Back to reality

Dear Reader,

The German Review is back from its summer break.

As I always do at this time of year, I spent five weeks in the tiny village that I grew up in on the northwest coast of Scotland. Fortressed by steep mountains to the interior and the Atlantic to the exterior, the village is so isolated that getting there from Berlin requires four different modes of transport and around 12 hours of travel.

Admittedly, that doesn’t stop it from being overrun with (mostly German) tourists in the summer. Nonetheless, it is still far enough removed from the world that, when you hear that an American presidential candidate’s ear has just been sliced in two by a bullet, the news goes in one auditory organ and out the other.

In short, going back to the Scottish Highlands for the summer was good for my soul but probably less good for my skills as a journalist, for whom interpreting any unexpected news as a sign of the impending Armageddon is a necessary occupational disease.

For your sake, I hope that returning to Berlin will turn me back into a neurotic Großstädtler as soon as possible.

In the pipeline are pieces on Germany’s Erinnerungskultur - officially sanctioned remembrance of the past - and whether it should be extended beyond the Nazis to include things like migration and modern political crime; previews of upcoming state elections in east Germany; and whether far-right, antisemitic magazines have a right to freedom of speech. I’m also going to be looking in greater depth at the question that is keeping the German establishment up at night: is the decline that we’ve seen over the past four or five years permanent, or just a blip?

Best,

Jörg Luyken

P.S. In case you missed my last piece on the creepy, illiberal remit of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, you can read it here:

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