Germany, November 1932. These are dark times for the Weimar Republic. While still alive, democracy is but hanging by a thread. Unemployment is dramatically high – more than five million Germans are out of work. Fights are breaking out in the streets. There’s a whiff of civil war in the air. The Reichstagswahlen – the national parliamentary elections – already the second of the year, have again failed to yield …

When Karin Speckert is out sweeping in front of her home and gets asked by tourists where they can find the Trump house, she pretends she doesn’t know. “It drives me crazy,” says the 76-year-old. She lives across from the house where Friedrich Trump, the grandfather of US President Donald Trump, was born in 1869. Speckert explains that the current owners of the house have had enough problems with annoying …

A paddle-wheel steamer in flames on Lake Erie – hundreds of passengers in mortal danger – the safety of the shore still far off: Ask a German man, woman or child if these fragmentary images ring a bell, and their likely answer will be the name John Maynard. “Who is John Maynard? John Maynard, he was our helmsman who …”

Thus begins one of the most famous ballads in German …

Perception Trap

For four long chapters of masterfully even-handed historical analysis, Andreas Rödder hides his political leanings – without ever being dull. The historian from the southwestern German city of Mainz asks “Who is afraid of Germany?” (Wer hat Angst vor Deutschland? Geschichte eines europäischen Problems) and lays out the conflicts over the country in the center of Europe, starting with the lead-up to World War I, spanning …

When Christian Petzold thinks of cinema, the image that comes to his mind is Angelus Novus, a print created by the Swiss-German avant-garde artist Paul Klee two years after the end of World War I. Klee’s image depicts what philosopher Walter Benjamin referred to as “the angel of history” with spread wings and its eyes and mouth wide open. In an essay touching on this heavenly messenger, Benjamin writes that …

The German native had already recorded his “message to my grandchildren” in November, while hovering 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, in the Cupola View Module of the International Space Station (ISS). On Dec. 18, Alexander Gerst, commander of the Soyuz MS-09 on its 57th ISS expedition, finally posted his speech online. After 197 days in space, Gerst and his Russian colleague, Sergey Prokopyev, along with United States astronaut Serena …

No. On a sunny morning in this beach town south of L.A., Moritz Wagner does not look much like an NBA star. He’s not dressed like many of his fellow pro-basketballers – flashy designer suits, heavy gold chains, extravagant headgear. Perched on a parapet in front of a Manhattan Beach Café, his baggy green clothes paint the picture of a surfer making himself comfortable after a few hours on the …

As The New York Times reported in November 2018, the United States and Saudi Arabia have apparently reached a framework agreement for the sale of nuclear power stations to the Kingdom. The deal is said to be worth up to $80 billion. However, Riyadh is insisting on creating its own nuclear fuel, despite it being cheaper to buy abroad.

There can only be one plausible reason for this pursuit of …

NATO is not dead. European defense budgets have been rising steadily since 2014; American forces are staying in Europe; and Donald Trump will eventually leave the White House. Yet Europe can no longer assume the permanence of the historically exceptional strategic order created some 70 years ago. China has become the United States’ peer competitor and the Indo-Pacific is the key theater in which that relationship will play out, with …

The year 2019 was ushered in under clouds of gloom and doom. The current global order is, in fact, a frightening global disorder. Not only is the world economy weakening, as tariff conflicts herald a pernicious trade war, but the certainties of international cooperation are also waning and vanishing in the political realm, as America’s retreat from global leadership and the rise of Xi Jinping’s China upend the prevailing power …