Author Archives: Hermann Observer

Only the cheapest survive

October 7, 2009 By in Heconomy Tags: 1 Comment

On the top of Germany’s most wealthy list, I mean.

Aldi lonely people...

Cheapness is what Germany wants, especially these days. So that’s why the founders of the Aldi discount grocery store chain are once again on top of Manager Magazin’s annual list of the country’s most wealthy people.

The Porsche family is out, of course. They’re still not cheap enough. And this reflects a real crisis or something. The number of German individuals or families with at least one billion euros in capital fell from 122 to 99 since last year.

In the name of all things just and decent, won’t anybody out there do anything to help these poor folks out? Buy a Porsche already or something.

99 German billionaires on the wall, 99 German billionaires…

Real women wanted

October 6, 2009 By in History Tags: 1 Comment

Sometimes it takes a real man to make a real decision like this: Editor-in-chief Andreas Leberts has announced that starting next year, Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, will ban those skinny professional model types from its pages in favor of “real women”, whoever and wherever they are.

Back to nature or something.

This decision is seen as an attempt to combat an unhealthy standard of unhealthy looking thin and flat I mean thin beauty and could also be seen as being the first step toward finally turning Brigitte into the men’s magazine it deserves to be.

Brigitte isst wieder.

Fruit sellers go home!

October 2, 2009 By in Home Cooking Tags: 2 Comments

Bashing Berlin? That’s easy. Especially if you’re a real insider who’s on the outside now. Thilo Sarrazin (SPD), the city’s former finance minister now working for the German Central Bank in Frankfurt, has said in an interview that Berlin is 1) not productive enough 2) has too many immigrants and 3) is being held back by its leftist mentality. Well, two out of three ain’t bad (I’m on the immigrants’ side for some strange reason).

Einen Koffer in Berlin habe ich nicht mehr.

“In Berlin there is a bigger problem than elsewhere of an underclass that does not take part in the normal economic cycle. A large number of Arabs and Turks in this city, whose numbers have grown thanks to the wrong policies, have no productive function except selling fruit and vegetables. I would strike a completely different tone. Anyone who can do something and strives for something with us is welcome. The rest should go elsewhere.”

It’s a good thing he went elsewhere before he did this interview is all I can say. And what the hell’s wrong with selling fruit, huh? I don’t see anything wrong with selling fruit. Unless your name is Klaus Wowereit or something, I mean.*

* Inappropriate/incorrect joke warning:  Klaus Wowereit is Berlin’s openly gay mayor who’s about to be the next big thang in what used to be the SPD, get it?

Sarrazin hält die Berliner für eher plebejisch und kleinbürgerlich. Die Bundesbank distanzierte sich von Sarrazins Äußerungen.

Old people forced to use Internet

October 1, 2009 By in Hi-tech Tags: 5 Comments

Old technophobic Germans, and heavens knows there certainly are a lot of those, just aren’t as feisty as they used to be.

Login Granny, or you're Hackepeter!

Forced at gunpoint by a younger generation that’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take all the nagging while they’re online anymore, practically a third of all Germans between the ages of 65 and 74 have now succumbed to the terror and are using the malevolent ‘merican medium as best as they possibly can, which isn’t very good, but still. A full 60 percent of the  jittery old codgers between the ages of 55 and 64 have been pressured into going online now too. The old wimps.

“Viele Senioren gingen nach kurzer Lernphase souverän mit dem Internet um.”

Hitler more than a wussy

September 29, 2009 By in History Tags: Leave a comment

American researchers have set the scientific world and everybody else in an uproar by determining that Adolf Hitler’s bullet-punctured skull fragment actually belonged to a woman, thus making the evil Nazi dictator one of those herself.

Her Hitler!

“This explains a lot of those bizarre hysterical outbreaks of his, I mean hers,” one researcher said. “And that half-ass mustache. And being a vegetarian. Like it all fits together now or something.”

“Ist der Schädel überhaupt echt?”

I thought they’d never leave

September 28, 2009 By in History Tags: Leave a comment

The SPD.

The woman in the middle.

“The SPD’s decline exemplifies the crisis for Europe’s once-mighty center-left parties, which are in disarray in the U.K., France, Italy, Poland and other countries amid divisions over how to balance social protections and business freedoms in an era of rising global competition.”

“The SPD is paying a heavy price for its own boldness in trimming Germany’s welfare state and partially deregulating the labor market under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Those pragmatic moves lost the SPD many of its traditional working-class voters, and have left the party deeply split between centrists and left-wing traditionalists.”

“The voters have decided and the result is a bitter day for German Social Democracy.”