2003: Hope or Fear?
Pundits warn that Germans' persistent pessimism could become a self-fulfilling prophesy
"Are you looking forward to the new year with hope or with fear?" That simple question has been posed to Germans at end of every year since 1949 by pollsters at the Allensbach Institute. Results this time around: 31 percent opt for hope, 30 percent for fear and the rest just plain don't know.
Going by the numbers, the mood in post-war Germany has been this dismal only three times before: In 1950, following the outbreak of the Korean War; in 1973, at the peak of the energy crisis; and at the dawn of the 80s, when economic indicators were pointing straight down. In other words, it's been quite a while, and once again, a floundering economy is to blame (see The Scope of the Crisis).
For a while, there was a certain novelty to this new pessimism. "The times are rotten," read a recent invitation, "but we're partying anyway." But economic pundits are now saying that the freshness and fun of this funk is wearing thin fast. They warn of downward spiral: If, fearing even worse times ahead, consumers stop spending, employers stop hiring, investors stop investing and so on, the economy will slow even further, feeding fears, and round and down we go.
A Financial Times headline reflects this worry rather well: German gloom could endanger reform plans. Of course, to conservative observers like the FT and The Economist, reform means dismantling the social safety net Germans have so carefully woven over the past half-century and are quite justifiably proud of. Others argue for heading in the opposite direction: The government should stimulate the economy by spending more, not less. The problem is that the growth and stability pact Germany signed when the euro was introduced exactly a year ago prohibits the country from creating any more debt than it's already saddled with.
It's a dilemma and perhaps the most disconcerting factor in all this is that the dilemma is written all over Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's face these days. Three months into his second term, he's still trying to avoid offending either business or union leaders and, despite creating a superministry for economics and employment, has not yet drawn up a clear plan for pulling the country out of the mire. Which is why his approval rating has fallen faster and further than any another governing post-war chancellor -- to 32 percent. About the only consolation for Schröder is that the opposition has been just as clueless; and their approval ratings are sinking, too.
Elsewhere
Just before last year's election, the German justice minister reportedly compared US president Bush to Hitler. It cost her her job. But comparisons in the same vein just won't let up. Recently, former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine compared Schröder to the last chancellor of the Weimar era, whose infamous ineffectiveness supposedly cleared Hitler's path to power. But the problem is not an exclusively German one. In the US, as "Dr. Werther" writes in Counterpunch, "the gratuitous invocation of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich has become epidemic over the past dozen years among the foreign policy elite and their hangers-on as an all-purpose justification for whatever foreign policy the elite wants to execute."
Frederic Morton reviews Thomas Mann: Life As a Work of Art in the LA Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Johanna Adorján talks to Armin Mueller-Stahl about playing Mann in a widely acclaimed TV series.
Theodor Adorno, writes Kyle Gann in the Village Voice, "was deeply aware of the crisis art would face under a worldwide American model of manipulative consumerism, which he saw as an equal and complementary threat to fascism."
The 8th annual Berlin & Beyond festival of new films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be held at the Castro theater in San Francisco from January 9 through 15.