The R-word Heard Around the World

Weekly Review: Germany threatens to drag Europe into what would then be a truly global recession. Also: Mitteleuropan art in New York

Way back when dot-coms first started turning into dot-gones, the joke running among economists and newspaper columnists was, "Don't say the R-word." It was a joke based on an idea reminiscent of an old Monty Python sketch about an architect whose buildings relied on the power of mass hypnosis. Once tenants stopped believing in them, they collapsed.

The "R-word," of course, is "recession." About a year ago, the fear was that if enough people lost faith in one of the longest and most spectacular economic booms in history (on paper at least) and even started whispering about a "downturn," only with an "R," it would become a self-fulfilling prophesy. By now, though, it hardly matters how we got here. The recession in the US is now all but official. Another stalwart of the global economy, Japan, has been floundering in the doldrums for as long as any twenty-something pink-slipped dot-commer can remember. For a brief moment earlier this year, it looked as if the last remaining holdout might be Europe. If Europe could weather the storm, there was hope for the global economy yet.

A cartoon in The Economist best captures why that's not going to happen. Europe is a car propped up in the mechanic's workshop and the driver asks, "So... How's my trusty high-powered economic engine looking?" What he can't see is that it's just fallen out from under the hood and crashed to the ground. His trusty economic engine is labeled "Germany."

Whether or not Germany has officially entered a recession -- generally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, though different economists tweak that definition in different ways -- is a matter of splitting hairs. When, on Thursday, the Federal Statistics Office announced that gross domestic product had shrunk 0.1 percent in the third quarter, it hardly mattered that the German economy had merely "stagnated" in the second. This was bad news, whatever you wanted to call it. Less than zero growth was setting in.

What's different this time around, a point John Schmid elaborates on in The International Herald Tribune, is the speed with which Europe, led by Germany, has followed the US into the pits. It is, as Schmid quotes one economist as saying, "the most synchronized downturn since the early seventies." But another, commenting on the exaggerated extremes of the global ups and downs of late, adds: "This is the same stuff that makes fantastic booms and also fantastic contractions."

All the more fantastic because good news and bad news alike now travels so quickly and has such broad effects. In a rather depressing article for Sunday's New York Times, Joseph Kahn quotes Stephen Roach, chief global economist at Morgan Stanley in New York: "One by one, every major country is tipping into a rare and possibly lethal recession. It is far-reaching and deep, and much of that has to do with the fact that we've become much more interconnected."

Update: A running theme of late in these weekly reviews has been the shaky state of Germany's governing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens. The vote of confidence covered last week was supposed to have put an end to all speculation that the coalition wouldn't make it all the way to next fall's national elections. It didn't.

Both parties held conventions last week and, while Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) came out of his stronger than ever, the Greens threatened to veto Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's support of Germany's role in the "war on terror," now playing in Afghanistan but with possible showings elsewhere in the near future. If they had, that would have done the coalition in once and for all. Newsweeklies Die Zeit and Stern, both published on Thursday, even ran obits.

But Fischer made yet another passionate plea for the Greens to stay the course -- the government's, that is, not their own, since the Greens started out two decades ago as a pacifist party -- and, after several complicated rounds of voting, the upshot by Saturday evening was that a majority of the 800 delegates voted Fischer's way: for Germany's military role and for the survival of the coalition.

In Telepolis

As pressing as the war issue has been, the Greens have had other matters to debate, too, of course. Mercedes Bunz attended a workshop aimed at firming up the thin Green line on media, information and communication policy for the future. What she found is that when it comes to questions of media, "the new, old, big, small, public and digital media," Green policy has less to do with venturing "Forward into the Information Society," as their eleven-page position paper put it, and more with "an update of education concepts from the 60s." While, just next door, France may be leaping into an open source e-government, the term "open source" isn't even mentioned. "Once again," writes Bunz, "the party has allowed this term to be snapped right out from under their noses by a grateful PDS," that is, the Party for Democratic Socialism.

Did ISIS, an ISP in Düsseldorf, intentionally or accidentally block a handful of neo-Nazi and other potentially objectionable Web sites last week? Was the rather ineffective blockade willful or was ISIS reluctantly following orders issued by the state of North Rhine Westphalia? The quote from an ISIS spokesperson nabbed by Stefan Krempl seems pretty straightforward: "We acted in order to avoid legal action and a fine." But then access was bizarrely restored and the official line grew muddled. On Friday, the day after his initial report, Krempl quoted ISIS manager Horst Schäfers as saying, "We telecommunications companies can do what we want. We're always the idiots." If they block sites, surfers accuse them of censorship. "If we do nothing," complains Schäfers, "we're supposedly encouraging right-wing radicalism." And he evidently hasn't found a way out of his dilemma yet. You can follow ongoing developments in English at Slashdot.

Elsewhere

The Neue Galerie opened in New York on November 16 with the exhibition New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940. In the New York Observer, Hilton Kramer ravesŽ not only about the exhibition -- "All the great names are represented: Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, among the Austrian painters; Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Oskar Schlemmer, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters and Franz Marc, among the Germans; and Vasily Kandinsky, Laszlo-Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee, among the outsiders who participated in the Blaue Reiter movement or the Bauhaus project" -- but also about the restored six-story building its housed in and, certainly not least of all, the café, New York's "first-ever perfect replica of a fin-de-siècle Viennese coffeehouse."

Two weeks before it opened, Carol Vogel told the story behind the Neue Galerie in The New York Times and Roberta Smith has recently chimed in with her own admiring approval.

As for what's on in Berlin and Vienna now, Artforum highlights a few selections.