Meet the Germans | Rory's Berlin Blog | Goethe-Institut

    What price would you pay for power?  Who would you sacrifice for success?  Faust is an old German legend of course, first recorded in 1587 and revitalised by artists, storytellers and countless ambitious men and women through the generations. Faust -- dissatisfied with his lot -- makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and pleasure.  Today the question of how much one might trade for worldly success is especially poignant, in the month of the publication of a biography about Helmut Kohl’s first wife.



    Helmut Kohl, German chancellor for 16 years, remains a controversial figure.  To many he is the architect of reunification, a great European who helped to bring down the Wall and enabled the country to be whole again.  But others regard him as an political opportunist whose use of illegal campaign contributions tarnished his party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

    Earlier this year the former Chancellor’s son Walter Kohl published Live Your Life or Be Lived: First Steps on the Path to Reconciliation, a warts-and-all biography about their difficult relationship.
    ‘For my father, politics was, and is, his true home,’ Walter Kohl wrote, sweeping away the picture-perfect image that Kohl had cultivated for his family.  ‘His real family had the name CDU, not Kohl.  He considered himself, in an archaic sense, the head of a tribe called the CDU. Somewhere along the way, in his internal perception, he and the party fused into one.’
    Over 272 pages Walter Kohl bemoans the fact that his father was almost always away from home.

    Then last week Heribert Schwan’s The Woman at his Side: the Life and Sufferings of the Hannelore Kohl (Die Frau an seiner Seite: Leben und Leiden der Hannelore Kohl) arrived on Germany’s bookshops.  Her heartbreaking story is seeped in Faustian tragedy: at the age of twelve Hannelore and her mother were raped by Soviet soldiers, then tossed out of a first floor window, from which Hannelore sustained terrible injuries.  For evermore the ‘smell of male sweat, garlic and alcohol, and even the sound of spoken Russian’ haunted her.  In the search for a quiet life she married Kohl, then a provincial politician, never expecting him to enter national politics.  When he became Chancellor she tried to hide herself away from the glare of publicity, or at least behind wigs and thick makeup.  Her reticence earned her the nickname of ‘Barbie doll’.  She only learned of her husband’s plan to run again in the 1998 general election on the television news.  In 2001 she committed suicide after contracting a crippling allergy following a course of misdiagnosed antibiotics.



    Heribert Schwan, a political biographer and a former editor at Westdeutsche Rundfunk, had access to Hannelore for more than a decade.  Over the last years of her life, he became her confidant, recording her darkest fears and secrets.  In his book he reveals the tragic story of a woman who lived in the shadows of a fanatically ambitious husband.

    Helmet Kohl didn’t sell his soul to the devil but he was obsessed by politics, which took absolute priority over his family and his wife.  Men and women who lead nations – not least one trying to reunite itself after four decades’ of division – cannot be expected to have lives like the rest of us.  Presidents do not get long lie-ins on Sunday mornings.  Prime ministers don’t have time to picnic in the park with their children.  

    The families of influential women and men have always suffered; that’s a given.  Power often leads to sacrifice and pain.  Temptation is always lurking, of course, whispering in ones ear, ‘How much must I pay?  What will you accept?’  But must ambitious individuals surrender moral integrity in order to achieve success?  That is the question which partners, their children and the general public need to ask of them, as we need to ask of ourselves.

    This month Berlin is celebrating its emerging artists.  Over the last twenty years low rents, liberal values and a rich artistic precedent have drawn more and more creative types to the city. ‘Based in Berlin’, which runs until the end of July at the Monbijoupark Atelierhaus as well as at four other venues, highlights the work of 80 young painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, performers and video artists who live and work in the capital.
    ‘Many of Berlin’s best artists have exhibition space devoted to them all over the world, but not in Berlin,’ declared mayor Klaus Wowereit at the exhibition’s opening.  ‘This show provides an important opportunity for Berlin’s emerging artists to formally showcase their work.’



    Despite the inevitable accusations of elitism and unfairness in the selection process (as there are some 6,000 practicing artists in Berlin, 5,920 of them were not included), the exhibition does succeed in raising the profile of the city’s vibrant art scene.  But ‘Based in Berlin’ overlooks a fundamental change which is transforming this city.  

    Gone are the sleepy days before reunification when West Germans had to be bribed to settle in Kreuzberg.  No longer can an incomer find a bargain-priced studio in Prenzlauer Berg.  Since 1989 Berlin popularity has steadily increased, along with the cost of renting work and living space, to the point that today increasing numbers of wannabe artists can no longer afford to be here.

    Last weekend this dilemma was addressed in a parallel show, 48 Stunden Neukölln, a two-day art and cultural festival in one of Berlin’s poorest neighbourhoods.  The event’s provocative theme was luxury, and local artists addressed – in manifold ways -- the question of how to survive (and to continue ones creative work) in the city.
    Over the course of the weekend 600 events were held in 330 venues ranging from a former prison and the old Kindl-Brauerei to Kiez International, Berlin’s longest running intercultural street fair. Even an Art Nouveau swimming pool was used as the stage for a modern opera, performed in part underwater.
    ‘For a while now, the value of art has been a matter of debate, especially when discussing the idea of guaranteeing that those working in the arts can make ends meet,’ said the organisers of 48 Stunden Neukölln.  ‘The question which we wanted to discuss was whether Neukölln can remain an important – and affordable – home for artists in the future.’



    This is a question which Berlin as a whole needs to ask itself.  In London artists have been long priced out of the old studios in Kensington and Chelsea.  In New York few aspiring creatives can even afford Hoboken these days.  Ditto central Paris and Rome.  Does Berlin – with its increasing gentrification -- want to go the same way, losing its youngest creative and questioning souls, or can it find a means by which emerging artists can continue to enjoy and enrich this changing capital?

     What does ‘German’ music mean to you?  To many people, both here and abroad, it means brass bands playing traditional marches, polkas and waltzes.  Few would first think of Kraftwerk, Wir Sind Helgen or Die Toten Hosen.  Even fewer would think of the trailblazing musical wunderkind Shantel.



    As the Frankfurt-born musician told me for this month’s artist interview, ‘I’m a German musician.  My music is an expression of a lifetime’s feeling.  It’s a part of the new German culture.’

    Shantel is a 21st century phenomena.  His single Disko Partizani!, with over ten million hits on youtube, shot to the top of pop charts here and in Turkey.  His Bucovina Club has helped to enflame worldwide enthusiasm for the Balkan beat.  His effervescent energy and euphoric, self-spoofing irony has electrified audiences across Europe.  No pop video has made me laugh so much as Disko Boy.  Yet for years most of Germany’s cultural elite ignored his work, considering it to be peculiarly foreign.

    Why?  ‘English’ music doesn’t mean madrigals and Northern brass bands alone.  ‘American’ music isn’t just Woody Guthrie’s ballads.  Both ‘English’ and ‘American’ music are understood to encompass everything from pop to classical, by way of Morris dancer’s ankle bells and twanging Country and Western guitars.  Hasn’t the time come to revise the definition of ‘German’ music?

    Off-stage Shantel is thoughtful, reflective and inquiring. ‘I never wanted to make something that was “correct”,’ he told me, talking about his unique sound. ‘I want to put this music into a genre equal to pop culture.’  
    Once on stage he becomes boyish and irreverent, thrilling his audiences with playful Balkan brass, dynamic electronica, wild stage-dives, hip-hopping belly-dancers and unadulterated fun.  His music – as he says – ‘goes immediately into your body, into your system, into your heart, into your stomach; it moves you and puts you into the situation where you have to show your emotions. This is the secret of the sound.  It turns you inside out.’



    To me, Shantel is contributing to the sound of a new Europe, crashing through old borders and prejudices in the process.  Over the next months – on his ‘Anarchy and Romance’ tour -- he will be performing in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Turkey, Finland and France.  His next UK date is at Koko London in November.  Why not drop by or click on and discover what it means today to be a German musician?

    Last week I took Mrs. Cat and our eight-year-old son Maus to the Spreewald, a lush waterland south-east of Berlin.  We fancied a quiet day paddling through the web of meandering canals, picnicking in a lush meadow, listening to the calls of songbirds.  Thursday seemed an ideal day for our outing, it being both brilliantly warm and a holiday.  Little did we know that – in this part of Germany at least -- it was Männertag.  



    ‘Men’s Day’ is the old East German interpretation of Father’s Day when every adult male in the land – irregardless of whether or not he is a father -- gets drunk.  Last Thursday all of them seemed to have travelled to the Spreewald to crowd into shallow Kahn punts, overwhelm the local restaurants and proudly toast their beer bellies to the early summer sunshine.  It was so noisy that, even in the depths of the forest, we couldn’t escape the raucous shouts and pounding music.

    Aboard the canal boats bobbed tipsy groups of friends and intoxicated work colleagues.  Sozzled members of various local Verein clubs -- drunk Bridge players, comatose archers, marinated marathon joggers, even jolly waxed moustache-growers (see below) – bantered across the canals.  To the especial delight of all the other revellers there were also boatloads of waterlogged brass bands.  

    Surprisingly – to me at least – was the realisation that Männertag is almost unknown in western parts of Germany.  In Munich, Hamburg and Cologne, Father’s Day is recognised with Hallmark cards and – if you’re lucky – breakfast in bed.  Alcohol plays only a minor role.  Bachelors don’t get a look in.  But in the all-inclusive embrace of the old DDR, Christi Himmelfahrt -- Ascension Day -- is the day to celebrate the male.

    As we paddled through the maelstrom, and I was asked again and again what on earth I was doing spending the day with my wife and child, I wondered what other events and customs endure from the communist years.  (And I’m not talking about dubious Ostalgie, which began with the resurrection of brands of East German foodstuffs, or gaseous old Trabants and flashing new Ampelmann, the little traffic light man beloved by Berliners.)

    The old Tag der Republik, held on October 7th, may be gone, as is ‘Liberation Day’, which marked the Red Army’s victory in May 9th 1945.  But what of the old East German sense of community?  Many claim that it endures in bonds of family which are stronger than those in old West Germany.  And whither free healthcare, workplace nurseries, even politically-motivated art?



    To start to answer my question I took in the fascinating Über Leben exhibition.  Over the next four months 280 photographs by Thomas Hoepker and Daniel Biskup are on display at Berlin’s Deutsches Historsches Museum. Hoepker – who hails from Munich – lived in East Berlin in the 1970s, reporting for Stern on life in the ‘other’ half of Germany.  His remarkable images of coal deliverymen, empty shop windows and ubiquitous tower blocks recall a nation at once foreign and familiar.  Daniel Biskup’s work concentrates on the radical transformations of East Germany, the Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia after 1989.   His images bear witness to life and survival of the people after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.



    So where for you, dear reader, does the old dream of ‘real existing socialism’ endure – apart from along the intoxicating canals of the Spreewald on Männertag?

    Like a modern day Saint Paul, the Chancellor Angela Merkel -- the ‘former high priestess of nuclear power’ according to Der Spiegel -- has been converted to a champion of renewable energy.



    Germany’s coalition government has announced that all the country’s nuclear power plants will be phased out by 2022.  After the crisis at Fukushima, Chancellor Merkel ordered a review of nuclear energy.  On May 30th the panel recommended that the seven oldest reactors -- which had already been taken offline for a safety review -- should never be used again.  An eighth plant -- the problem-plagued Krümmel facility in northern Germany – is to be shut down as soon as possible.  The country’s nine other nuclear power plants will be switched off within a decade.

    The move restores the decision of the previous German government -- a coalition of the centre-left SPD and the Greens -- to end the country’s reliance on nuclear power.  It’s a decision which pleases the vast majority of Germans.

    At first Germany seemed to have overreacted to the Fukushima crisis.  Nuclear angst swept the country as if a tsunami were about to wash out of the Baltic.  Support for the Greens surged in a number of elections and the governing centre-right coalition seemed as useful as spent nuclear fuel rods.  A grim-faced Chancellor faced the nation and spoke of a ‘watershed for the whole world’.   She said, ‘Everything must be placed under review.  There must be no taboos’.  To many her comments looked like political posturing.

    Three months on, the reborn Chancellor now speaks of Germany setting an example for the world.  
    ‘We believe that we as a country can be a trailblazer for a new age of renewable energy sources,’ she said a few days ago.  ‘We can be the first major industrialised country that achieves the transition to renewable energy with all the opportunities -- for exports, development, technology, jobs -- it carries with it.’

    The transition will be a huge challenge, but it’s the sort of challenge at which Germany excels.  Today nuclear power supplies almost a quarter of the country’s energy needs.  As the atom plants are shut down, electricity consumption will need to be cut or imported from neighbours (expect a generation of new natural gas plants plus more puffing, coal-fired power stations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia).  As Germany’s vast wind farms are in the Baltic and North Sea, and most of the heavy industry is in the south, a huge energie autobahn will need to be built through the forested heart of the country.  And the country’s reliance on Russian gas and Saudi oil, with the political dependence that entails, will make for some nervous moments in the coming decades.

    But Germany is now advancing boldly toward being a green power – wind, tide and solar energy – by 2050.  The decision to end its reliance on nuclear power will further motivate German industry to be the market leader.  As both a trained scientist and an astute politician, Chancellor Merkel has taken a responsible – if premature -- step toward a nuclear-free future, and in the process told German industry to get even further ahead of the game.



    The decision even raises the possibility of a future alliance between her centre-right CDU party and the Greens.  Now who would have dreamed of that three months ago?  It’s nothing short of a Biblical miracle.