“The Blocked Republic”

SPIEGEL cover story: Germany has no choice – unemployment and a catastrophic educational and public health system make reforms essential. The state bureaucracy, which is paralysing the country, is also in urgent need of restructuring. The remedy is known – but the political parties and associations are doggedly defending the status quo.

“Small Businesses? Broke!”

Bankruptcy: Few are suffering as brutally from the standstill in the reforms as German small and medium-sized businesses. Left in the lurch by politicians and out in the cold by the banks, paralysed by the weak economy, pushed around by bureaucrats and tangled up in the impenetrable jungle of the tax and labour laws. Small businesses? They are the main source of jobs in Germany, creating about three million jobs over the past two decades, while the big businesses rationalised away almost a million. They are also the nation’s largest source of vocational training, because four out of five apprentices are trained in small or medium-sized companies. And they are the country’s most important research laboratory – three quarters of all patents are developed here. Statistically speaking, one German company goes bankrupt every 13 minutes, almost 110 a day; companies on which thousands of jobs, livelihoods and families depend.

“Gulliver’s Bonds Must be Broken”

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf about empty election campaigns, politicians who lack courage and the longing for consensus, the need for more individual involvement in the education and public health systems, and the weaknesses of the German electoral system:

“The reason parties like Pim Fortyn’s in Holland or the Italian Forzza Italia got as far as they have, is that politicians weren’t talking about the issues that people were interested in. So if there was that kind of fringe party in Germany, it would also have a chance here. … Both the candidates talk about enormous necessities and contribute nothing towards really dealing with them. It’s funny: one of them is promoting the German path, the other is calling for social justice – when you look at the parties and their traditions, you would expect it to be the other way round. … Of course we have to reorganise the welfare state in such a way that it can still be financed in the face of demographic developments. And this problem can only be solved by means of greater personal involvement. So far, no one has come up with any other way. … Financing privileging education, in other words university education, isn’t the responsibility of the state. I’m amazed that the protests by people who will soon be earning 30, 40, 50 or even 100 percent more than the average wage, and who are demanding that the conditions for this be paid for by the poorer members of society, are being listened to seriously at all. To me that’s a mystery. … The system of relative majority voting practised in England translates the general mood of the electorate into a functioning government. I think that translation is much more important than achieving an exact proportional representation of all the different groups, like in the German Bundestag.”

Terrorists: The German criminal police office BKA has expressed a keen interest in being present during the questioning of Ramzi Binalshibh, the terrorist who was arrested in Karachi. Next week, a delegation of the German law enforcement officials is to visit the American FBI. The Germans, too, have many questions. Where are Said Bahaji and Zakariya Essabar, Binalshibh’s fellow conspirators who fled from Hamburg at the same time as he did, and whose trail currently runs cold in Afghanistan? What information does Binalshibh have about the attack on the Jewish synagogue in Jerba in April, in which almost 20 people were killed, several of them German citizens? The Yemeni is also particularly important for the ongoing investigations in Germany into the September 11 attacks. And finally he could explain the role of the only man so far charged in Germany, Mounir al Motasadeq, whom investigators accuse of acting as an accessory to murder in 3116 instances.

“Cheap Death”

Disasters: The victims of terrorist attacks often feel deserted by the German state. Compared with the United States, compensation payments are miserably low. Whether Jerba or New York, Eschede or Erfurt – whenever people are afflicted by great misfortune, politicians promise quick and unbureaucratic assistance. But the public words of concern are followed by few deeds. In the end, lawyers always have to step in for the victims, but the anger remains. What the people concerned want first and foremost is assistance and help in bureaucratic matters – support which the German governments and administrative authorities are often agonisingly laborious about giving. Nor can the victims understand why their emotional suffering alone is not enough in order to be awarded damages. As a result, damage to property can quickly get very expensive, whereas death is cheap. The new civil damages law that came into force this summer has not done anything to address this system either.

“Brussels Twin Peaks”

EU convention: The French and the British would like to have a European president, but the smaller countries and Germany are reluctant. The underlying issue is the way in which power should be distributed on the European continent in future, who is to represent it and in what manner. The opponents of further European integration in London, Paris and Madrid would like to use the figure of the president to secure the predominance of the European Council, the member governments’ instrument of power, over the EU Commission which represents the heart of the community. The proponents of integration are making a stand against this: most of the smaller countries, and Germany - government and opposition alike.

“Cruellest Cleansing”

Kosovo: The UN police force is taking assertive action against Albanian war criminals. Riots threaten because many people still view these men as heroes. More than three years after NATO moved in, the international community is at last daring to deal with its own former allies. Investigators have even arrested the leader of the former Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, on suspicion of murder. The number of victims is estimated to be above 1000. The perpetrators or instigators are mostly former, high-ranking KLA leaders – after the war they were almost all integrated into Kosovo’s civil defence corps TMK, the successor to the KLA. Unnoticed by the general public, the Hague Tribunal has also opened up an office in Pristina.

“Fear of the Bearded Men”

Morocco: The Islamists are expecting a significant increase in votes at the forthcoming parliamentary elections. They could receive anything between ten and forty percent of votes, no one is quite sure. Their involvement in the government is hampering the reforms in the North African kingdom. In particular, the Islamists could delay any attempt at rectifying the lack of women’s rights, or even bring such attempts to a complete halt.

“The Sexually Uneducated Nation”

Teenagers: One generation later it is turning out that the sexual revolution proclaimed by the ’68 generation never actually happened. Parents still find it embarrassing to talk about sex and contraception. With girls reaching sexual maturity at a much younger age, such prudishness has fatal results. More and more adolescents in Germany are becoming pregnant unintentionally and, usually after severe inner conflict, decide not to have the child. Despite spending millions on sexual education programmes, campaigns in schools and masses of colourful flyers, the change in the contraceptive habits of minors since the early 1980s has been “disappointingly” slight, according to the authors of the latest study about adolescent sexuality, issued by the Federal Centre for Health Education, BzgA.

“Search for ‘Hare’s Blood’”

Crime: Art robbers are becoming more and more audacious in the way they plunder museums, art galleries and villas with poor security precautions. German investigators are currently hunting for 140,000 works of art, but they rarely succeed in putting a stop to the game of the gangs and their fences. Since the Eastern European borders were opened, Germany has become the hub of the international black market for artwork, thanks to its geographical location in the heart of Europe. Receivers of stolen goods sell off holy statuettes from German, Polish and Czech churches, redistributing among the interested public what common professional thieves bring them from their robberies in exclusive residential areas. More stolen goods than ever before are turning up with antique dealers’ and gallery owners’, at art markets and jumble sales.

Tissue preparations: Few people have as many skeletons in their cupboard as the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. He has set up a global body enterprise with 300 permanent employees in three locations, between which he constantly travels to and fro. One is in Heidelberg, where he currently stores 300 corpses; one is in China, where he is collaborating with the Medical University of Dalian; and this one here is in mountainous Kirghizia, where he is, among other things, developing new methods for the controlled decay of corpses. In fact, von Hagens could easily retire: in 1977, as a scientific assistant at the University of Heidelberg, he came up with a procedure which revolutionised anatomy: plastination as a means of preserving biological samples. The preparations produced are extremely life-like, and of a quality that earlier anatomists could only dream of. They don’t smell, they are dry, and so robust that they can be conveniently transported from one place to the next. In particular, von Hagens is a master of the art of presenting his plastic humans in provocative poses: the body of a skinned man, for example, can be seen bending over a chess board. Ten million people in Europe, Korea and Japan have been awed by the bizarre corpses in von Hagens’ exhibition “Body Worlds” which is currently visiting London and Seoul.

“Driven by Talent”

SPIEGEL interview with Ernie Els, four-times winner of the Majors, about mental strength on the green, the secret of his rival Tiger Woods’ success, and nationalist incidents during the Ryder Cup:

“Unfortunately the Ryder Cup lost its initial attitude. … Every professional golfer has an ultimative goal: to win a national tournament, to win an international one, a major one – depending on his capabilities. When you’ve reached it, then anything else doesn’t quite compare the same, everything else seems not as important. The incentive is gone. You fall in a motivation hole. Another reason why some pros fall down is that they are playing too much golf. … At the end of the day putting wins the tournaments for you. … Putting is not a technical thing, it’s more a mental thing. You have to be very calm, you’ve got to be able to read the green perfectly and to control your heart-beat – it’s a mental game and Tiger Woods wins more often than any other.”