Sunday, March 9, 2025

Joshua Freedman

One long word for man, one giant leap for the Big Brother state

Telekommunikationsüberwachungsmaßnahmen. Now that’s a word to get your tongue around after a few. But that hasn’t stopped the Bavarian authorities from using it to...

Merkel stuffed by Frankfurters… and now the chips are down

In the last few days and weeks I’ve blogged about the threat to the ruling CDU in Germany posed by this Sunday’s regional election...

Freudian slip of the week

Renate Künast, co-leader of the Greens in Germany, was making a parliamentary speech and quoted a piece the political columnist Hugo Müller-Vogg had written...

Why Goethe should be banned from German degrees

It's a health and safety risk. As Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein points out on Comment Central:Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows...

Germany’s Communist kingmakers

The REAL election '08UPDATE: I found this Die Linke car in the street, but I'm not sure it's a Trabant. I know little about...

Wanted: one Alistair Campbell

The REAL election '08I picked up this election leaflet (pictured) outside Frankfurt University the other day. It's from the far-left Party for Social Equality...

The glossy reality of Germany’s news media (not available online)

Germany’s widest-read newsmagazine, Focus (think Economist, but guest-edited by the Private Eye team, plus a bit of Stuff thrown in), celebrated its 15th birthday...

70 Blairs, 3 Ahmadinejads, but only one Hitler

I came across this German website, which lets you search for the frequency of different surnames across the country. It relies on phone book...

Doh! The bloggers are killing me!

To mark last week's panel discussion on online journalism, held by the German Union of Journalists:(Hat tip: Spreeblick) Cherwell 24 is not responsible for...

Don’t believe anything you read

BILDBlog catches Bild out... It draws up from the vault nine bits of speculation about the future of Jürgen Klinsmann, all from the pages...

Love letter to Hillary Clinton, the casserole fowl

Bild (sensationalist red-top) columnist Franz Josef Wagner always writes a letter to a person or  group as his regular newspaper piece. His latest one...

Not quite the River Main of Blood

The REAL election '08The boss is in trouble. State Prime Minister Roland Koch is being branded a racist for a pre-election statement… and his...

Could this be the start of a magnificent journey?

For a while I’ve thought the dull German media could do with an injection of the Murdoch treatment. And it seems my wish has...

They’re all saying it

The REAL election '08The wonderfully named Guido Westerwelle, leader of Germany's centre-right liberal Free Democrats, has taken after Hillary Clinton (and everyone else) and...

Slightly off-topic

Enough about this FA Cup magic nonsense already! There's one reason why no one cares about the FA Cup any more. The final's no...

The REAL election ‘08

Welcome back, and happy new year. Three weeks tomorrow, the state of Hesse goes to the polls in the regional elections certain to get...

Merry Christmas to all our racist readers

The PC stagnation hasn’t quite hit the banks of the River Main yet. Blair’s Christmas card bloomer a few years ago changed things slightly...

It’s time for change

Three months ago I launched this blog as a German press review. Well, ideas have moved on, and I’m now re-launching it with a...

Crossing continents with Facebook’s help

I came across a "German Newspaper Front Pages" application on Facebook. I thought it went well with this blog. Its description tells us:This application...

Finally, the Brits beat the Germans at something: scandals

The good news: We beat Germany, and it wasn't even in a war.The bad news: It wasn't a penalty shootout either. It was a...

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