Achtung! is the title of my monthly column in Blueprint magazine that I have been writing since October 2008. That headline has to do with the Brits’ continuing stereotyping of us Germans as heel-clicking, orders-shouting men in jackboots. I have long since learned that the best way to live with that preoccupation is to go along with it, even bring it up before they do. So when the editors came up with the title, I rolled my eyes but agreed. This was written in September, before the size of the financial crisis became to be fully known. My condemnation of people producing “invisible earnings” could have been much harsher.
THESE DAYS, even cities and countries are branded like washing powder. When I hear a line like ‘London is the creative capital of Europe,’ (or was it ‘the World’?), the first thing I ask myself is whether this is the result of objective research, a tabloid invention or another government campaign to take peoples’ minds off increasing inflation, prohibitive property prices, terrible traffic and weird weather. Yet there is some truth behind the slogan. I live and work in Berlin, San Francisco and London, and there is something different about the British capital.
