Fattening the Vultures

Murdoch and Berlusconi circle the remains of Leo Kirch's media empire. Also: Hardt and Negri hit Germany; and new evidence of IBM's business with the Nazis.

It was all supposed to be over by the Easter holiday weekend. It wasn't. Leo Kirch's media empire, based in Munich and centered on rights to a giant library of films, but also including stakes in newspaper publishers, film production companies, Formula One racing, pay and commercial broadcast television channels and the lucrative TV rights to the next two World Cup championships, is falling apart. There's a scramble on to snap up the pieces and papers around the world have gleefully portrayed it as a clash of titans: Rupert Murdoch vs. Silvio Berlusconi.

In truth, the two moguls don't get to wrestle over the Kirch spoils alone. Yes, Murdoch's News Corporation and Berlusconi's Mediaset each have stakes in the Kirch group. But bankers, Kirch's major creditors, sit in on every meeting. Saudi Prince Alwaleed, another investor, has delighted in presenting himself as a mediator between Murdoch and Berlusconi. And both behind and in front of the cameras, German politicians are getting their words in on the proceedings as well. After all, whatever happens to Kirch's assets could have an influence on national elections this fall -- and on whichever government is formed after it.

Edmund Stoiber, the conservative Bavarian challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, sure doesn't want to see two billion euros ($1.7 billion) worth of investment from the Bayerische Landesbank (making it Kirch's largest creditor) go up in smoke. And Schröder, who's struggling to keep unemployment from spiraling even further above the figures he promised during the last campaign, doesn't want to see nearly 10,000 Kirch employees tossed out on their ears.

But the prospect of either Murdoch or Berlusconi grabbing a soapbox in Germany has got to bug Schröder even more. "I believe that, if the prime minister of a friendly nation were to have influence over a private firm operating in the field of the German media, that would be not unproblematic," he told Der Spiegel at the end of the week. The word "friendly" in that quote is a nice touch. Berlusconi has delighted in flying in the face of criticism from abroad and at home of his reckless blending of his roles as Italian head of state and media monopolist.

If, on the other hand, the prize goes to the bidder with the most ambition, Rupert Murdoch may yet realize his long-term goal of a major foothold in the German mediascape. He's been the most ruthless in his dealings with Leo Kirch, demanding money back on his investment in Kirch's failed pay-TV project when he knew it'd break the 75-year-old entrepreneur.

For weeks, German papers and news broadcasters have displayed scary samples of Murdoch's Clinton and Blair-bashing tabloids in the US and Britain, but one wonders if Schröder's Social Democrats or, for that matter, the Greens or Democratic Socialists would have any more to fear than they've already seen in, say, Bild, Europe's largest taboid, published by the Axel Springer Verlag -- in which Kirch has a 20 percent stake.

Or think back to 1999, when freshly ousted chancellor Helmut Kohl admitted that he'd funneled funny money to his party's coffers. He wouldn't name the secret donors (and that alone set off a scandal that ran for months) but many whispered one could well have been Leo Kirch. Neither would confirm nor deny the charge.

Germany's had a conservative media mogul for ages. What it's afraid of now is one from the outside.

In Telepolis

The German version of Empire, the most popular tract on globalization since Naomi Klein's No Logo, has just been published and Stefan Krempl interviews co-author Michael Hardt. Krempl posted an English version of the interview to the Nettime list.

Ralf Grötker finds passages in the book that are rather out there and writes, "Of course it's easy to poke fun at Empire. But precisely because the project is so whimsical, anyone who has not given up hope that theory and politics might once again be reunited in a grand narrative won't be able to completely ignore this masterpiece of over-the-top rhetoric."

The other author, of course, is Antonio Negri, once absurdly accused by the Italian government of being the "secret leader" of the terrorist Brigate Rosse (BR), or Red Brigades. After years of silence, the BR were suddenly back in the news following the murder in mid-March of labor consultant Marco Biagi, and Telepolis's Harald Neuber is not alone in finding this return rather convenient for Berlusconi. Italian unions have staged the largest demonstrations in the history of the republic, sparked in particular by Biagi's proposed reforms. Now, Berlusconi argues, rejecting these reforms would be nothing less than giving into the terrorists. The history of the BR, Neuber writes, is shot through with the infiltration of US and Italian secret services and previous flare-ups of terrorist activity -- even the BR's most infamous stunt, the kidnapping and killing of Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro in 1978 -- have nearly always mysteriously served right-wing agendas.

For a divergent yet related riff, see The Relevance of Antonio Negri to the Anti-Globalization Movement from NOT BORED!, a self-described "anarchist, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal."

In English

Two from Ashley Benigno: British parliamentarians debate a bill that would clamp down on exports of not just technological tangibles -- robots, gyros, you name it -- but also intangible stuff like "information"; and workers at mobile telephony company Blu stage Italy's second "New Economy strike" in Italy.

Elsewhere

Early last year, Edwin Black kicked up a storm of controversy with his book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation. Since then, new documentation has turned up, and now, in The Village Voice, Black makes a stronger case than ever that IBM knew very well what Nazi Germany was doing with its technology -- "organiz[ing] and manag[ing] the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination" -- and carried on dealing with its most important customer outside the US anyway.

Germans' sense of guilt over this era kept those who survived it quiet and drove their children, the generation of '68, out onto the streets. But the generation that followed has gradually grown less interested in wallowing in that guilt than in the "normalization" of Germany. In The Guardian, Jason Cowley examines the evidence of this in new books by Anthony Beevor, Günter Grass and the late WG Sebald as well as a proposal to merge the states of Berlin and Brandenburg and call it Prussia and reignited interest in "the largest single refugee movement in European history," the expulsion of between 13 and 14 million ethnic Germans from lands east of current German borders. If all this sounds rather touchy, maybe even potentially dangerous to you, consider Cowley's argument that, overall, this "normalization" should be welcomed.

It's easy to forget that some Web sites are actually making money. Time Europe's Thomas K. Grose looks at two: Dooyoo, based in Berlin, and Expatica, whose HQ is in Amsterdam.

And finally, it can't be helped. When the admirable Jed Perl opens a New Republic cover story with the take-no-prisoners line, "Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter," well, there's just got to be one more Weekly Review pointing to Richter pieces. Might as well toss in the more appreciative yet shorter takes from Daniel Kunitz in Slate and Robert C. Morgan in NY Arts Magazine.