1. The strange RAF nostalgia
“We stand together!” and “For you health & happiness!”: That sounds like a greeting card from the department head, but it’s on a banner in Hamburg.
Someone hung it up at the left-wing autonomous cultural center Rote Flora.
It calls for “solidarity with Burkhard Daniela Volker” – which obviously means the former left-wing terrorists Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg and their comrade Daniela Klette, who was arrested yesterday.
It has something of folklore, of the trench warfare of the old Federal Republic, something between urban guerrilla and chic.
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Mugshots of Daniela Klette
Photo: AP/BKA
Reminds me of a bookseller who only sold me Stefan Aust's "Baader-Meinhof Complex" under protest at the end of the 1990s.
He complained about the "rubbish" and also urged me to read "Texts and Materials on the History of the RAF," an anthology containing much of what the terrorists had published.
So that I would understand what they had fought for.
(What's really worth reading about the RAF - here's the overview.)
When it comes to the RAF, a mix of strange non-seriousness, nostalgia and folklore seems to have survived the decades.
This mix was already inappropriate back then.
And it still is, a quarter of a century after the terrorist group's self-declared end.
The case of Daniela Klette alone: She is said to have been involved in three politically motivated attacks and a series of robberies on supermarkets and cash-in-transit vehicles.
However, it remains to be seen what she can really be punished for, as my colleagues Bertolt Hunger and Ansgar Siemens report.
»What does her hair prove at the crime scenes of the RAF attacks?
Klette could have been the perpetrator in all three cases.
But she could also have been uninvolved - if, for example, she only drove in the vehicles involved in the crime to get bread rolls." Mere membership in the RAF has been statute-barred since 2018.
The RAF fascination has not yet faded.
Here is more background: What punishment does Daniela Klette face?
2. Get in and find your way out
"When it comes to 'Nothing between us' or 'Come in and find out', the average German only understands Railway Station," writes my colleague Jochen Leffers about the thesis of a Dortmund graduate student who examined how advertising in English is received by German consumers.
To do this, she measured the skin resistance of 24 test subjects when the advertisement was played, similar to the lie detector test.
The test subjects reacted more strongly to German slogans, or sayings, such as “Are you still living or are you already alive?” than to “Have a break, have a kitkat”.
The text is almost 20 years old (and can be found here), which is about how long ago I thought of Douglas.
At the time, the cosmetics chain advertised with “Come in and find out,” which many consumers in a much larger study translated as “Come in and find out again” (others translated the then Sat.1 motto “Powered by Emotion” as “Power through Joy").
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Singer Ariana Grande (2015 in Hamburg)
Photo: Franziska Krug / Douglas / Getty Images
Now Douglas is back in the headlines: The company is aiming to go back on the stock exchange, as my colleague Kristina Gnirke reports, according to insiders before Easter.
At first it smells like boring business news, but it's an investor thriller: "An influential company hunter, who is considered particularly savvy in the financial industry, basically had the cosmetics chain tied to his leg when he started his job," says Kristina.
“His predecessor had bought them shortly before he started.” And despite a lot of effort, it was difficult to get rid of the savvy Douglas.
That's his business: "Buying companies, usually charging them with debt for the necessary loans, then selling them off again at a profit - if possible with enough money raised so that the company can pay off the mountain of debt." But he now wants to go public make the exit.
In advertising English: Came in and wants out.
Read more here: The investor and the lipstick effect
3. Disks
"I'm not on Instagram or TikTok, I don't listen to a podcast and I have two iPads that I rarely use," writes my colleague Jochen-Martin Gutsch.
In his living room there are still tuners, CD players, record players, two boxes the size of suitcases, plus hundreds of CDs and records.
He has the feeling that he is slowly losing touch in his early 50s (here his column).
He is in very good company: Sparkasse Bremen has just sent its new terms and conditions to 15,000 business customers - on 15,000 USB sticks by post.
Nobody digitizes German.
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Branch of the Sparkasse Bremen
Photo:
STPP/IMAGO
However, sending USBs poses one or two more dangers than the private preference for physical recordings: For fraudsters, for example, this may create a new, promising scam: »USB sticks are more suitable for installing malware than, for example, links in E emails,” says Netzwelt author Jörg Breithut.
"It's usually enough to connect the stick, for example to install spyware on the computer that reads passwords." Checking the authenticity of a bank stick is difficult.
Another savings bank, Berliner, did things differently about two years ago: It sent printed terms and conditions to its customers on 130 A4 pages.
I find it even more annoying: I don't have to carry the USB stick to the paper container.
Read more here: Why a savings bank sends its terms and conditions on USB sticks
What else is important today?
Frigate “Hessen” mistakenly fires at US Reaper drone:
An explosive security incident has occurred in the Red Sea.
According to SPIEGEL information, the crew of the German warship almost shot down a US drone if the technology had not failed.
Von der Leyen wants to buy weapons with frozen Russian money:
the EU has frozen around 264 billion euros in Russian assets.
Whether this money should be used to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine or weapons is debatable.
Ursula von der Leyen has taken a position, as has Finance Minister Lindner.
EU Parliament votes against mandatory health checks for drivers:
There will be no mandatory medical checks for drivers in Germany for the time being.
The EU Parliament has decided that the EU states should continue to decide on such tests themselves.
The FDP rejects the investigations.
Power plant operator sends drones to melted fuel rods:
What it looks like inside the destroyed reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is still largely uncertain.
This makes the clean-up work more difficult.
A fleet of maneuverable drones is supposed to clarify the situation.
What we recommend today at SPIEGEL+
Will you miss tax classes III and V?
The traffic light wants to target the tax brackets - the opposition sees many families at a disadvantage as a result.
What's really behind the plans.
And what they mean for you personally.
“Children with Long Covid are sometimes sicker than cancer patients”:
The pediatrician Nina Kollmar specializes in cancer.
She has also been treating minors suffering from Long Covid for three years.
Here she talks about her everyday life in the clinic.
Huguenots and Ruhr Poles were already struggling with integration:
without the Huguenots and “Ruhr Poles” we would not be an asparagus nation, and Schalke 04 would not have become champions.
What happened to Germany's first large immigrant groups?
Which is less important today
Enlarge image
Photo:
Toby Melville / REUTERS
Prince without a guard:
Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex, known as
Harry
, 39, has lost a legal battle, as British media report.
It's about a decision by the Interior Ministry to only grant him police protection on a case-by-case basis, not always.
He offered to pay for it himself in the future.
The ministry's lawyers argued that it was "not appropriate" for rich people to be able to "buy" government protection.
Mini concave mirror
The “Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung” about an infectious disease:
“Between 200,000 and 400,000 people worldwide die every year as a result of Maria.”
You can find the entire concave mirror here.
Cartoon of the day
And tonight?
Could you watch Dune: Part Two?
The film doesn't officially start until tomorrow, but it's already showing in some cinemas today.
Is it perhaps the most exciting science fiction event of the decade, as we read here and there?
If I have the desert, gnihi.
In any case, it is "the continuation of the 'Desert Planet' saga that the American science fiction author Frank Herbert published from the mid-sixties," as my colleague Tobias Rapp writes.
"Much like Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, hippies loved the volumes - but so did right-wing radicals." (You can find out more about previous attempts to film the series here).
"Unlike in 'Lord of the Rings', where the principle of friendship is ultimately strong enough to defeat the darkness, or in 'Star Wars', where the conflicts resolve in the family drama of the father-son relationship, in “Dune” has power itself at the center,” writes Tobias.
»If you want the right thing, you have to win, otherwise you won't get it.
If you want to win, you have to believe, because that is man's strongest motivation.
If you want to spread faith, you have to lie.
But will those who lie still win the right thing?" The first two "Dune" films together now form the first book of a total of six - reminiscent of the Hobbit principle.
Tobias believes that “Dune: Part Two” is a masterpiece, a world-creating epic, especially thanks to the visual imagination of director Denis Villeneuve.
(Full review here .) Very best sand work.
I wish you an exciting evening.
Heartfelt
Yours, Oliver Trenkamp, Blattmacher in the editor-in-chief