But a bitter dispute has broken out in Wolfsburg over the question of which direction the steering wheel should be turned. The savings plan that VW boss Oliver Blume wants to impose on the group is highly controversial. The 58-year-old wants to cut billions, cut tens of thousands of jobs in Germany and have the supervisory board approve the fact that four of the group's German car plants - in Zwickau, Emden, Hanover and Neckarsulm - will "run idle" one after the other in the years after 2030, as they say at VW.
If negotiations with the supervisory board fail on Friday morning, VW is threatened with an internal war. In this case, the board of directors wants to call an extraordinary general meeting, bypassing the supervisory board. Although anchored in the Stock Corporation Act, it is practically never used as an escalation tool by a board of directors against its supervisory board.
Apparently, resourceful fraudsters from China have discovered the pass, which was actually intended for Nazi victims and their relatives, as a shortcut to the German passport. German citizenship is one of the most valuable in the world. With the Bordeaux red passport you can travel to more than 180 countries without a visa and live, work or study anywhere in the European Union.
My colleagues Lukas Eberle, Christoph Giesen, Thore Schröder and Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt have reconstructed how criminals from abroad, especially from China, systematically faked relationships to once-persecuted Jews in order to be naturalized in Germany as alleged relatives of Nazi victims under Article 116.
Before the election next Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, the debate about payments from financially strong states to financially weak federal states via state financial equalization has become louder again. According to surveys, the right-wing extremist AfD could have a prime minister and a state government there for the first time - with election promises whose implementation, according to calculations by economic researchers, would lead to a funding gap of around 2.2 billion euros in the state budget.
The five eastern German federal states and Berlin are all net recipients, the four net contributors to the financial equalization are in the west with Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Hamburg.
In view of the shift to the right in the East, people there are apparently asking themselves whether they still need to finance this. At least that's how the results of the current SPIEGEL-Ipsos political monitor can be interpreted. Accordingly, 39 percent of those surveyed rated the financial contributions of the old federal states to the development of the new federal states and to equalizing living conditions there as too high.
»The assessment was correspondingly different in the West and East. Among the West German respondents, 47 percent felt that the financial transfers to the East were too high or too high; in the east this was 8 percent. 11 percent of West Germans and 30 percent of East Germans found the transfers to be too low," writes my colleague Florian Diekmann.
The detailed results of the SPIEGEL-Ipsos political monitor can be found here: Four out of ten Germans see the West as the paymaster for the East
Ravages of time: George Clooney, 65, mourns the loss of his youthful teeth. The Hollywood actor is currently at the Venice Film Festival. At a press conference at the opening, he spoke on various topics, including the current political situation in the USA. “We are currently living in a kakistocracy,” says Clooney. The word describes a country that is ruled by the least qualified people. His aging seems to bother him much more than the political climate in his home country. Everything about it would make him wistful, Clooney said: "Literally, you brush your teeth and think, 'Oh, my teeth used to be so much nicer.'"
Could you go to the cinema and watch “Fatherland”. The black-and-white film with Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann and Sandra Hülser as his daughter Erika describes the two's journey to Frankfurt am Main and Weimar in 1949. It is the first time that the Nobel Prize winner for literature returns to his home country after fleeing the Nazis. He is cheered on this journey, but also insulted.
My colleague Wolfgang Höbel interviewed the film's director, Pawel Pawlikowski, and asked him why he chose this material of all things: "Thomas Mann's return to Germany in 1949 and the associated historical context interested me because certain similarities to today can be seen. The Old World is in ruins, a social and cultural model has collapsed, and in its place are new dynamic narratives that force everyone to take sides and leave less and less room for one's own thoughts and voice. In the divided Germany of 1949, polarization was visible and vivid. Today it mainly happens in the digital space and is driven by algorithms,” says Pawlikowski.
You can read the whole interview here: "Gustaf Gründgens definitely deserved the slap in the face"
Have a nice evening. Warmly
Yours, Michail Hengstenberg, author in the culture department
