coincidence or coincidence?
Last week, on the day of the so-called car summit in the Federal Chancellery, shopping at the local bakery.
The family business with decades of tradition has given up and sold.
Here, in contrast to the ungoverned capital – as this newspaper so aptly put it recently – everyone knows what bankruptcy is.
The bureaucracy suffocates them, says the baker, the documentation requirements take more time than the craft itself. Now the energy costs, the oven no longer pays off.
She has a tear in her eye.
Meanwhile, at the invitation of Olaf Scholz, ministers, the automobile industry and automobile opponents met in Berlin, and those who would most like to get rid of BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz or Lufthansa made press statements en masse that the country was threatened with demise.
But that threatens if Germany relies on an ever-growing crowd of tax-financed bureaucrats and lobbyists trying to cut each other's hair.
From taxes generated by BMW, Mercedes-Benz, VW, Lufthansa and the local baker.
Which they can only earn if they are given the freedom to make technical innovations and make sensible business decisions.
The chancellor was once mayor of Hamburg, he should know about the importance of industry for Germany's prosperity.
The CDU should know about the importance of medium-sized companies.
The FDP about the value of freedom.
Then why is the baker closing?
Why does a foreign CEO ask us, "Do you actually have a plan once you've destroyed your auto industry?"