Summer Theater

German and Italian politicians trade barbs but most Germans and Italians don't care; still, whatever happened to European union?

It's that time of year again. Parliaments are shuttered and parliamentarians are heading off for their holidays. But the newspapers have to keep right on publishing and TV and radio newsreaders have airtime to fill. Regardless of all the meaty material there might be out there to report on, when it comes to the domestic front, year after year, Germans all but inevitably face another season of what's often dismissed with a wry cynical wink as "summer theater."

It usually begins with some politician's ill-considered remark. That'll spark a sensational headline and reporters will run off to political opponents for more snappy quotes to feed the fire. If all goes as hoped (for the newspapers, that is), those reporters can spend the next several weeks bouncing around as if in a pinball machine, ringing bells, collecting jabs and counter-jabs between the governing coalition and the opposition.

The spark for this year's fire, though, was neither off the cuff nor from a German. Just days after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's jibe in the European Parliament that a German social democrat would be well cast as a concentration camp commandant (see Waiting for the Punchline), Stefano Stefani, an Italian undersecretary - for tourism, no less - wrote in his party's newsletter: "We know the Germans well, those stereotyped blonds with a hyper-nationalist pride who have always been indoctrinated to be first in the class at any cost." He went on to complain about Germans taking up space on Italian beaches and generally being loud, belching nuisances.

Germany's popular and conservative tabloid, Bild, itself also the brunt of Stefani's tirade, knew a fiery spark when it saw one and ran with it. It didn't take long for Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, despite his penchant for holidaying in Italy (and, among his center-left compatriots, he's not alone, to call off his family's plans for vacating there this year. Another minister followed and the war of words - whether most Germans or Italians wanted it or not - was on. Stefani was pressured to resign, but the press is having too good a time to let that be that. The cover of Der Spiegel this week promises to probe the troubled relationship between the two countries and depicts Schröder as Goethe, famous for, among a few other works, his Italian Journey.

Meanwhile, the British and American papers are enjoying the rift from afar. For the Observer, John Hooper has followed up his regular reports on the mess in the Guardian by chalking up both sides of the scoreboard. First, a description of a front-page cartoon in La Stampa depicting Berlusconi taking a leak on that German parliamentarian, and "Bild then hit back by parking topless models in deck chairs outside the Italian Embassy in Berlin to prove how 'sexy, beautiful and charming' Germans really were. The paper also published a glossary of phrases for those German tourists who persisted in holidaying in Italy. It included such edifying rejoinders as 'Take your greasy eyes off my wife'."

In the New York Times, Italian novelist Roberto Pazzi has come up with the piece that rewards reading but is also about as surprising as the sun rising in the east: the history of German-Italian relations stretching back to the year 9 AD. But in the same paper, Frank Bruni writes what may be the most sensible reaction to all this yet. These little rhetorical wars tend to flare up periodically between the English and the French, the Germans and the English and so on (though the English really do seem to enjoy this sort of thing most), Bruni reminds us, and the fact that another has finally popped up again after all the somberness that followed 9/11 and two wars, and then, the "suspiciously sweet music" accompanying the unveiling of a new constitution for the European Union only goes to show that things may finally be settling back to normalcy.

A few thoughts before I take off for my own holidays (in Croatia, natch, nicely out of the crossfire for now, though just the other night, a Croatian did claim on a popular talk show that the rocky Croatian coastline is far cleaner than any Italian beach). All these same papers keep reporting over and over again that the majority of Germans and Italians alike consider this whole brouhaha unnecessarily ridiculous. Both wish their politicians could find something more constructive to do.

Second, picking up on Bruni's point, it's probably quite healthy for the EU - which can't help but become a more tightly knit body over time, especially if the US keeps unwittingly pressuring it to do so - to let off steam now and then. I can't help but think that Americans enjoy the differences in their local and regional characters which necessarily entail the (usually) friendly jibing across the Mason-Dixon line, between the coasts and "flyover country," between the "red states" and "blue states." But no one would argue that Americans don't have an overall sense of a uniquely American identity when compared or contrasted with any other part of the world.

See you in August.

Elsewhere

Of course, not all the bickering and name-calling this past week has been quite as silly. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Heidi Sylvester reports on the battle over the leadership of IG Metall, Germany's largest industrial union. And this in the wake of a poorly timed and enormously unpopular strike.

As if to confirm the weakening of labor's power and the general wane of the truly social democratic model, Schröder himself has penned an article which the Guardian clips a bit and runs under the title, "Modernize or die."

In the Village Voice, Gregory Fried reviews Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (see also: Too Little, Too Late).

The Economist reviews three books on Riemann's hypothesis, "a puzzle that has perplexed mathematicians for the last century and a half.... [P]roof of the conjecture would have immense consequences. Equally, a disproof would be the mathematical equivalent of an earthquake, destroying decades of work at a stroke."

And finally, back to the New York Times. The recently prolific Richard Bernstein offers a last impression of Berlin's Palace of the Republic before it gives way to a replica of the building it replaced in the early 50s. And on the occasion of composer Heiner Goebbels's work Eislermaterial, Jeremy Eichler files a longish piece on Hanns Eisler and suggests a click for further exploration of the man who "lived a fascinating 20th-century life."