Tales from Germany

  It is seldom that I can just get on my bike and go to a press conference, but this one in Trier yesterday was a welcome change!   Trier, Germany (ENI). The Roman Catholic Church in Germany has launched an official telephone hotline for victims of sexual abuse in its institutions. At a press conference in Trier, Bishop Stephan Ackermann of the German Bishops' Conference said on 30 March the helpline will be staffed by psychologists and social workers from the diocese of Trier. Ackermann was appointed in February by the German bishops to handle mounting allegations of abuse in Germany's Catholic Church. The crisis began when a school in Berlin run by the Jesuit order announced in January that there had been systematic abuse of pupils by three priests in the 1970s and 1980s. After the school had appointed a lawyer, it appealed for victims of abuse to come forward. Soon it emerged that the priests involved also worked at other church-run schools and...

The annual Leipzig Book Fair is truly a people's book festival and in stark contrast to the Frankfurt Book Fair which is all about deals. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented his book printing machine (I visited the museum two years ago in Mainz ), Germany has been the centre of the publishing trade. From 1632 to 1945 Leipzig was the biggest book fair in Germany and in Europe. However after the divide of Europe and Germany into East and West after the Second World War in 1945, the festival continued in East Germany. It was however was overtaken in importance by Frankfurt. This get-together of the publishing and media sectors with writers, readers and publishers has an invigorating air about it. In the hustle bustle of some spring sunshine th e famous mix with booksellers, readers, plebs and wannabe authors like myself. Nobel Prize Laureates Günter Grass and Hertha Müller were walking around being interviewed and talking to people, as was South African author Deon Me...

There I stood this week at the grave of Erasmus of Rotterdam in the Basel Münster at a loss to read the inscription in the lingua franca of Europe. Albeit the lingua franca of an earlier Europe, when a common written language prevailed - Latin. That was the world of this Dutch Renaissance humanist. Coming from Africa I never saw the advantages of Latin as a subject. Moving from Jozi barely a century old to Germany’s oldest Roman town , a mere 2,000 years old , I was soon confronted by Latin. In our area some secondary schools offer the option of pupils starting with Latin as their first foreign language when they, aged barely ten, start Gymnasium, the most academic of the three-tier secondary schools. Because numbers are low a lot of marketing goes into attracting pupils.My tri-lingual daughter was seen as a natural candidate. „Latin is a dead language,“ I proclaimed loud enough for all to hear. Whereas the German intelligensia, in other words the professors, the architects, t...

A story that continues to rock the Protestant Churches in Germany and that I did for Ecumenical News International in Geneva. T rier, Germany, 24 February (ENI)-- Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders have expressed their regret about the resignation of Bishop Margot Kässmann, the first woman to lead 24 million German Protestants, who belong to the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). At a 24 February press conference in Hanover, where she was resident bishop, Kässmann said she was resigning from her leadership positions, only days after she was stopped for a drink-driving offence. When she made her announcement she was flanked by her four grown-up daughters. Kässmann said she had given up her posts as a bishop and as head of the EKD but would continue as a pastor. One commentator said the resignation would hurt the EKD more than it would help it because of a shortage of well-known leaders in the church grouping. Still, one cleric from a theologically conservative gr...

Invigilating my students while they wrote their Business English Exam last Friday, I realised how complacent I have become in Germany. Instead of like a few years earlier standing like a hawk over them, I was sitting at my desk marking. Now in my own defence I should add I was pretty weak and sick on this day. However German students and pupils are absolutely notorious for cribbing from each other and yet I was not going to even try and find out if they did. Unlike Anglo-Saxon countries where one can be expelled from an institution for cheating during an exam, it is by no means seen as an a remotely serious crime in this country. No much worse, most Germans (including my own children) can relate some pretty hair-raising stories of either copying from others during exams or being put under such social pressure to put your exam paper in such a way that others can copy from you. Even my brainy husband did not escape this pressure of others copying from him at his elite Bavarian Gy...