Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ensor drew lessons in form and color from Turner, Courbet and Manet, but the spirit of his work, the mad afflatus of his gift, owes more to the Germans. His devils are inherited from Bosch and Brueghel. His taste for the grotesque traces back to Grünewald. He, in turn, would hand on his caustic vision of humanity to the German Expressionists, younger artists like Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner who saw the possibilities in his combination of sour disposition and strident palette...
...hard to feel sorry for a guy who walks away from a job with a check for €50 million ($71 million). So while a few Germans see Wendelin Wiedeking, departing CEO of German sports car maker Porsche, as the victim of a public lynching by media, few feel bad for him. Wiedeking had a 17-year run at Porsche, the Stuttgart-based sports car icon which has just failed in its bid to take over motoring giant Volkswagen and will now be merged into the VW group. He took the job when Porsche was on the skids and transformed...
...many, leveraging his company in a gambit to acquire the much larger carmaker. He failed because he underestimated the political opposition to a takeover of VW and ended up saddling Porsche with $13 billion in debt. As his star was sinking, Wiedeking went from hero in the German public's eye to a victim of his own massive hubris. In his way, Wiedeking is Germany's symbol of the greed generation, just as Bernie Madoff is in the U.S. or the Royal Bank of Scotland's Fred Goodwin is in Britain. Not a criminal like Madoff, obviously, but someone...
...huge handout and Wiedeking himself suggested a more modest sum. Before the ink had dried on the check, Wiedeking announced he would donate half the money to a Porsche-sponsored charity. Not without a sense of humor, he also pledged to donate $2.3 million to assist "needy journalists". The German taxman will likely get a big chunk of what is left. "For the first time an executive has responded to the ever louder public criticism of compensation and bonuses for managers," wrote the business daily Handelsblatt. "It could be that the Wiedeking affair is a turning point." (Read...
There is another lesson in Wiedeking's downfall, a lesson unlikely to be lost on automotive executives, investment bankers or even European Union bureaucrats: Volkswagen is not just any German company. Wiedeking lost his bid for control of VW when he lost the support of Ferdinand Piech, the VW supervisory board chairman who initially backed a Porsche takeover. Piech realized that Christian Wulff, the premier of the state of Lower Saxony, which holds a blocking stake in the carmaker, would not support a takeover. All Wulff had to do was use the so-called Volkswagen...