The bankruptcy of the Leo Kirch empire in Germany would be catastrophic. Everyone – the government, the banks, the media – is afraid of Rupert Murdoch.

“Cheque-point Charlie”

German capital: The director of the museum dedicated to the Berlin Wall is helping himself to millions – possibly endangering the museum’s very existence.

“We Aren’t Puppets”

SPIEGEL interview with Jean-Luc Dehaene, vice president of the European Union’s constitutional convention, on a new distribution of power in the Community, and the looming chaos of the enlargement process:

“We need the chance to carry out a fundamental reform of the EU, based on the ideas developed within a year by the representatives of the European parliaments, the governments and the European Commission within the convention. Implementing the answers in the form of resolutions will then be up to the heads of state, the European Council. … The expansion will be the next major reunification, the reunification of Europe. We are facing a quantum leap, a totally new dimension in the European project. … If it wants to survive, Europe now has to organise itself as a political union. … I’m a strong believer in a small Commission, which should comprise at most 12 to 15 members. This means that not every member state can be represented in the Commission. There has got to be a system of rotation.”

“The Poison of Doubt”

France: The start of a tough presidential campaign – Jacques Chirac’s bonus as holder of the office has melted away, his socialist challenger, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, has almost caught up with him in the opinion polls. Old bribery scandals are providing new fuel.

“A Permanent Presence”

Central Asia: Moscow is looking on morosely as the Americans march up in the former Soviet Orient. Moscow’s threatening gestures towards its former allies might “only promote the sympathy for the USA and the West”, especially since Russia gives Central Asia almost no economic aid. But this is where Islamic underground fighters are forming up against a new supremacy.

“Hunger for Pictures”

Afghanistan: Culture in Kabul – with a zero budget, a bombed-out city theatre and the legacy of ministers who went on their tours of inspection with a sledge hammer. Is there any room for culture in a city of ruins? Some passionate believers are convinced there is: now more than ever. “My budget is zero, nothing, zilch. I have nothing,” says the new minister Raheen Makhdoom, a delicate, fine-boned man who has returned from 23 years in exile in Pakistan and the USA. What is not needed in such a devastated town, where children were forbidden to fly their kites, where television sets were piled up for burning, and where women were not allowed to see the sky for five years? There is still no cultural life in Kabul, it’s more of a case of resuscitation with the help of a first-aid kit. Everyone tries as well as they can, using anything they can get hold of. In the National Gallery, carpenter’s nails are hammered into the walls to hang an image of the king in the Hall of Fame. A hunchbacked old man, who is almost entirely hidden under his turban, drags a canvas into a room stacked with broken picture frames and shreds of cloth. When he briefly unrolls the canvas, a nude portrait of a woman can be seen. Beauty herself. An unreal, dizzying sight in this town of burkas. The old man shuffles on.

“Dracula for the Ordinary People”

A Bonn researcher has discovered the origin of the vampire legends. The “undead” were the village’s unfortunate dead – but they didn’t suck blood. In the tales that have been handed down in Romania, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia, vampires play the same role that led to women being burnt at the stake elsewhere: they were forced to become scapegoats. Whatever went wrong in a village community – be it some strange disease that decimated the inhabitants, or a storm that destroyed the harvest – it was one of the “undead” that was to blame. According to historian Peter Kreuter, the reason why the belief in vampires became so strong in South-eastern Europe was that the Orthodox Church there offered its people nothing tangible or rational about death. The undead were an answer to the existential question: “What happens after we die?”

“Thank You, Dear Daddy”

Psychology: The self-proclaimed therapist Bert Hellinger is gathering a growing crowd of world-wide followers, using a mixture of esoteric role play and reactionary ideology. The former missionary leads those in search of help onto a large stage and humiliates them. He rejects all responsibility for the consequences. He has never completed any recognised training; nor is his technique of a “family line-up” his own invention. Authoritative experts say the autodidact suffers from megalomania. But while the experts warn against him, laymen in their hundreds are captivated by his authoritarian methods. With Hellinger it’s quite possible for someone who is suicidal to have to act the part of a dead person. In such cases, the effect can scarcely be predicted. But Hellinger rejects all studies into the matter; so normally no one ever finds out what effects Hellinger’s interventions have had. However, the family of a female doctor from North Germany did publish the deadly results. One day after attending the seminar the woman committed suicide.

“Heil Hynkel”

Berlin Film Festival: New developments concerning Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” – a documentary is surprising audiences with colour scenes. The other new insight into the “Great Dictator” is provided by scenes shot in colour, which film historian Michael Kloft has unearthed from the Chaplin family archives, and assembled together with British Chaplin expert Kevin Brownlow to create this documentary.

“A Sort of Cynical Talibanism”

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with US writer Philip Roth on political correctness at universities, President Bush, writing in advanced age and his latest novel to be translated into German, “The Human Stain”:

“There may once have been good reasons for “political correctness”, back in the days when there was still massive discrimination in the USA. But what goes on at many universities nowadays has reached an unbearable level of stupidity. … At many universities a kind of cynical Talibanism prevails, but the hunt on Clinton surpassed everything in terms of cynicism. … The war helped Bush to find a rhetorical position. He now talks a kind of truck driver’s American: We’re going to find them, we’re going to smoke them out, dead or alive – that’s the language of a privileged lower class boy who is pretending to be as tough as someone from the working class. … People don’t necessarily become slower with age. I’m now 68 years old, an age that I find absolutely inconceivable, but I’m not working any less than I have during the rest of my life. … I’m fit and I feel fine.”

“The Mystery of Wannsee”

Contemporary history: The Wannsee Conference of 1942 is a particularly cryptic symbol of the Holocaust. Now the means by which the only surviving record was handed down to posterity seems to have been established at last. The Briton Betty Nute, 85, worked for the American prosecution team of Nürnberg after the war. She now tells for the first time how the conference records were discovered in the spring of 1947 among the files of the Foreign Office.

“The Second Sexual Revolution”

SPIEGEL cover story: Viagra was just the beginning. Pharmaceutical companies are launching a whole flood of highly effective new potency drugs. For the first time, sex pills for women are also being tested in the labs. In order to find miracle substances like this, neuroscientists try to work out how sexual desire is generated in the brain.