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Der Spiegel: Germans Being German

 

COMMENT: The fall­out from the euro­zone cri­sis is pro­duc­ing some inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­na, not the least of which is the open expres­sion of Ger­man chau­vin­ism [1]. In a recent sto­ry,  the nor­mal­ly respectable Der Spiegel unleashed a remark­able com­ment about Ital­ians.

Can you imag­ine an Amer­i­can edi­tor, even an edi­tor of one of Rup­pert’s Rags [Mur­doch], let­ting a com­ment such as Herr Fleis­chauer penned make it to press?

Even the flat­u­lent ESPN was oblig­ed to fire a head­line writer for his com­ment about Jere­my Lin (the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can point guard of the New York Knicks bas­ket­ball team.)

“Ger­many vs. the Rest of Europe” by Floyd Nor­ris; New York Times; 2/17/2012. [2]

. . . . With­in each class, atti­tudes are hard­en­ing against the oth­er. “The birth defect of the euro was to put very dif­fer­ent cul­tures of eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty in the strait­jack­et of a sin­gle cur­ren­cy,” a com­men­ta­tor, Jan Fleis­chhauer, wrote in the Ger­man week­ly Der Spiegel after an Ital­ian cruise ship ran aground last month.

“Be hon­est,” he added. “Did it sur­prise any­one that the unlucky cap­tain of the Cos­ta Con­cor­dia is Ital­ian?” He asked whether any­one could imag­ine that a Ger­man, or even British, cap­tain would have behaved as the Ital­ian did.

An Ital­ian news­pa­per, Il Gior­nale, fired back with a front-page arti­cle denounc­ing the Der Spiegel com­men­tary. “We are per­sons to avoid, a bur­den for Europe,” the author, Alessan­dro Sal­lusti, wrote. “The Ger­mans are a supe­ri­or race. We have already read that in the speech­es of Hitler.”

Ger­mans are increas­ing­ly angry about hav­ing to bail out Greece and oth­er coun­tries, while those coun­tries react bit­ter­ly to being forced to take orders from Berlin. The Finan­cial Times reports that “a right-wing Greek news­pa­per depicts Angela Merkel, Germany’s chan­cel­lor, in a Nazi uni­form above the head­line ‘Mem­o­ran­dum macht frei’ — an allu­sion to the mem­o­ran­dum in which Greece’s for­eign cred­i­tors demand more aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures and to the Auschwitz slo­gan.”. . . .