EXBERLINER Issue 168, February 2018

POLITICS REPORTAGE ZEITGEIST ART MUSIC FILM STAGE
Let the insiders have their controversy
– for the rest of us Berliners, it’s time
for 10 days of celebs, parties and above
all, great movies. We’ve got your guide
to the best of the fest. — p.20-26
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SCREEN QUEENS
From daring directors to
indie programmers, it’s
women who rule Berlin’s
cinema scene. — p.6–15
COLUMN— Political Notebook
Editor-in-chief
Nadja Vancauwenberghe
168
Cover illustration by Varja Kovaleva
Deputy editor
Rachel Glassberg
Web editor
Walter Crasshole
Film
Paul O’Callaghan
Art director
Stuart Bell
Publishers
Maurice Frank
Nadja Vancauwenberghe
Ioana Veleanu
Editorial
Design
Music
Michael Hoh
Art
Sarrita Hunn
Stage
Daniel Mufson
Food
Françoise Poilâne
Graphic design
Louise Yau
This month’s contributors
Jenny Browne, Yun-Hua Chen, Aqueena Crisp,
Emmanuelle François, Franziska Helms, Liam Kelly,
Aske Hald Knudstrup, David Mouriquand, David
Opie, Jane Silver, Madeleine Speed, Zhuo-Ning Su,
Thomas Wintle, Rowan Woods. Photography: Karolina
Spolniewski. Illustration: Varja Kovaleva, Agata Sasiuk.
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The power of boredom
Konrad Werner explains German politics. This month:
What was so bad about the Grand Coalition again?
For some reason, everyone seems to
agree with the idea that the German
media is “left-wing”. Which makes it
weird that the press seemed disappointed
last month when the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) decided to hitch itself to the Merkel
coalition one more time. It was, no one actually
said, like watching an incompetent sailor
getting keelhauled – tied up to the hull and
doomed to either drown or have his body
horribly shredded and maimed by barnacles
and other marine fauna.
But now we are there anyway. As I write,
the SPD’s 440,000 members
are yet to vote, but the 600 or
so delegates at the SPD party
conference in Bonn have just
voted to enter coalition negotiations
with Angela Merkel’s
CDU and her Bavarian rightwing
attack dog the CSU.
That wasn’t how it was
supposed to be, not for the
German press. They, like everyone
else, were ready for the
further demolition of the old order, for that
is the zeitgeist. That’s why the media spent
most of the week up until last month’s vote
amplifying the importance of Kevin Kühnert,
the 28-year-old leader of the “Jusos” (the
SPD’s “young socialist” movement), who
championed the “NoGroKo” campaign, and
talked with rare passion about the Social
Democrats’ social-democratness.
There’s a good reason for this. It is true that
the SPD’s disastrous election result last year
(20.5 percent, its lowest since WWII) is partly
down to the fact that Merkel was really good
at leeching out their ideas and making them
her own. Replacement of its top personnel
would undoubtedly do the SPD good. Even the
exhausted and depressed Martin Schulz, on
election night, declared that it was time for his
party to go on some kind of Buddhist monk
retreat for abused coalition partners.
But on the other hand, there could be a real
cost for the country if the SPD doesn’t enter
a coalition. A minority government driven
by the conservative half of Merkel’s already
really conservative Christian Democrat Union
(CDU) could push this country even further
into the AfD zone than it already is. For one
thing, Merkel would end up
having to fish around among the
Bundestag from one policy to the
next to try and squeeze a majority
out of the MPs. For another,
despite what Kühnert and the
“Jusos” have said, the SPD did
actually get a few good compromises
out of its preliminary
coalition talks: you could see the
SPD’s influence in a new health
care policy and plans for a basic
state-guaranteed pension for people with
low incomes. Also, the social infrastructure
investments included in the coalition paper
had an SPD mark on them: €2 billion for new
social housing, another €2 billion for new allday
schools, and €3.5 billion for kindergartens.
All that stuff would be good for the
country, even if it’s not exactly a socialist
revolution. But no one gives a shit about fair
pensions and health insurance, because the
media treats politics as a soap opera, rather
than policies that affect people’s lives. And
now they’re bored of this storyline, and they
want sexy new characters. n
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