As you have no doubt heard by now, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was informed by German intelligence that her phone was subjected to American surveillance. Predictably she reacted badly and called President Obama himself to ream him out. At the New York Times,...
Letter From Sofia: Old Tanks and Modern Mayhem
The military museum in Bulgaria's sprawling capital city consists of a tiny building and a huge outdoor display of weapons that look as if they had been wheeled in fresh from the battlefields and parked, higgledy piggledy: mountain howitzers that shelled Turks in 1912...
Not All the Migration After the Fall of the Berlin Wall Was From East to West
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. When the Berlin Wall fell, a tremendous number of people headed for the West, permanently. Between 1989 and 1990, nearly 4 percent of the population of East Germany moved to West Germany. The outmigration rate dropped considerably...
The Government Shutdown From a European Perspective
As a German student studying in Washington, it's sometimes hard for me to believe the absurdities the U.S. political system produces. The ongoing U.S. government shutdown—the product of an inability by political elites to forge lasting compromises, as well as the...
Germany Votes and Austerity Reigns–For Now
Europe's most powerful nation has voted. On September 22nd, the people of Germany granted Angela Merkel a huge victory, awarding her center-right party nearly 50 percent of the seats in the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Although Merkel’s victory was a foregone...
Germany’s Third Generation East
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989. It’s already been nearly a quarter of a century since the two Germanies were reunified. An entire generation that never experienced life in a...
Germans Shocked That Obama Allowed NSA Free Rein
The NSA’s access to data clouds in Europe is news to most Europeans.
You Don’t Know Squat
The Germans used the word instandbesetzen — a combination of renovating and occupying — for squatting.
Emphasis Added: The Foreign Policy Week in Pieces (4/12)
From WWII to Afghanistan, and the Iron Lady.
Eating History
The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another. That might not have been the intention of the museum founders. But this tension actually captures the ambiguities of East Germany and the ambivalence that many Germans feel today about the erstwhile communist state.