Germany

Although Germany is one of the richest countries in the world, signs of increasing poverty are becoming increasingly visible across the country. Homeless people sleeping rough, mothers forgoing meals in order to feed their children, pensioners looking for discarded bottles to trade for the deposit.

According to the Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband, Germany’s umbrella organization for welfare organizations, 13.8 million Germans either live in poverty or are at risk of slipping below the poverty line. The German government also voices its concerns about the growing gap between rich and poor.

The term poverty in this context does not mean that millions of people in Germany are at risk of starving or freezing to death. Instead, it refers to relative poverty, which is measured by the average living conditions of the society in question.

Germany to pay December gas bills for households and businesses in new energy crisis plan

Europe’s largest economy must cut consumption by 20 per cent to avoid potential shortages, expert warns

Germany is to pay most of the nation’s December gas bills as part of an effort to shield citizens and the economy from the energy crisis fuelled by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Berlin has riled EU neighbours by allocating up to €200bn (£175.5bn) for a “defensive shield” to ease the strain, amid warnings in Berlin that Europe’s largest economy must reduce its gas consumption by 20 per cent to prevent a potential shortage this winter.

Pretty sweet social programs!

Officials in Germany have announced plans to rebuild a bridge over the Rhine that collapsed days after its capture by US soldiers in the final weeks of the second world war.

The bridge at Remagen, which featured in a 1969 film of the same name starring George Segal, Ben Gazzara and Robert Vaughn, focusing on the heroism of the allies’ final advance into Germany, could be standing again within a decade, town planners have said.

I first visited West Germany as a student, during the height of the Cold War, but I didn’t make it to Berlin until shortly after the Wall came down. In fact, when I arrived there by night train from Munich in the spring of 1990, it was still coming down, both figuratively and literally. Chugging through what until very recently had been East Germany, we stopped at a station where the train remained closed—like Lenin’s on his 1917 journey to Saint Petersburg—while an elderly woman in a shabby, ill-fitting uniform made her way slowly along the platform, meticulously copying down the numbers of our passenger cars, obviously performing a decades-long but now pointless ritual. In the morning, we pulled into the Berlin Zoo station, where everyone got out except for yours truly, because I was too naïve to know that Berlin Zoo was, in fact, the main station for West Berlin and that the final stop, the Hauptbahnhof, where I ended up disembarking, was a cavernous, empty old pile of rubble—or close to it—in the former East Berlin.

Germany’s economy and climate minister has angrily lashed out at Angela Merkel’s party, accusing it of being responsible for “16 years of energy policy failure”.

While the ongoing gas crisis across Europe gets steadily worse, political tensions in Germany appear to be growing, with the country’s economic and climate minister, Robert Habeck, angrily lashing out at his political rivals in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel.