How should Germans live?

An interesting article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung this week concerned itself with the word façade and what a bad wrap it has had in recent years. Façade has come to mean a pretence for a more malign intention. Originally though, it just meant the front of a house, which is made more beautiful than the interior in order to impress people walking past.

Just as façade has come to have a purely negative meaning, the idea of giving a house a pretty exterior went out of fashion a long time ago in Germany.

During the zweite Zerstörung - the decades after the war in which the Gründerzeit architecture that marked out German cities as architectural masterpieces were either replaced by concrete blocks or repaired on the cheap without stucco exteriors - façade became an ugly word.

I mention this because the theme of how Germans should live is likely to be a prominent one during this election year. Various parties of the left have proposed plans like banning detached housing, dispossessing landlords …