Dialog International

Review: Heinrich Böll's Der Engel schwieg

I picked up a copy of Heinrich Böll's very first novel Der Engel schwieg (English version: The Silent Angel) after reading W.G.Sebald's essay On the Natural History of Destruction about the literary impact - or lack thereof - of the aerial bombing of Germany in World War II.  Sebald mentions Der Engel schwieg as one of the few books of the time that dealt with the death and destruction  of the bombing.  But the book was too bleak and realistic for the time and wasn't published (Böll wrote the novel in 1950, but it wasn't published until 1992 - seven years after his death). 

After reading Der Engel schwieg I feel that Sebald was only half-right about the novel.  Yes, Böll was writing about a taboo subject, but there were certainly commercial, not just sociological, reasons for why the manuscript was rejected. Böll was just gaining his sea legs as a writer; some of the plot lines, characters, and themes were handled to much better effect in Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953) and subsequent novels.  On the other hand, the novel is a must-read for Böll fans, for Der Engel schwieg gives us the "raw Böll"; everything we love about Böll is here in his first novel: good vs evil, light vs dark, the corruption of the Church hierarchy, the courage and generosity of women, the struggle to find meaning through God.  And perhaps no other novel describes more powerfully the existential struggle for survival in those first days following the "Zero Hour" ( "die Stunde Null"). 

Der Engel schwieg begins with the central figure, Hans Schnitzler, an AWOL soldier moving Zombie-like through the rubble of his ruined city (unnamed but recognizable as Böll's Cologne) where in the dark he stumbles across a damaged statue of a smiling angel. Schnitzler is on a mission to find the widow of a wealthy soldier, who, inexplicably, gives his life for Schnitzler's - a total stranger to him.  But there is little joy in having been given the gift of life; on the contrary, Schnitzler is bitter that he was cheated out of death:

“Ich sollte leben, ich wollte sogar leben – - und er wollte mir das Leben schenken, aber ich begreife jetzt, daß man jemand das Leben schenken kann, indem man ihm den Tod stiehlt.”

("I was to have lived, I even wanted to live ... and he wanted to give me life, but I realize now that you can give someone life by stealing his death.")

Schnitzler eventually does find a reason to live, in a love relationship with Regina, a woman who has lost everything in the war, including her infant son.  The couple consummate their "marriage" after drinking altar wine.

If Hans Schnitlzler and Regina represent the light in Der Engel schwieg, Dr. Fischer embodies the darkness.  Fischer publishes a newsletter for the Catholic Church and is a pal of the Bishop as well as a Nazi party member. Fischer collects Madonnas - not for their religious meaning but rather for their monetary value.  Dr. FIscher is relentless in his quest for money, which, for Böll is blood money: there is the smell of blood as Fischer opens his safe, he pays a handsome sum to Regina for donating blood to his daughter.  In the end, blood money wins out, and the reader is left with an image of the stone angel sinking into the mud, its smile now a sorrowful grimace.  This is not the happy ending the publishers were hoping for that might distract readers from the horrors of war and misery of a ruined country before the Economic Miracle. 

Böll was not interested in happy endings.  In his 1952 essay Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur ("Commitment to the Literature of Rubble") Böll emphasized his commitment to writing the truth of what he witnessed:

Die Bezeichnungen als solche sind berechtigt: es war Krieg gewesen, sechs Jahre lang, wir kehrten heim aus diesem Krieg, wir fanden Trümmer und schrieben darüber. Merkwürdig, fast verdächtig war nur der vorwurfsvolle, fast gekränkte Ton, mit dem man sich dieser Bezeichnung bediente: man schien uns zwar nicht verantwortlich zu machen dafür, daß Krieg gewesen, daß alles in Trümmern lag, nur nahm man uns offenbar übel, daß wir es gesehen hatten und sahen, aber wir hatten keine Binde vor den Augen und sahen es: ein gutes Auge gehört zum Handwerkszeug des Schriftstellers.

(The characterizations as such are justified: there was a war, six years long, and we came home from the war and found rubble wrote about it.  What's strange is the accusatory tone people used in their characterizations of us. Not that they held us responsible for the war, or that everything lay in rubble, but they took offense that we had witnessed it, but we weren't blindfolded and we did see it: a good eye is an important tool for a writer.)

Deutsche Bank Embraces Mitt Romney for President

The New York Times has a terrific front-page piece on the close ties between Mitt Romney and Goldman Sachs.  And, of course, it makes perfect sense that "Mr. 1%" would be joined at the hip with the financial institution that presided over the 2008 financial collapse.  So far, the NYTImes reports, Goldman employees have contributed close to half a $million to the Romney for President campaign.

The NYTimes piece doesn't mention Deutsche Bank, but the Huffington Post has an interesting data base on contributions by Deutsche employees to the Romney campaign.  Clearly, the managing directors and investment bankers at DB are trying to play catch-up to their big brother Goldman.  Recently, Barry Bausano, a DB senior executive, hosted a "posh fund-raising event" for Mitt Romney in New York City. 

Why would officials and employees of Deutsche Bank donate money to one of the wealthiest men ever to seek higher office?  Simple: Deutsche is seeking the co-manager slot behind Goldman Sachs to manage the auctioning-off of America should Mitt Romney win the presidency.  Think of the fees involved in privatization schemes, outsourcing transactions, and securitization of what remains of the American dream.  Goldman alone is not big enough to handle the dismantling of Social Security and the establishment of private retirement accounts invested in risky securities.

Certainly, Deutsche Bank also wants to keep its title as America's Foreclosure King as millions more homeowners are forced from their properties.  It was music to the ears of DB bankers when Mitt Romney attacked the Obama administration for intervening on behalf of homeowners. 

“Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process,” Romney said, “Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

But the number one reason DB and every other investment banker, hedge fund manager, and private equity investor is backing Mitt Romney is that he will protect the "carried interest" provision in the US tax code that ensures that they and their leader Mitt Romney pay less then half the percentage of tax on their income as bus drivers, public school teachers, and the rest of us poor slobs in the "99%".

German Left Party Under Surveillance While Nazis Run Free

For years the National Socialist Underground was traveling around Germany and murdering immigrants and the occasional police officer but the German domestic intelligence agency was using taxpayer resources to spy on the freely elected representatives of the Left Party (die LINKE):

Germany's opposition far-left Left Party is under more intense surveillance from domestic intelligence than previously thought, SPIEGEL has learned. Information from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) reveals that 27 Left Party parliamentarians are being observed -- more than one-third of the party's 76-strong parliamentary group.

The BfV is reportedly watching not just radical party members, but also a number of more moderate members, including almost all of the Left Party's leading figures in parliament. Among the targets are leader Gregor Gysi, deputy chairwoman Sahra Wagenknecht, and members of the party's parliamentary committee Dietmar Bartsch and Jan Korte.

Of course the Left Party is a danger to German democracy, since the party espouses such extremist views as the immediate withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan and a national minimum income - both positions supported by an overwhelming majority of Germans. 

Meanwhile, as Mely Kiyak writes in a terrific rant in the Frankfurter Rundschau, the neo-Nazis and their allies in the media such as Thilo Sarrazin and Udo Ulfkotte are living the high life in Germany, "like God in France": 

Kein Kopf ist gerollt, keine Republik erschüttert, nie übernahm ein Minister Verantwortung für Mordopfer von rechter Gewalt, keine Rücktritte. Kein Umdenken, kein Umschreiben der Schulbücher, keine Gesetzesänderung. Die Umerziehung des deutschen Volkes, das sich wie zu besten Nazizeiten als genetisch homogenes Volk begreift und Angst vor seiner Abschaffung hat, ist misslungen. Köstlicher Zustand, dieses Nazi-Sein! Ein bisschen scheinheiliges Gedenkminüteln im Parlament, hin und wieder ein Kerzenmarsch, ansonsten, freies Land für freie Nazis.

(No heads have rolled, no republic has been shaken, no minister ever took responsibility for the murdered victims of right-wing violence, no resignations. No re-thinking, no re-writing of text books, no changes in the law. The reeducation of the German people - who, just as in the Nazi era think of themselves as a genetically homogeneous people and are terrified of being eliminated - has failed. It's a grand time to be a Nazi! A little sanctimonious hand-wringing in the parliament and now and then a candlelight march but otherwise - a free country for free Nazis.)

The Great Standard & Poor's Conspiracy Against the Eurozone

It's funny how anti-Americanism is hard-wired in the mindset of both the Left and the Right in Germany.  The Eurozone is in crisis due to mismanagement and over-borrowing by a number of EU countries.  This leads to a downgrade in the credit rating of debt securities by Standard & Poor's.  But for pundits and demagogues the tail wags the dog and the crisis is deliberately triggered by the rating agency as part of an Anglo-American sonspiracy against the European continent: 

When such political adversaries as European parliamentarian Elmar Brok, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, and German Left Party bigwig Gregor Gysi agree on something, skepticism is warranted. Particularly if the two use almost exactly the same words.We find ourselves, said Brok, after rating agency Standard & Poor's recently downgraded the credit rating of nine euro-zone countries late last week, in a conflict akin to a "currency war." The agencies, he went on, are pursuing "Anglo-American political interests."

Left Party leader Gregor Gysi was even more pointed in his attack:

"Wir haben es gegenwärtig mit einem Krieg der Banken und der amerikanischen Ratingagenturen gegen die europäischen Völker zu tun", wetterte der Chef der deutschen Linksfraktion am Samstag in Berlin.

("We are now dealing with a war of the banks and American rating agencies against the people of Europe" the head of the German Left Party fuliminated on Saturday in Berlin.)

And on the party's Web site, Sahra Wagenknecht, the rising star of the Left Party, rails against the "extortion: (Erpressung) of Standard & Poor's: 

Die LINKE fordert daher, die Macht der Rating-Agenturen zu brechen und die Staatsfinanzierung vom Diktat der Finanzmärkte zu befreien. Statt das Wachstum durch drakonische Kürzungsprogramme abzuwürgen und die Bevölkerung der Krisenländer in die Armut zu treiben, müssen außerdem europaweit Konjunkturprogramme aufgelegt und öffentliche Investitionen getätigt werden.

(Therefore the Left Party demands that we break the power of the ratings agencies and the free the national budget from the dictates of the financial markets. Instead of choking off growth with draconian cuts and forcing the populations of the countries in crisis into poverty, we need to establish a growth program and make public sector investments.)

It is instructive to read some of the comments on the official site of the neo-Nazi NPD: 

Nach erfolgter Abwertung sanken die Zinsen für US-Anleihen!
Die Rating-Argenturen sind Amerikaner! Ein Schelm, wer Böses dabei denkt!

(After the downgrade the interest rate fell for US Treasury Bonds! The ratings agencies are American! Only a scoundrel would think there's something fishy here!)

Bei Rating-Agenturen wie Standard & Poor’s handelt es sich ...um die Flugzeugträger im Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrieg der Anglo-Amerikaner gegen Kontinentaleuropa!

(Ratings agencies like Standard & Poor's are the aircraft carriers in the financial and economic war of the Anglo-Americans against continental Europe!)

Another commenter asks the rhetorical question: "Who controls the wealth in the US?  And the institutions of wealth?"  Well, the answer can be found on several related Web sites:

Derzeit verschärfen, welch ein Zufall zeitlicher Übereinstimmung, die amerikanischen Ratingagenturen, angeführt von der Firma Standart&Poors, durch die Herabsetzung der Kreditwürdigkeit von EU - Staaten die Krise im EURO - Raum. Und natürlich ist auch diese Firma eine große jüdische Gesellschaft in Amerika. Und besonders die jüdischen Chef Analysten David Zuber und Standard & Poor's Chief Economist David Wyss werden von den jüdischen S&P Chefs von der Leine gelassen wenn es darum geht, gute Gründe gerade JETZT zu finden, dem EU - Raum seine Kreditwürdigkeit zu entziehen...

(What a coincidence that the American ratings agencies, led by Standard & Poor's, have exacerbated the crisis in the Eurozone with credit downgrades. And, of course, this is a big Jewish company in America.  In particular, the Jewish chief analyst David Zuber and S&P's Jewish chief economist David Wyss are let loose by the Jewish S&P bosses when it's time find good reasons to destroy creditworthiness of the Eurozone...)

It's amazing how little conspiracy theories have changed through the ages.  But everyone wants to avoid speaking about the real conspiracy: the conspiracy of Eurozone governments and the people to borrow like there's no tomorrow.

US Professor: Germans had no knowledge of Holocaust

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, where senior officials of the NS-regime met to decide on the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". To mark the occasion, an American professor of political science - Dr. Paul Gottfried - has published a piece absolving Germans of any guilt in the Holocaust.  According to Gottfried, the notion that the German people were complicit in carrying out the "Final Solution" is a "leftist" myth that has been used to demoralize Germans and force them to turn away from their national identity:

Basic to this self-flagellation is having Auschwitz serve, in a former German foreign minister’s words, as the “founding myth for the German Federal Republic.” One must believe that not only did the Third Reich murder millions of Jews, but that Germans of all classes and regions happily cooperated.

This borders on Holocaust denial.  And Gottfried goes on to accuse "leftists" of lying about the role of the Wehrmacht in participating in the mass murder of Jews and other ethnic groups.  Gottfried repeats the claim made by right-wing nationalists that the Wehrmacht is blameless and was simply fighting a war for national honor. Professor Gottfried bases his conclusions on the work of a single historian:

It is against this background of lunacy that Alfred de Zayas, a retired high official from the UN Commission for Human Rights, has released Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis (Genocide as a State Secret, 2011). Zayas has authored other controversial works that go against the prevalent leftist grain. Among his earlier studies are heavily documented examinations of Eastern Europeans’ organized murders of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) after the Second World War, as well as the postwar agreements that greased the skids for these crimes. Zayas’s works are all painstakingly documented, and his latest study is based on thirty-five years of interviews and a laborious sifting of sources. The author fine-combed the records and testimonies of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946-47 and interviewed surviving “war criminals” including Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Nuremberg prosecutors, and former war prisoners of the Nazis.

Evidently Gottfried doesn't believe that Speer - who used slave labor on a massive scale to carry out his grandiose projects - was a war criminal.  But it is completely absurd that de Zayas (and Gottfried) absolve the Wehrmacht of all guilt based on the findings of the Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts (Wehrmacht Office for the Investigation of Violations of International Law) which German historians have long since unmasked as nothing more than a Nazi public relations unit.  Anyone interested in the true role of Wehrmacht in carrying out the Nazi criminal enterprise should read Wolfram Wette's book on the subject: The Wehrmacht: History, Myth and Reality ( 2006), Wette explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity. 

But Gottfried's (and de Zayas') larger thesis - that the Holocaust was the work of just a small circle of SS officers and kept secret from the German population - is even more disturbing.  For a crime of this scale required the active cooperation and participation of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens.  From the workers who produced and packaged Zyklon B, to the engineers who designed the gas chambers and crematoria, to the credit committees of Dresdner Bank who approved the project financing for Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Of course people knew what was going on.  Surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by the Americans and the Allensbacher Meinungsforschungsinstitut revealed that between 25% and 40% of Germans were aware of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich.  But none of that matters, of course, to Professor Gottfried whose only goal is to attack historical research as a "leftist plot".  Gottfried's sole source of information is Alfred de Zayas' 2011 book Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis which was deemed worthless by most historians (typical review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine -pdf warning). A much better - an meticulously documented - book on the subject is  Bernward Dörner's 2007 study Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte. 

What is Professor Gottfried's motivation in promoting historical-revisionist junk to an American audience?  Gottfried is senior editor of the Webzine Alternative Right, which, as I've written elsewhere is the American cousin of the völkisch-national weekly Junge Freiheit. 

Related Post:  Read my review of Peter Longerich's book Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!

GOP Europe-Bashing Intensifies

When did Europe join Iran and North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil?  If you listen to the Republican Party candidates for president, Europe is is the model for Barack Obama's plan to enslave Americans with social welfare program.  Mitt Romney has been the most vocal Republican in using Europe to attack the president: 

"He (Obama) wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society," he said in his victory speech after winning the New Hampshire primary. "We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity. This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America."

I can understand criticism of the fiscal practices of Eurozone countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain, but why does Romney paint Europe as antithetical to American values? Is it the fact that EU countries are committed to universal health care? That Europeans are healthier and live longer?  That Europe has better public schools that produce skilled knowledge workers for the 21st century economy? Is it the high-speed trains and superior transportation infrastructure?

Ever since Barack Obama took office in 2005 he has been portrayed by his right-wing detractors as the alien "other" - he's the Kenyan-born Muslim or an effete Harvard-educated socialist who goes around the world "apologizing" for America or the "food stamp president" who spits on "American exceptionalism".  There is a racist subtext to much of this, which Romney wisely wants to tone down, so painting Obama as a "European socialist" is a more acceptable way to say "he's not one of us''. 

The Atlantic Review takes note of Romney's Europe-bashing and doesn't believe it will gain much traction: 

Romney and the others won't succeed. Americans are smarter than these guys think. American voters know that bashing Europe will not fix US problems. Americans will vote for the person with the best plan to solve their economic problems.

I wish I could be as sanguine.

See also Lee Siegel's piece in the New York TImes:  What's Race Got to Do With It?

Review: Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud

In Thomas Brussig's funny 1995 novel Helden wie wir (English version: Heroes Like Us) about the collapse of East Germany the narrator pokes fun at Christa Wolf and calls her the "Super Mother" of East German literature („Übermutter“ der DDR Literatur). And that is precisely the persona she assumes in her last novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud). 

I'm sorry to say that Stadt der Engel doesn't really succeed as a novel.  It might have worked better as a notebook or personal memoir of an emotional crisis in the vein of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, but even that is questionable since the nameless narrator of Stadt der Engel - who is clearly the author herself - is too guarded to connect with the reader: we learn nothing about her as a woman, a mother, a wife.  Instead, we get the Übermutter of East Germany and are left with 400 pages of socialist navel-gazing.

Stadt der Engel covers the nine months that Christa Wolf' spent at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.  The invitation from the Center came at an opportune time, since things were getting hot for Christa Wolf in Germany following the collapse of the GDR.  She arrives with the passport of the GDR - a country that no longer exists.  She is in mourning for the loss of her beloved country: throughout the book she refers to the collapse of East Germany as an Untergang (downfall) instead of Wende (turning point) which is the usual word.  Furthermore, the writer is still in shock that her fellow citizens in East Germany had rejected her call for a socialist renewal; they wanted to nothing more to do with utopian experiments.

But the sojourn in Los Angeles coincides with the revelation back home that Christa Wolf had briefly collaborated with the Stasi as IM Margarete ("informant Margaret") and spied on fellow writers.  Soon after her arrival in the US, the fax machine is humming with articles and essays from former colleagues, friends, and admirers who now treat her as an object of scorn.  This leads, midway through the book, to a nervous breakdown. What is devastating to the writer is not so much the act of collaboration, but the fact that she has no memory of it.  How ironic this selective amnesia is for Christa Wolf, whose novels explore how the past is always intruding on the present.  Her motto, which opens her 1976 novel Kindheitsmuster -

"Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen." (The past is not dead. It's not even past")

 - was lifted without attribution from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (perhaps she forgot these are not her words?).  In Stadt der Engel Christa Wolf employs the same narrative strategy as in KIndheitsmuster, using the first person for the present, and the addressing herself in the second person "Du" in recounting the past. 

The problem in Stadt der Engel is that not much happens.  The narrator has little interest in learning about America and spends much of her time holed up in her hotel room watching Star Trek episodes or having tiresome phone conversations with a German scholar staying in a room next door who also suffers from a deep depression.  A subplot involving the letters of a woman psychoanalyst, known only as L., who was forced to flee Nazi Germany, goes nowhere.  From time to time the narrator ventures forth to meet with other Germans staying in LA, or with aging Jewish refugees.  On these trips she sees homeless people and unemployed African Americans which gives her insight into awful injustice of (capitalist) American society and allows her to feel superior in her commitment the socialist utopia. 

Only in the last 20 pages does Stadt der Engel arouse some interest when the narrator leaves Los Angeles and travels through the desert in Arizona and Colorado to discover "the soul of America".  The impressions of the Hopi reservation are interesting, but then she ends up in the casinos of Las Vegas where she can smell the Untergang of the American empire. Finally this sense of impending doom sparks a momentary flash of insight - or at least questioning:

Das kleine Land aus dem ich kam, wa es zu unbedeutend, um Anteilenahme zu verdienen? Stand über ihm con Anfang an nicht das Menetekel des Untergangs: Ins Nichts mit ihm? Wäre es möglich, dass ich um einen banalen Irrtum so sollte gelitten haben?

(The small country I come from - was it too insignificant to deserve my sympathy? Didn't it exist from the beginning under the sign of downfall?  Is it possible that I suffered so because of a banal mistake?)

Christa Wolf joins that long list of émigré German writers, artists and composers who have nothing but disdain for America - the country that gave them sanctuary.  In this connection I highly recommend Michael Lentz's 2007 novel Pazifik Exil about the German exile community in Los Angeles.  Of course there are exceptions:  the great playwright Carl Zuckmayer fled the hothouse of the Los Angeles to raise sheep on a farm in Vermont, where he did discover "the soul of America" and wrote the charming Vermonter Roman.  Finally, for a very funny novel about a German writer lost in the vast expanse of America, I recommend Walter Kempowski's Letzte Grüße.

Sarrazin: Mixing German and Muslim Blood Creates a "Plow Horse"

Best-selling author and wannabe genetic scientist Thilo Sarrazin sounded the alarm about contaminating German blood with that of inferior races.  Speaking before an enthusiastic audience in Döbeln  Sarrazin compared Germans to the Lipizzaner stallions among horse breeds:

"Stellen sie sich vor, dies sei ein Gestüt mit Lipizzanerpferden. Und irgendwie wird in jeder Generation ein belgischer Ackergaul eingekreuzt. Völlig klar, die genetisch bedingte Fähigkeit zum Laufen sinkt", doziert Sarrazin mit vor der Brust verschränkten Armen. "Gleichzeitig steigt die genetisch bedingte Fähigkeit, einen Karren durch den Lehm zu ziehen. So ist das auch mit Menschen."

("Imagine that this is a stable of Lipizzaner stallions. And somehow in each generation they become crossed with a Belgian plow horse. It goes without saying: the genetic ability to run diminishes over time," Sarrazin lectures with his arms folded across his chest. "At the same time the genetically-determined ability to pull a cart through the mud only increases. That's how it is with human beings as well.")

Sarrazin is right.  What Germany needs immediately are new Nuremberg Laws that would criminalize the contamination of German blood with inferior genes from Turkey or "Arabia".  Otherwise Germany risks becoming a nation of plow horses like America, where we all have some Creole, African, French, American Indian, and God knows what other kind of blood running through our veins.  Hitler had nothing but contempt for this nation of "Mongrels"; he knew the Master (Aryan) Race could easily defeat us.  Oops!

Should Gauck Replace Wulff as President? Not so fast...

Americans are so wrapped up in the Republican presidential primaries that they most likely haven't noticed that Germany has a juicy presidential scandal of its own.  Germany's president, Christian Wullf, has come under attack for lying aboug taking a private loan from disreputable sources while he was premier of Lower Saxony.  Like most political scandals, its not so much the lies but the cover-up that's the issue here.  Wulff made threats against Germany's powerful tabloid Bild-Zeitung , which up to that point had always been his biggest champion, in a stupid effort to suppress the story about his financial dealings.

Now, according to the New York TImes, there is a growing chorus demanding that Wulff resign and be replaced by Joachim Gauck, a favorite of the SPD and the Green Party: 

“Mr. Wulff has long since been denigrated to a laughingstock,” Vera Lengsfeld, a member of Mrs. Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, wrote on her Web site. “Mr. Wulff’s credibility is now so damaged that he is only a caricature of that which he tried to be but apparently never was.”

Mrs. Lengsfeld called for Mr. Wulff to be replaced by Joachim Gauck, who ran against him in 2010. Mr. Gauck consistently trumped Mr. Wulff in public opinion polls at that time and was dubbed “the President of our Hearts” by the German news media.

But Gauck has some baggage of his own, which can only be a distraction if he becomes president:  he is a champion of Thilo Sarrazin, who made millions of euros from his best-selling book that claims Muslims are genetically inferior to "Germans": 

Der Sozialdemokrat Thilo Sarrazin wurde im Jahr 2010 von Gauck als mutig bezeichnet. Sarrazin habe “über ein Problem, das in der Gesellschaft besteht, offener gesprochen als die Politik”, sagte Gauck. Die politische Klasse könne aus dem Erfolg von Sarrazins Buch lernen, dass “ihre Sprache der politischen Korrektheit bei den Menschen das Gefühl weckt, dass die wirklichen Probleme verschleiert werden sollen”

(In 2010 Gauck characterized Thilo Sarrazin as "courageous".  Sarrazin "spoke openly about a real social problem," Gauck said.  The political class could learn something from Sarrazin's book, namely that "their language of political correctness raises suspiciouns that real problems are being obscured'.)

Also, Gauck was a signatory of the Prague Declaration which equates the crimes of Nazi fascism with Soviet communism.  The declaration has been criticized by many for relativizing - or minimizing - the horror of the Holocaust.

In general, however, I go along with Spiegel commentator Georg Diez, who recommends doing away with the largely ceremonial post of president altogether:

Ich würde zum Beispiel gern das Amt des Bundespräsidenten abschaffen, das ja eh nur eine Art Blinddarm der Politik ist: Wenn alles gut läuft, spürt man nichts, nur wenn er sich entzündet, merkt man, dass es ihn gibt.

(For example, I'd like to eliminate the office of the Federal President, since for a long time it's been a kind of "political appendix": when things are going well, you don't realize it's there.  But when it gets infected you know you have one.)

The presidency is relic from the early years of the Federal Republic recovering from the trauma of the Third Reich.  As an institution, it's usefulness has long since passed. 

Mitt Romney: Eine Heuschrecke im Weißen Haus? / A Locust in the White House?

US private equity groups are known in Germany as Heuschrecke ("Locust") for their standard business practice of acquiring cash-generating businesses, loading them with unsustainable levels of debt, paying themselves lavish dividends and "management fees" and then allowing the business to fall into insolvency, and finally bankruptcy and liquidation.  In the United States, these private equity investors are paradoxically called "job creators"; in fact, they are job destroyers. (Read my blog post on the sad story of Honsel AG). 

DIe Welt has a pessimistic 2012 scenario where Mitt ("Mittens") Romney - locust extraordinaire - takes the White House:  Eine Heuschrecke im Weißen Haus? Mitt Romney wird Präsident.

Romney, Jahrgang 1947, ist der erste Mormone im Weißen Haus. Der starke evangelikale Flügel der Republikaner überwand seine tiefen Vorbehalte gegen den einstigen Bischof der "Heiligen der Letzten Tage" in Boston, als alle alternativen Kandidaten, zuletzt Newt Gingrich, implodierten und das alte Parteiestablishment sich verzweifelt hinter Romney scharrte. Ungeliebt, hölzern mit dem einfachen Wahlvolk, gewann der Multimillionär genug Vertrauen bei parteiungebundenen Wählern, die zu den Verlierern der Wirtschaftskrise zählen und in Scharen aus Obamas Lager überliefen.

(Romney, born in 1947, is the first mormon in the White House.  The strong evangelical wing of the Republican Party overcame its deep reservations abou the one-time bishop of the "Latter Day Saints" in Boston, after all other candidates imploded, including, finally, Newt Gingrich, and the old party establishment stood behind Romney in desperation.  Unloved, wooden in his interaction with everyday voters, the multi-millionaire won enough support from independent voters, who saw themselves as victims of the economic crisis and defected in droves from Obama's camp.)

We will be hearing much about "Romney the Job Creator" but in fact, during his Bain Capital years he was a classic locust, enriching himself while destroying jobs in the US, outsourcing others to China, and leveraging Bain's portfolio companies with enormous amounts of debt. 

For a glimpse of what America might look like with a locust at the helm, read this article from the New York Times:  After Romney Deal, Profits and then Layoffs.