All Popped Out

With the world grown serious and all, Germany's unique brand of "pop journalism" is so over

It was another week spent hammering nails into the coffin of the late 90s.

Not all that long ago, Europe was rabidly jealous of the economic boom going on in the US and couldn't embrace the American model tightly or quickly enough. But on Friday, the EU won the WTO's blessing to slap the US with a potential $4 billion in penalties, suggesting that a full-blown trade war may be brewing. The Bush administration's plea for special treatment of Americans in a future International Criminal Court has led many Europeans to grumble about an out-of-control Imperium Americanum. And even Edmund Stoiber, the ultra-conservative challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in elections just three weeks away, couldn't afford politically not to do an about-face and follow the government line on Iraq: If the US invades, not only will Germany not be going, it'll also withdraw its six specially outfitted vehicles and 52 soldiers from harm's way in Kuwait.

But those are just the headlines. There are deeper (and somehow, also fluffier) cultural shifts going on beneath the surface. Jochen-Martin Gutsch introduces one well in the Berliner Zeitung:

1999 was a wonderful year. There was the New Economy, the markets were giving money away, newspapers in Frankfurt and Munich were sending young journalists to Berlin to do anything but what the old journalists in Frankfurt and Munich were doing. And Florian Illies wrote a bestseller. The book about a generation, 'Generation Golf'.

For Illies, born in 1971, the VW Golf embodied contemporary Germany's answer to the yuppies of the 80s and his snappy talent for upbeat sociological palm-readings of his times won him a seat as editor of the "Berliner Seiten" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Those pages sported longish lifestyle essays celebrating the goings on in the new capital - until the FAZ cut them a few weeks ago (See The Incredible Shrinking Mediascape). Like jetzt, the youth-oriented supplement of the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, also killed off, the special section cost a bundle but brought in few new readers .

Other hang-outs for Illies's like-minded colleagues, such as the SZ Magazin and the Die Zeit section called "Leben" ("Life"), are on the endangered species list. Not too surprisingly, the old guard is relishing its schadenfreude as eagerly as proponents of economic fundamentals cheered on the Nasdaq's nose-dive a year or two ago.

Generation Flop sneered Der Spiegel last week. "Pop-Journalismus", as it was often called, was just "irony instead of investigation" anyway, and the infamous case of Tom Kummer, fired in the summer of 2000 for making up celebrity interviews out of whole cloth for the SZ Magazin in the name of "borderline journalism" and the "implosion of the real", was the beginning of the end.

Further allegations: Pop journalism fetishized detail, retreated from "high culture", favored subjectivity over objectivity. Perhaps in a kinder vein, though, Roger Willemsen may have struck a point closer to home when he wrote in the SZ this weekend that the "pop culture in the feuilletons was often not an avant-garde, but rather, a conservative organ. Harmlessless was its article of faith, inconsequence its sacrement."

And in 2002, we just can't have that.

Elsewhere

"I call upon the US to live up to its responsibility for climate protection and to make a contribution to reducing greenhouse gases commensurate with its size." Chancellor Schröder previews the speech he'll be making in Johannesburg in The Guardian.