Goodbye Tempelhof
Summer in Berlin. The Turkish community is out in force with elaborate barbecues in the Tiergarten, and the city's eight open air cinemas are doing good business. Sadly no Love Parade this year (Berlin is too broke), but as compensation, everyone is heading down to the "Moma in Berlin" modern art exhibition at the New National Gallery on Potsdamer Platz. Since opening in February, the show, with 200 paintings borrowed from New York's Museum of Modern Art has become one of Germany's most popular ever, with queues winding twice around the glass gallery. The organisers have even adopted the sort of modern exhibition management practised in London for years. They are offering visitors the chance to book tickets and time slots in advance. The catch - these VIP tickets cost more than twice the price of regular entry.
Otherwise, the city's old western suburbs and hip new eastern quarters continue to rub along uneasily. In the latest contest over the future of two of Berlin's three airports, the east has won. Tempelhof in the west, remembered for its Nazi architecture and role in the Berlin airlift, is about to close forever. Meanwhile Sch?eld, the old German Democratic Republic airport, is on the up and up, mostly because easyJet has taken up residence. It conjures little history or romance, rather the prospect of long S-Bahn rides to a windy airstrip in the bleak southeastern suburbs. At least it means even cheaper holidays for Germans in easyJet's orange-clad conveyor belt.
How radical are Schröder's reforms?
After the disastrous European and regional election results in June, Gerhard Schröder seems unable to awake from his political nightmare.
His zigzag course since 1998 (a third-wayer, then a friend of the unions, then a hard-nosed reformer, now a supporter of European "industrial champions") has left many people confused, and has led to contrasting interpretations of what last year's employment and welfare cuts really mean. For the left, the unions, and evidently many voters, the grandly named Agenda 2010 is no less than the end of Germany's prized welfare state. For many economists and think-tankers, little has changed.
A look at the numbers suggests that, while core elements of Germany's cradle to grave welfare cover are still in place, something big is stirring. Take the radical cuts in unemployment benefits that have gone relatively unnoticed abroad. Under Agenda 2010, from next January, those among Germany's 4.3m jobless who have not worked for over 12 months (18 months from those over 55) will be eligible essentially for only a flat-rate monthly benefit of around E350.
This represents a dramatic break with a system in which the vast majority of jobless people, including those unemployed for several years, received benefits linked to their previous earnings. Someone with net earnings of, say, E2,000 a month would receive about two thirds of that - E1,300. As ever in Germany, the government has softened the blow with phase-in periods, but nevertheless that luckless unemployed person faces losing about E1,000 a month over a relatively short time.
Or take the health sector reforms, designed to boost efficiency and cut costs in the EU's most expensive health system. Ulla Schmidt, Schröder's personable but unpopular health minister, was feeling pleased with herself in June when pharmaceutical companies complained that profits were down because since January fewer drugs could be charged to the statutory heath funds. The E1bn in savings made by those funds between January and March (the first time they had not been in the red in the first quarter in ten years) had to come from somewhere, she noted.
The media has tended to take the "nothing has changed" view and continues to tear into the government. At least the Social Democratic party (SPD) might now be able to rely on one paper, the left-wing Frankfurter Rundschau (sometimes described as the Guardian of Germany). The paper usually excoriates the government from the left. But an SPD holding company has just bought a 90 per cent stake in it.
The FT shakes up German media
The talk of reforms and more reforms was also in the air in Frankfurt's St?l museum on the Main river in June, when my newspaper, the Financial Times, celebrated 25 years of publishing in Europe. Frankfurt was where it all started, on a snowy night in January 1979, and guest speaker European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet was polite enough to suggest that the pink paper had never looked back since. He spent most of his speech pressing Schr?, Chirac et al to quicken economic reforms. It's a shame Gerhard and Jacques ignored their invitations to attend. Among the guests who did turn up was a contingent from FT Deutschland, the FT offshoot set up in 2000 with the aim of shaking up Germany's sleepy newspaper landscape. It has done some of that and, despite still making losses, circulation has edged up to 94,000 copies a day (from 66,000 in late 2000). Perhaps most noteworthy: its 40-year-old editor, Christoph Keese, has just moved into the editorial seat at Welt am Sonntag, one of Germany's most conservative broadsheets. Youth, it seems, is no longer a disqualification for top jobs in the German media.
