For Cecilia Malmström, it was an unpleasant yet necessary task.

On Jan. 19, as the Swedish-born European Commissioner for Trade was presenting her draft mandate for new negotiations with the United States in Brussels, she visibly sought to not raise expectations. “This is not a traditional, comprehensive trade agreement,” Malmström explained. She also stated that there would be no revival of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), that controversial …

It’s an ambitious goal: By 2022, Germany will close its last nuclear power plant and, only 16 years later, stop burning coal altogether. Too slow or too ambitious? It’s a hot debate in Germany, at the moment. Nevertheless, the federal government plans to follow the recommendations of the so-called Coal Commission, and to codify it in law by May. It will also stipulate which regions and companies directly affected by …

The focus has shifted in debates over the security of energy supplies. While the secure supply of energy sources (coal, petroleum and natural gas) was once the central theme and will remain necessary for some time, of even greater importance are sustainability and climate compatibility. Headlines touting decisions by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have been replaced by those citing international climate conferences and their declarations on decarbonizing the …

German CEOs tend to get nervous when confronted with legal problems in the United States. To be sure, class action lawsuits are often associated with major financial costs. This is exactly what Volkswagen found out when the diesel scandal broke. While there is much criticism of class action suits, primarily regarding the large sums involved in litigation, there have been growing calls in Germany for more consumer rights in the …

It was a loud and crashing warning shot: On Feb. 7, 2019, Facebook’s business model came under harsh criticism from the Bundeskartellamt, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, which argued that the online giant was abusing its market position by collecting and exploiting the data of its users on a large scale. The antitrust office ordered Facebook to undergo an internal divestiture, meaning that the company would have to gain the explicit …

It was 2006, and Columbus, Mississippi, was where it was all supposed to get started. EADS co-CEO Tom Enders himself came to open a new helicopter assembly plant. His company had just won a contract to build several hundred aircraft for the US Army. The UH-72A Lakota, the military version of the EC145, was supposed to serve in a variety of roles – executive transport, search and rescue as well …

There was a certain historical irony at work on that day in December 1918, when US President Woodrow Wilson boarded the USS George Washington on his way across the Atlantic to attend the Paris Peace Conference. The steamer was, in fact, a former German passenger ship built by the German shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd; it had been confiscated in New York at the start of World War I and had …

The German-American friendship has sunk so low that Germans now have more trust in China than in the United States. A recent survey commissioned by the Atlantik-Brücke and conducted by the polling firm Civey found that 85 percent of respondents rate relations between the two countries as poor to very poor.

But Germans are airing their resentment not only in anonymous polls. A number of leading intellectuals, writers, journalists and …

According to Andrei S. Markovits, “anti-Americanism is a particularly murky concept because it invariably merges antipathy towards what America does with what America is.” In a 2004 book, he bemoaned what he called the “hatred of America.” Markovits could republish this book, subtitled Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Western Europe, restating and updating the antipathy against America – if indeed this hate, this anti-Americanism exists.

One can heed the …

After the voice and the guitar, the harmonica – or mouth organ, or just harp – which was first sold in Vienna in the 1820s, is the most characteristic instrument of the blues. And the first harps African-American used to make music must have come from places that lie today in Germany, Austria or the Czech Republic. In other words, all people employed in harmonica production at the time spoke …