Filed under: Blogposts
Berlin – It threatened to be a complete wash-out, a testament to the fact that you cannot live the same revolution twice.
But in the end, Berlin celebrated 20 years since the fall of the wall on Monday – amid freezing drizzle and under a sea of umbrellas – in its characteristic hardy spirit, with moments that brought many to tears.
The Festival of Freedom started with the heads of state or government from every European Union state, the United States and Russia in attendance, and ended with a fireworks display over the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s symbol in good times and bad.
The proceedings began with a whimper rather than a bang. A classical concert, despite being conducted by the beloved Daniel Barenboim, failed to warm up an already soggy crowd.
The Israeli-Argentinian conductor led a programme that began honourably with a serious tribute to the wealth of German musical and poetic culture: A prelude from Wagner’s opera Lohengrin. But it wasn’t exactly a singalong moment, and the crowd’s mood dampened further when A Survivor From Warsaw by Arnold Schoenberg followed.
The piece is a sung narration of the horrors of the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany murdered millions of Jews during World War II.
‘This just doesn’t fit,’ complained one woman in the audience. ‘This should have been a day when we as Germans could celebrate for once without a bad conscience!’
Others couldn’t understand why a supposedly popular event was dominated by classical music – and some pretty serious music at that.
But the mood began to improve, helped along by images on the big screens set up on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate, which at one point displayed US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton nodding along to the exuberant strains of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
The frantic finale to the symphony was written in 1812, as Europe was being bludgeoned by the Napoleonic wars. Beethoven himself was wracked by unrequited love, and was nearing total deafness. And yet, joy came out of adversity – a fitting thought to remember the end of Germany’s awful 20th century by.
Filed under: Economy, Europe, all | Tags: Business, Germany, GM, Labour, Opel, US
Berlin – From the point of view of the German autoworker, the devil you know isn’t necessarily better than the devil you don’t.
On Thursday, more than 10,000 Opel employees turned out to express their displeasure at the decision of General Motors, Opel’s US parent, to keep their company, instead of selling it to the Magna- Sberbank consortium.
That deal had been the subject of months of torturous wrangling, with the jobs of tens of thousands of workers at stake. Now, it is in the bin.
To get an idea of the emotions that the fate of Opel arouses amongst its staff, witness the now-ubiquitous T-shirts worn by workers when on demonstration duty: ‘We Are Opel’, the slogan goes – a clear if somewhat overblown reference to the popular refrain during the last days of the East German dictatorship, We Are The People.
Now, Opel workers are back in the arms of GM, which has arisen like Lazarus from bankruptcy, and is suddenly feeling optimistic about the prospects for the automotive industry post financial crisis.
On the whole, they are not happy in Detroit’s familiar embrace.
In Europe in the past 20 years, the Marxist baby has mostly been thrown out with the Soviet bathwater. But as Fred Halliday here argues, finding useful lessons in the history of Communism is not just for soft-headed Ostalgists. See openDemocracy article here.
