@mimi I would vote for any news about Germany from real news in German papers, magazines and websites. But if the Guardian or France 24 has something, you could give your reaction or what other Germans are saying about the subject. If the Guardian got right or wrong.

Thanks for asking all of us. Have a good Freitag.

I hope I didn't came into cross fire with another Open Thread for Friday.

Just to let you know that I actually had written an Open Thread for this Friday that I courageously dumped into a black hole to never see the light again. That was actually a pretty good one, according to my standards. I informed JtC about it, me making a big pile of pooh with it, that's why I wrote this as a replacement, just to fulfill my obligations.

Ok, I am sorry for the mess. But I am happy to experience the scheduler to work in my favor.

Have all a very good Friday and I am happy to get any answers to all my stupid questions.

Meanwhile I answered some of them to myself, but I am glad to hear from you.

@lotlizard I was happy to see mimi so wholeheartedly recommend it; I was aware of it before, and from what I've seen of it (like this piece I discovered years ago: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/locals-say-coca-cola-orig...), I think highly of it.

My mother and I have been talking about learning a foreign language together, and I finally was able to convince her to start with German (she came of age at around the same time as the American public was learning the full scope of the Holocaust, and it basically tainted her view of everything German for most of her life - though I accept her saying this was not so since I asked about it, I did formerly wonder whether that all was a factor in, despite having had multiple husbands before my father, only finally settling down and having kids once she got around to the Nice Jewish Boy™ of her dreams).

… by having its German subsidiary buy Stern’s parent company, publisher Gruner + Jahr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTL_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruner_%2B_Jahr

Also, Axel Springer just bought the U.S. website Politico for over $1 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico#Acquisition

To my jaded eye, all German mainstream news channels are alike nowadays — globalist, Atlanticist, neoliberal on economic policy, and neocon on foreign policy. You might as well be reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist magazine, or the Associated Press. In the beginning, there was post-war Allied-occupation-imposed Bernaysian paternalism. More recently that has merged with Cass Sunstein’s notion of “nudging”. At any rate, everyone agrees that E.U. elite rule and reputation must be protected, U.S. woke ideology must be imported and promoted, and populism must be discredited.

The leading newspaper in Dresden where I live, the Sächsische Zeitung (“Saxon News”), is owned by a Social Democrat party-linked holding company, DDV.

The taz is the daily paper closest to the Greens. I’m not sure which media best reflect the Left Party (ex-communist / post-communist) milieu — the only one that comes to mind would be the daily Neues Deutschland, which grew out of the East German ruling communist party’s house organ.

Everybody has such an axe to grind these days that they’re all unreliable. All must be taken with a grain of salt, in full awareness of on which side the respective writers’ and editors’ bread is buttered when it comes to politics, money, and career.

@enhydra lutris  
as ineffectual hand-wringing status-quo apologists for U.S. empire. Living in Hesse in the greater Frankfurt area — where many Spontis morphed into Greens, yielding luminaries like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit — I had no reason to question their view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontis

In the late 1990s, I do personally recall that Die Zeit’s foreign correspondent seemed alone in exposing the terrible pogroms against the Chinese under the eyes of the army in Indonesia, in lengthy reports sometimes running to a full page or longer.

Example (unfortunately paywalled):
https://www.zeit.de/1998/09/indones.txt.19980219.xml

As so often in the past, in Indonesia the Chinese minority is the scapegoat
In Suharto’s empire, scenes of people being hunted like animals

By Jochen Buchsteiner
19 February 1998

Everyone else in German media seemed to be looking away for economic, geopolitical, or even racially charged reasons. Helmut Kohl had famously gone on a fishing trip with Suharto to clinch a trade deal. The attitude seemed to be, “Who cares about Chinese, anyway? They’re not one of the minorities we in the West worry about protecting. They’re probably like the Koreans in L.A. — serves ’em right for hogging all the business success and keeping darker-skinned groups down.”

Die Zeit? Objective, US propaganda, or what?

You present an interesting conundrum. Consider a "newspaper" published in Germany, in Deutsch, that is simply a collection of Associated Press articles and US government agency memos and propaganda "leaks", versus some other paper, printed somewhere outside of Germany in some other language that is based on the reporting and interviews conducted by German correspondent reporters on the ground in Germany? And, of course, in both cases, somebody, somewhere has editorial control (Murdoch, Kushner?).

What is mimi's news? How's the weather, the price of brotchen, and the "atmosphere" where you are?

At any rate, this is an open thread, and, for the purposes thereof, pretty much as good as any other, non?

be well and have a good one

@thanatokephaloides

don't let it bring you down

Hey mimi!

You said:

I will not dare to translate an article from a German newspaper and post an excerpt of such a translation. I remember well someone on dailykos with the nickname "translatorpro" putting me down (to say it gently, for translating some article according to my own level best.

So, never again.

spelling corrected to appease autocorrect

A couple of points:

1. This isn't dailykos, it's c99. Hereabouts, if you tell us that a translation is your work and according to your own level best, you should be met with nothing but respect and gratitude for your efforts. We're not some hell-hole where narcissistic dicks are encouraged to act, well, like "translatorpro" did.

2. Whoever (s)he might be, "translatorpro" can kiss my white Irish nether regions! (I'm not much of a fan of narcissistic dicks.)

3. We appreciate your bringing us German news. Our options for that service are limited hereabouts to efforts made by you and lotlizard to my best knowledge. I certainly am no Teutonophone, as my most recent foray into German makes painfully obvious.

So, vielen dank for this, and don't let the bastards grind you down!