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You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles.
Half of us are partly German! Half our language and culture, generally, in Anglo-Saxon terms, is German.
But, as environment minister, I am very interested in a thriving German automobile industry, because I can only pay for the rising costs of environmental protection at home and abroad if there are people in Germany with jobs and who pay taxes.
The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.
The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.
It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.
I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.
I felt really sorry for Oliver Kahn. Up to that point he had made lots of saves for the German team. Of course he could have caught the ball but it just happened. It was bad luck. In that situation, you need to be very strong psychologically to carry on.
I would caution against fueling cheap populism. First of all, every German who has spent a vacation in Greece knows that the standard of living there isn't higher than it is in Germany. Second, Greece is paying a high price for European assistance.