Word: der
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a Gerhard Schröder joke making the rounds in Germany that perfectly captures the hapless Chancellor's predicament. Schröder tries to console an unemployed architect, telling him, "If I weren't Chancellor, I'd be building houses." The irate architect shoots back: "If you weren't Chancellor, I'd be building houses, too." Barely two months after he won re-election by a wafer-thin margin, Schröder's handling of the country's sputtering economy has made him the most unpopular leader in postwar Germany. People feel betrayed and lied to by Schr...
...thing that infuriates voters is the knife-point targeting of the taxes being introduced by Schröder and his Finance Minister, Hans Eichel. Dog owners will get slapped with a tax of 16% on pet food; company cars will be hit with a 1.5% tax, leading the auto industry to predict 150,000 fewer cars will be sold next year. Air travelers were threatened with a 15% tax on frequent-flyer miles, prompting national airline Lufthansa to say it was considering moving its program overseas, which would eliminate 500 jobs. The government will impose a flat...
...morbid state of Germany's government wasn't on the agenda last week when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac held a working dinner at a castle outside Berlin. Yet, perversely, Schröder's problems could help get relations between Paris and Berlin over a difficult hump. France has been nursing the Continent's most important relationship with a sense of wounded pride for the last few years. Not only did reunification make Germany the bigger partner, but the imminent prospect of a big-bang enlargement of the European Union threatened to put the Germans...
DIED. RUDOLF AUGSTEIN, 79, influential founder and publisher of the liberal, often combative postwar German newsweekly Der Spiegel, which quickly moved away from Nazi-era press restrictions to champion tough investigative journalism; of pneumonia; in Hamburg. Augstein went to prison for treason in 1962 in what became known as the Spiegel Affair: after the magazine published an article critical of NATO, police arrested journalists, an act that drew international scorn and helped lead to the downfall of West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss...
...further 25 are due to expire at the end of the year. Fixing the problem fell to Berlin, say NATO officials, in part because its capability needs to be bolstered: the Bundeswehr had to rent Ukrainian Antonovs to get cargo to Afghanistan last spring, and the Schröder government, pleading budget problems, has already reduced its order for the A400M from a promised 73 planes to just 40. NATO officials hope Berlin will pull together enough allies to commit to the long-term lease of eight to 10 such planes. The Dutch have been tasked with heading a similar...