion supposed to envelope dissenting ECB board decisions.
In hindsight, Dr Weber’s recent public utterances seem like a cry for help or, at the very least, for political backing. He snapped last week and turned on Dr Merkel, attacking her eurozone reform plans as “lacking in ambition” for leaving the single currency subject to the vagaries of political control.
Excluding him from the Berlin-Paris plan for euro zone reform was, Dr Weber felt, poor form after years of loyal service, particularly after he played a blinder in rescuing property lender Hypo Real Estate and its basket-case subsidiary, Depfa in Dublin. He felt increasingly isolated in his Frankfurt office, allies say, the last man standing in what was once Germany’s self-evident pursuit of economic stability.
“He naively expected the news to stay private, but within two hours it had flashed from Frankfurt, London, Berlin,” remarked a government official in Berlin. “He’s left everyone at a loss, not least Chancellor Merkel.”
The whole affair has echoes of last May, when president Horst Köhler got into a strop and resigned without warning, complaining darkly of a “lack of support” at political level. Is there a pattern? “It does leave you wondering if the chancellor has a problem catering to male egos,” remarked one government adviser yesterday.
Dr Merkel’s path to power is littered with the bodies of political opponents, from Helmut Kohl to Gerhard Schröder. But it’s one thing knifing political rivals standing in your path to power and quite another to keep key people happy and loyal. Does Angela’s inability to hold on to the men she needs expose her blind spot to the fragility of the male ego? Or, by leaving Köhler and Weber to twist in the wind, has Merkel exposed a lack of leadership? The political analysts are in overdrive, but perhaps their own analysis betrays an assumption, prevalent in Germany’s male-dominated world of politics and business, that women in leadership positions are mainly there to make their male colleagues feel better about themselves.
Either way, for the third time running, Berlin has missed the chance to put a German at the head of the European Central Bank. And Angela Merkel has missed a chance to convince Germans, increasingly skeptical of the little-loved single currency, that their money is safe and that eurozone bailouts will remain the exception rather than rule.
In Tammy Wynette parlance, the Merkel-Weber D.I.V.O.R.C.E becomes final on April 30th.
Bob may not like Mondays, but he likes Maurice Lacroix watches
IN NEIGHBOURING Austria, I had an unexpected Irish encounter recently in Vienna. Taking a break from saving the world was Bob Geldof, grimacing from the window of an upmarket jeweller’s. Not in person, mind, but as the poster boy for luxury Swiss watchmaker Maurice Lacroix.
“I don’t want to live like everyone, I don’t want to talk like everyone, I want to be myself,” exhorts Bob on a poster, in perfect German, to passing shoppers.
Maurice Lacroix – not to be confused with French couturier Christian – recruited Bob as an “ambassador” for “never veering from beliefs in his journey to success”.
Bob is like their bling-bling watches, the company adds, “All about substance, all about authenticity”.
And what says Sir Bob? “They showed me the watches which I thought were beautiful and cool,” he said in a promotional video, before adding enigmatically: “I’m interested in whatever I can get involved in.”
Whatever, Bob.
Belly laughs in Bavaria
GERMAN HUMOUR is, of course, a unique species. For too long now, German comedy has been the butt of other countries’ jokes. It’s a puzzling business, considering the stellar comedic offerings at this year’s “Carnival” festival in Bavaria.
Daughter to father during long car journey: “Father, I think my bottom has fallen asleep.” Father to daughter: “Ja, I think I heard it snoring.” Laugh or cry, anyone?
A Tiger’s tale
GERMAN READERS can't get enough of the Irish-themed debut novel by journalist Markus Feldenkirchen. Was Zusammengehört(What Belongs Together) is an eminently readable two-in-one tale, a story of love won and lost in 1980s Ireland juxtaposed with a warts-and-all portrait of the Celtic Tiger banking madness. The book, which begs to be filmed, is already in its third edition and has sold over 10,000 copies, a spectacular showing for a first-time author. Publishers Kein und Aber are putting out feelers to the English-language market and curious Irish Timesreaders can read an extract at keinundaber.ch/markusfeldenkirchen/ 01432/index.html
‘Mad Men’ or ‘Mother Knows Best’ in business?
IT WAS a miserable week for the German leader: in the upper house, the Bundesrat, the political opposition dismissed
as too stingy her government’s plans to increase welfare payments by €5 a month. Meanwhile, in Hamburg, after nine years in power, Dr Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) are heading for a crashing defeat in state elections there tomorrow week – a disastrous signal ahead of the six regional polls to follow.
Then there's the ongoing sniping over whether Germany needs a gender quota. For foreigners living here, it's clear that something urgently needs to happen in the German business world, where office working life is coloured by the kind of chauvinist overtones flaunted in the early episodes of Mad Men.
Just three per cent of women sit on the boards of Germany's 200 biggest companies, prompting news magazine Der Spiegelto take up the cause with a polemic cover story titled "Why Germany needs a gender quota".
Confidantes of Dr Merkel say she is anxious to see more women in leadership positions but, sensing a battle she couldn’t win, ordered her cabinet ministers to kill the debate.
That shouldn’t have been a problem: after all, a third of Merkel’s ministers are women. But one minister has refused to be cowed: labour minister Ursula von der Leyen. In a small but significant act of rebellion – unheard-of in the good-as-gold Merkel cabinet – the 52-year-old politician with seven children at home continues to debate the issue in public.
With Merkel accused of lacking empathy and Tammy Wynette tenderness (see left), speculation is growing that Dr von der Leyen is ready to launch as the anti-Merkel: the real mother of the nation.
Top trumps for tyrants
THE HAPPY German childhood wouldn't be complete without Quartett, a cross between Happy Familiesand Top Trumps,where players win or lose cards based on various categories, from the horsepower of cars to the size of planets. The talk of last week's Nuremberg Toy Fair was Dictator Quartett, letting children play and learn about their favourite despots. Adolf Hitler is the unchallenged top trump with unbeatable stats on his card power, including 55 million victims. The Nazi dictator beats out Stalin with "just" 35 million victims or Pol Pot (1.7 million), Saddam Hussein (1.3 million) and Idi Amin (300,000). Bringing up the rear in the pack is "Baby Doc" Duvalier with 30,000 deaths.
"We've had lots of positive feedback," said the game's developer Jürgen Kittel, whose other Quartettlines include "Deadliest Diseases" and "Vermin". But he admits the dictator range is "not everyone's idea of humour".
Owing Germany douze points
IT’S BARELY February, but Germany is already in Eurovision fever. After a battle with Berlin and Hanover, Düsseldorf has emerged as host city. Its hotels are already booked out and city fathers are considering putting visitors into a huge tent city.
In a stunt not tried since Johnny Logan, Germany is sending its winner from last year, Lena, back into the ring. A television competition is under way to choose the best song for her. This year’s competition will be more political than usual: Lena’s uncle, Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, is a leading German diplomat and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s soon-to-be chief EU adviser. Why don’t we keep the Germans sweet by giving Lena douze points in May?
Not that Ireland has fared badly in Germany since we were attached to a German-led bailout drip. Since then, Irish living in Berlin have been bracing themselves for an onslaught from the Bildtabloid. Read by one-in-five Germans, Bildlaunched a vicious attack on the "greasy Greeks" last May, ordering them to sell some islands to pay their bills and running a campaign to "give the Greece back their drachmas".
Ireland, on the other hand, has been given the kid glove treatment. So why are they being so nice to us? The answer, it seems, is self-interest: the central pension fund into which all German journalists pay has invested heavily in Ireland, confessed a senior Bildjournalist to me earlier this week. Bildsells itself with the slogan of "telling you what to think".
In this case, it seems the tabloid wants its readers to lie back and continue dreaming of Ireland’s woolly sheep and misty fields.
