Is it possible to garner a bad review for the opening of something so innocuous-sounding as the German-American Heritage Museum? If the reviewer is the Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher, anything is possible. (Fisher was the former German correspondent for the Post, before foreign correspondents became an endangered species. And as a few Germans have acknowledged—and as Fisher himself once told me—the reviewer’s relationship with Germany has never been an entirely happy one.)
The problem, as Fisher sees it, is that “the Balkanizers are in control.”
Oh no he didn’t!
John Rosenthal, meanwhile, hits much harder in this week’s issue of The Weekly Standard, wondering why it’s okay for the German government to seize private bank records to chase down tax evaders but it isn’t okay to share that information with U.S. authorities who are monitoring terrorist activities.
On a much lighter note, Ian Brunskill reviews the Simon Winder book, Germania, in the Wall Street Journal: “‘Germany,’ [Winder] observes, ‘is a sort of Dead Zone today.’ English-speaking travelers visit on business trips, shuttling from airport to city-center hotel with barely a glance at the land around them and no thought at all for the country’s culture or history.” And there is indeed a lot to see:
And lastly Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of the composer, has died at the age of 90. Und das ist alles…
