Germany

Morning Star and the red-browns in Germany

Sahra Wagenknecht The editor of the Morning Star , Ben Chacko, has been at a “Rosa Luxemburg Conference” in Berlin and hob-nobbing with the Die Linke (“The Left”) Bundestag member Sevim Dagdelen, whom he interviewed for the paper’s 20 January edition. Dagdelen rages against sanctions on Russia and claims that “The US wants to destroy the Russian-German relationship for good”. She adds that delivery of “more powerful” weapons (but she clearly means any weapons) to Ukraine must stop and warns of a “third world war” if Putin is not conciliated. She complains about Die Linke not opposing Leopard 2...

Last Times where “nothing has ended”

Drawing on the author’s first-hand experience of the fall of Paris and the early French Resistance, Victor Serge’s novel Last Times (New York Review of Books, 2022) offers a bleak, immersive view of France under the German occupation and the Vichy government. Written in the early 1940s, the novel covers a period of just over a year in 1940-41. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists have an overarching goal that leads them to join the columns of refugees making the arduous journey to Marseilles and — they hope — to a ship that will carry them to the Americas, but one should not read Last Times...

Berlin’s ‘Third Sex’: Magnus Hirschfeld and the first LGBT rights movement

Costume party at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Magnus Hirschfeld (in glasses) holds hands with his partner, Karl Giese Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was the founder of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, a pioneer in the field of sexology and an outspoken advocate for the rights of sexual minorities. Gay, feminist, socialist and Jewish, he was anethema to the Nazis, and it’s no coincidence that on 6 May 1933, a bust of Hirschfeld was thrown onto the fire along with his extensive library and archives, at the one of the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings...

Kino Eye: Wolfgang Petersen, 1941-2022

German director Wolfgang Petersen, who died in August, was renowned for his brilliant World War Two film Das Boot (“The Boat”, 1981). Based on Lothar Bucheim’s novel, Das Boot follows the German U-Boat U96 as it stalks Allied convoys in the North Atlantic. The film is notable for its lack of conventional heroics and its stress on the details of submarine life — very smelly, grubby, cramped and tedious. The U96 captain, played by Jürgen Prochnow, dislikes the Nazis but he carries out his duty (as he sees it) with a degree of detachment and subdued cynicism. The crew share his sentiments and...

Health workers win in Berlin

Healthcare workers in Berlin have achieved gains through a month-long strike. Workers at the Charité (university-linked) and Vivantes (Berlin-local-state-owned) hospitals, organised in the trade union Verdi and the Berlin Hospital Movement, sustained 35 days of action for safe staffing levels and levelling up of conditions and pay between directly employed and subsidiary contract workers. In October agreements on safe working ratios were reached at both hospitals, including compensatory payments aimed at enforcing levels. It is estimated that this will mean an additional 1,000 nursing staff...

Morning Star’s Nick Wright praises Wagenknecht

In the Morning Star of 18 November, former Straight Left ultra-Stalinist Nick Wright, now rehabilitated into the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and a regular contributor to the paper, had a lengthy article headed “The truth about immigration waits at the Polish border” While rightly condemning Poland and the EU over the plight of the people at the border, Wright glosses over Lukashenko’s cynical manipulation of desperate migrants in his efforts to destabilise the EU (while his master Putin gloats from the sidelines), and reports of Belarusian troops forcibly turning back migrants attempting...

Berlin votes to expropriate landlords

"I am angry that the working class movement built this, but now it’s the corporations who profit off this.” “I hope [housing companies] think ‘Oh, the Germans are crazy. Your money is not safe in Germany’. This would be great.” - Two supporters of the Berlin housing referendum, quoted Vice Germany’s 26 September general election was a mixed bag for the left. The conservative coalition was ejected from office for the first time since 2005, with the Social Democratic and Green votes rising substantially from 2017, the Christian Democratic vote plummeting and the far-right Alternative for Germany...

A film from the GDR

Making a — very loose — connection to Bruce Robinson’s review of the Deutschland series ( Solidarity 592), and jumping back a few years, the GDR (which acquired the great UFA film studio when Germany was divided) once made some interesting films, even though much of this output now lies neglected and relatively unknown. My selection is a 1957 film, Berlin: Schoenhauser Corner , directed by Gerhard Klein. The ‘corner’ in question is a series of railway arches at Schoenhauser station on the Berlin overhead railway. Here disaffected teenagers, rebels and misfits congregate to look for some relief...

Spy stories from the fall of Stalinism

Deutschland ‘89 (currently available on All Four) is the last series in a trilogy following Martin Rauch through the 1980s. He is an East German border guard who has been coerced into becoming a spy for the HVA, the external wing of the Stasi. Each of the three series is concerned with a major crisis of the East German state: 1983 with NATO’s stationing of nuclear missiles in West Germany; 1986 with the desperate need for foreign currency that leads the GDR into supplying arms to the South African apartheid government and pimping its citizens as guinea pigs for West German Pharma companies to...

Virus: indict the Tories!

Of people who test positive for the virus and should self-isolate, only 20% or fewer are doing so fully. That’s an official estimate . No one knows what percentage of people who are identified as contacts of the infected — and may be infectious themselves, without having symptoms — are self-isolating. Most people asked to self-isolate get no or minimal isolation pay, so isolated properly is economically difficult or impossible. Of those who do self-isolate, many can do so only in overcrowded housing. However careful they are, they’re likely to infect others there. In New Zealand, the...

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